Lana and Kit are two of AHS‘ protagonists, but only one gets a satisfying conclusion.
It has been an incredible disappointment to watch American Horror Story, which invents a brand new story and mythology each season, simply treading water in two of its last three episodes.
As American Horror Story: Asylum’s season built towards its finale, “Madness Ends,” it seemed unlikely that creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk would find a way to tie together all the divergent plot elements, from the demon-possessed Sister Mary Eunice to serial killer Bloody Face to Dr. Arthur Arden’s monster mash to those damn pesky aliens.
Alas, Murphy and Falchuk fail to tie anything together, leaving the many ghouls of Briarcliff Manor to feeling like they’ve been walled off in unrelated rooms of a haunted house.
Asylum doesn’t leave viewers with an open ending — we know the fate of every central character — but it ignores longstanding questions about the show’s internal logic in favor of giving the characters emotional closure, much in the way ABC’s Lost closed.
If you can stand to never know why there were aliens on Asylum (other than as a cheap way to bring characters back from the dead), then you’ll see that “Madness Ends” is absolutely one of Asylum’s greatest episodes, on par with the great two part “I Am Anne Frank,” episodes 4 and 5.
As one might expect, the reason “Madness Ends” is so great is because its narrative style is so unlike anything else seen previously on the program.
Jumping ahead to 2012, the entire episode is built around a 60 Minutes-style interview with the now-world-famous reporter Lana Winters, who slowly reveals to the world how she took down Briarcliff, and by extension, how every other character still living at the end of last week’s abysmal “Continuum” eventually met their maker.
It’s a great one-off gimmick, and in true AHS fashion, there is a wealth of great cinematography including some incredibly disturbing camera angles and heavy use of archaic, period-specific camera equipment.
Although such visual stylization has felt desperate whenever the script couldn’t live up to the grandiose camerawork, “Madness Ends” plays it perfectly, from twirling steadicams to some truly striking uses of depth and shadow. There’s a lot of craziness on AHS that viewers won’t find anywhere else until season 3 arrives in late 2013, but the cinematography will be missed the most.
Visuals aside, “Madness Ends” deserves praise for managing to make the show’s heroes interesting again. By episode 10, Kit Walker and Sister Jude’s primary antagonists (Arthur and Sister Mary Eunice) were gone, and Lana killed the original Bloody Face in the following episode.
Because of this, episode 11 and 12 found Asylum spinning its wheels, wasting time that could have been better spent trying to mix each of the three heroes’ struggles into one fantastic stew. Thankfully, “Madness Ends” doesn’t attempt to hyper-inflate the finale, instead methodically giving each hero a quiet end to the horrors of their lives.
In turn, Lana is solidified as the most proactive hero, Kit as the most compassionate and Sister Jude as the most tragic.
Lana, having ended the grotesquery of Briarcliff and killed the original Bloody Face, is living out her days in the life she always dreamed of having, openly gay and renowned as a writer. Personal tragedy hasn’t destroyed her and she finally decides to redeem the lies from her first book, Maniac, by telling the world that Bloody Face’s son was not aborted.
As we find out, the new Bloody Face, Johnny (the baby that lived) has snuck onto the set of Lana’s interview, preparing to kill her when it ends. The tension leads to one of the season’s better scares, when Johnny hands calmly hands a water bottle to an apparently unaware Lana.
The inevitability of Johnny killing Lana is so strong that it really feels as though it might happen, especially given that every other major character has died before the final confrontation.
Lana, however, talks Johnny down, telling her son he is only half Oliver Thredson and then, obviously, half Lana. Much as he did in “Spilt Milk,” Johnny again begs for his mother — he is a tortured soul, who never escaped his father’s shadow despite Lana giving him up for adoption.
Yet again, Lana’s only choice is to put him out of his misery, and this time she succeeds, putting the bullet meant for her right into Johnny’s head.
While the culmination of Lana’s life work may be the most exciting thing the episode has to offer, Jessica Lange’s Sister Jude once again steals the spotlight in her incredible, emotional send-off.
It’s not often that this kind of personality finds its way into a horror show, but Lange completely nails her portrayal of Sister Jude’s final moments.
Saved from Briarcliff by Kit, Sister Jude seems to have completely lost her mind. Kit and his alien-affected children (never explained, sorry) try their best to deal with the crazed Sister Jude, the kids eventually resorting to some off-screen alien magic (again, unaddressed) to help bring back the old, fun Jude of the 1950s.
Suddenly, the new, no-longer-a-nun Jude finds the happiness she had been seeking for so many years, unexpectedly, as a sort of grandmother for Kit’s children. After six months enjoying this new life, Jude has to die.
By far, the best moment of “Madness Ends” involves Jude finally confronting the Angel of Death she had avoided for so long, allowing herself to be taken. Without Lange the scene wouldn’t be half as fantastic as it is. (Thankfully, Lange will be returning for the third season of AHS.)
On the flipside, Kit’s end is the show’s low point. Kit spends most of the episode playing a part in Jude’s story, and when he dies (or presumably dies), it’s from pancreatic cancer.
Instead of letting the character go out with the dignity of a cancerous death as a way to offset the show’s ridiculous level of fantasy, Asylum delivers the most unsatisfying ending of all, with the aliens simply abducting Kit before the cancer takes him. Once again, the unnecessary aliens make an unnecessary visit to Massachusetts and add exactly nothing to the Asylum experience, other than consternation.
Overall, though, “Madness Ends” is a great piece of television, managing to make all the bizarreness of Asylum palatable on a human, emotional level.
Asylum, as a whole, never paid off on the promise of its plotlines. Individual episodes wowed with the complexity of their labyrinthine webs of action, but in the end it was all just smoke and mirrors, the plots never intended to truly come together.
That being said, Asylum still out-classes the first season of AHS. Lana and Jude are far and away the best characters Murphy and Falchuk have created for the series thus far, and watching their characters grow and change realistically despite the insanity around them has been a joy to behold.
If Murphy and Falchuk can pull together a more coherent plot in season 3 without losing the depth of some of the characters, AHS will rise to a whole new level.
Seriously, though — no more goddamn aliens.
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