Come one, come all to the new weekly TV Recap of American Horror Story: Freak Show in which every Thursday I take a look at the latest happenings in Fraulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities. What will the fourth season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series bring and what will we remember from this delightfully oddball group of characters? Join me as I look at the Top 5 Characters of the week, recap important events, and share overall thoughts on the series as well as any other interesting tidbits worth of mention.
Top Characters of the Week
1. Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange)
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| Jessica Lange |
Importance: After escaping the Freak Show and selling it to Dandy Mott (Finn Wittrock), she heads to Hollywood where she starts up The Elsa Mars Hour. There she becomes a beloved celebrity with a lot of friends. It is only when she performs on Halloween that her old life comes back to haunt her. With the return of Edward Moondrake (Wes Bentley), she accepts her fate and goes to heaven where she shall perform to a pleasing crowd for the rest of her life.
Best Scene: In a decent callback to an earlier episode, she performs David Bowie's "Heroes" and begins to realize the danger that she has caused. Edward Moondrake shows up and calls her to her death. In those final moments of life, we see how the rest of the world reacts to this ordeal. It is a spiritual thing that nobody else sees. It is a haunting moment covered in bafflement that shows the performer going out the way that she started.
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| Finn Wittrock |
2. Dandy Mott
Importance: Serving more as a deus ex machina for the series than anything else this episode, he cuts out the middle man and kills off a bunch of freaks when they refuse to do what he wants. He conveniently lowers the cast numbers in ways that allow his upcoming death by tank torture to not seem so crowded with naysayers.
Best Scene: Fitting in with the other themes lead by Stanley's obsession with selling freaks, Dandy dies in a tank of water. He is drowned while everyone else watches the murderer plead for his life, leaving the unsettling feeling that everyone on this show was unlikable at some point in the season's run.
Overall Thoughts
Is this really how the show ends? Forgive me, as I do not know anything about American Horror Story's other three seasons, but I am left with a lot of anger and bafflement here. Freak Show not only has the distinct honor of being the first season of this show I have watched, but it is also the first Ryan Murphy series that I have watched as a whole. I almost made it through The New Normal, though that reached max tedium midway through. In this case, I find almost no motivation to want to go back through and watch the other seasons. The issue is both yes, I do and also no I don't.
I don't really know what to expect from this show. For a long time, it was going great. It even embodied some great horror tropes and the camerawork was top notch. I could accept it as a kitschy weird show that was having fun with horror constructions. Then it became a melodrama, Twisty the Clown was killed off and the show became overtly sexual on a lot of themes. I am not a fan of these and despite my endorsement of the first few episodes, things quickly became clear that they didn't know what they were doing.
The one clinch on the entire series is that I didn't know where things were going. This was at first a positive but quickly became a negative. Did we really need to have a murderous ventriloquist on the show? It only took away time and served such a useless role in the grand scheme of things. The presence of Dandy has consistently been interesting, but inevitably scatterbrained. There wasn't a focus and instead chose to kill of beloved characters simply because that's the shows contractual obligation.
It also hurts that the central two characters are evil and cringe-worthy for different reasons. Yes, Dandy was meant to always be the villain. His ride off was poignant and for some reason feature both references to The Man with the Golden Gun and Heaven's Gate. Not necessarily horror films. Then there's Elsa, who started off as the savior who could do no wrong and quickly turned into vindictive personified.I didn't want to see her succeed because at a certain point, she didn't earn it. Even Ethel in the episode makes the point that Elsa was a rather obnoxious brat.
Also, the closure of the entire thing is just one big slap in the face. Sure, Edward Moondrake was a nice touch midway through the series and added a dramatic weight in a spiritual way. However, the things quickly went south when it was revealed that this was the conclusion and not just some convenient myth. She would die and go to her personal heaven. Even if this is a metaphor for Lange's goodbye on the show, it doesn't serve as a decent reasoning behind the show's ending. In fact, it is a cop out of resolution. Nothing of value really happened. Elsa got her wish, innocent freaks died and then Dandy did. Some lived happily ever after, but the whole thing reeks of irresponsible bow ties.
Sure, there's some nice thematic touches that were wrapped up, but the end product suggests that the idea could never be done right. I do miss the optimism that I had when the first episode started and we meet Twisty the Clown in a Zodiac-inspired moment. Where was that ingenuity in the past five episodes? Where was the sense that freaks are humans too? Instead, it reaches a middle ground where the innocent die and the abusers get some sort of royal treatment. While we don't see where Dandy winds up, there's a sense in the assumption that he had his own heaven, free from his mother and nagging maid.
I want to believe that this is just one godawful season in an otherwise inventive show. I was captivated by what the show initially did and want to believe that Murder House, Asylum and Coven were way better. I plan to take a breather before exploring these prospects, but the likelihood of me recapping season five seems suspect. I have rarely felt this betrayed by a show that I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. It had potential to paint a compelling look at freak show culture and instead painted a canvas full of insincerity and sloppiness in spades.
Episode Rating: 2 out of 5
Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5
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