AHS: Freak Show Review – “Curtain Call” (4×13)

Wow.

Let's just all take a minute to consider “Curtain Call,” which is an astoundingly, thuddingly bad conclusion to a season that, while not great, wasn't necessarily a disaster.

Well, leave it to Ryan Murphy to rewrite history at the eleventh hour. “Curtain Call” is awful: tone deaf, flat, boring, ridiculous—take your pick. It is among the worst hours American Horror Story has put us through, which is at this point a rather tall order. It is easily the worst episode of Freak Show.

The episode divides rather neatly into two halves. The first concerns Dandy's takeover of the Cabinet of Curiosities. As the episode opens, Dandy lords over the freaks, and they rise against him, seemingly too easily. And of course it is too easy—before long Dandy is silently strolling around the camp, shooting the freaks dead one by one. RIP Grace Gummer the Fork-tongued Tattoo Monster, dead without consequence like every other woman on this show. Coven may have trivialized death by making it a temporary, stakes-free status for most of its characters (Nan just stayed dead). But Freak Show commits an arguably greater skin by robbing death of its necessary dramatic weight. Dandy's massacre of the freaks underlines a point that needs no further expounding, and comes at the expense of characters in whom the audience could not possibly be expected to have any investment. Even Dandy, despite Finn Wittrock's game performance, has been absent so long and so underwritten overall that his motivation beyond “is a murderous psycho” is non-existent. There is some beautiful cinematography throughout the sequence, but that's just surface (albeit a gorgeous one). Far from shocking or moving, this turn of events is mean and violent and totally empty. Even Desiree's anguished embrace of Jimmy upon their discovery of the bodies rings hollow, even though it theoretically checks every box it needs to. In Freak Show, grief and violence and loss are all surface, no depth.

From there we have an abrupt cut to the wedding of Dandy Mott to Bette and Dot. If I weren't committed to reviewing this show for Smash Cut, I would've shut off the television at this wedding scene. No joke. Of course the twins are playing a long (well, not very long) con, but fuck it, who cares? By the time Bette and Dot and the surviving freaks (just Desiree and Jimmy at this point) have drugged Dandy and dragged him back to the circus, I have completely checked out. I think my major issue with this whole thing is that this final confrontation begins in this episode—it doesn't build from anything that came before, even despite some hamfisted attempts to pull everything together such as Desiree's speech. “You may look like a motion picture dream boat, but you are the biggest freak of them all.” You don't say!

As with Coven, the season arc has done a heel turn to be about something that isn't tangential—in fact, the rest of the season was the tangent—but which is entirely without consequence anyway. In this instance, it's the notion of Dandy wanting to own the freak show, which was nominally raised in the first episode and then promptly abandoned in favor of literally a million other things. The funny thing is, this is true of all the show's seasons: both Murder House and Asylum made similar eleventh hour turns that revealed the stories to be about something different than expected. The difference is, those seasons revealed the stories as being about something more than expected, too. Freak Show's ending is reductive, unexpected only in how thoroughly unsatisfying it is.

Anyway, then Bette and Dot and Desiree and Jimmy trap Dandy in a Houdini-esque tank and drown him to death, all the while sitting there and munching popcorn and cracking wise. And so, what? Are we supposed to feel good about this? Is this supposed to be a triumph for these characters—that they, too, are horrible murderers?

And then suddenly it is 1960, and Elsa is famous (sure) and has a variety hour (okay) and is married to David Burtka (alright, fine) and she won't perform on Halloween because she doesn't do that because Edward Mordrake. Do you remember Edward Mordrake?

Just to be clear: the entire remainder of the episode is an extended rhapsody on the nadir of Elsa Mars's fame, which has apparently all along been the heart and soul of the season. Eventually the hardcore German murder-porn videos of Elsa's past come back to haunt her, and also Massimo is dying of lung cancer, and so she decides that maybe she will perform on Halloween after all, and so she sings David Bowie's “Heroes” (poorly) and Edward Mordrake shepherds her soul away on national television, accompanied by Twisty. Do you remember Twisty?

Wait. It gets stupider. Edward Mordrake decides that Elsa Mars isn't made for his Gang of Ghouls or whoever the fuck and so instead, Elsa passes into Freak Show Eternal and there's the fucking ghost of Ma Petite and Grace Gummer the Fork-tongued Tattoo Monster and yes, even Ethel, and they all hug and make up and Elsa sings “Life on Mars” to an audience of ghosts, happily ever after. I'm not kidding. This is how American Horror Story: Freak Show ends. What a spectacular nosedive into the asinine for a season that's been content to tread the line of mediocrity for so long.

Merry Christmas, Noodle Mouse. See you next year for Amish aliens from the future or whatever.

 

Stray Observations:

• As always, the grade below is for the season. The episode grade is 3/10, and that only because some of the actors are trying really hard and a few shots are very pretty.
• Shout out to Finn Wittrock, who was by far the MVP of Freak Show, and a more than worthy addition to the repertory. Here's hoping that if he's back for more, it's a more deserving script.
• Neither Maggie nor Dell warrants any mention in a finale that turns out to be extremely preoccupied with ghosts. This may suggest something about the superfluity of, oh, say five or six episodes in the middle of the season.
• Per reports from TCA week, American Horror Story is going to be radically re-invented for season five. Given that this is a Ryan Murphy show and so the phrase “radically re-invented” is pregnant with literally boundless possible meanings. Perhaps it will be re-invented as a “good television show.”
• My primary motivation for reviewing American Horror Story this season was my hope that it would ascend to the terrible, laughable heights (sure, we'll call them heights) of Coven, and so mostly I'm bummed that it turned out to be too little, too late. Imagine if we had hit this high water mark around episode eight! Anyway, The Americans takes over the time slot next week, so if you need a palate cleanser you could do worse. Thanks for following along on this dumb journey with me!