You literally could've ended "Red Tide" with Episode 5, "Gaslight," and it would've at least ended on a high note, with just as many loose ends..to say I'm disappointed after the carefully crafted first five episodes of AHS: RT (yes, I'm one of the few that appreciated Episode 4, the "flashback" episode, "Blood Buffet"), would be an understatement...
What happened to Billie Lourd's character, Lark? She just kind of disappeared for no reason...where was Doris? I guess eating a raccoon in a cemetery is our final image. What happened to the State Trooper who refused to listen to the City Council about the missing Police Chief after her body is discovered in the ocean by fishermen? In fact, great opening scene as it was (and, it was), in retrospect, with the "ending" they chose, what was the point of that? We'll get to the ending in a minute...
This installment of AHS, much like previous seasons, didn't have a lot of innocents, save Doris and Chief Burleson, who both didn't fare well, but, the best of the bad went very quickly in this finale...truthfully, once Belle Noir and Austin met their fate pretty quickly--in, to my mind, in the laziest and most unimaginative way possible--after getting their urgency to do something about the Hollywood people by being threatened by Code Enforcement (ummm...really? Seriously? Code Enforcement?), I was completely hopeful that, if you're going to get rid of your most sinister characters like that, something equally shocking and sinister must be coming up...unfortunately, I was wrong...if you didn't see Alma killing her father, Harry, soon after Belle, Austin, and the Pale People were out of the way, then, maybe you're new to this series...it was as predictable as predictable could be...I was only surprised that it happened nanoseconds later, and not after a couple of commercial breaks...
When "Three Months Later," appeared on the screen, after one of the aforementioned commercial breaks, and we suddenly saw a sunshine filled screen, after five episodes of a dark, cold, Massachusetts backdrop, I knew it was time to cue Fonzie, rev up that motorcycle, and tell the shark he's on in five--there was some serious "Jumping the Shark" in our future...The Chemist, Ursula, and Alma, with baby in tow, have relocated to Sunny LA, and if P-Town gave them a character studded Bon Voyage Party to send them on their ways, we surely didn't see it...somehow (don't ask, I didn't), the Chemist has been able to infiltrate the LAPD to weed out bad cops, and give them the Muse Pill, turning them into Pale People, and marvels at the swift justice they receive for killing innocent tourists on the street...Alma has turned into a slightly less endearing version of Claudia, from Interview With the Vampire, and Ursula is, well, Ursula...I thought feeding Alma a Street Hustler was a nice, macabre touch--but, that novelty wore off when she killed her first chair competition at an audition a few scenes later...
There were many ways they could have wrapped this installment up--many mentioned on here already (someone mentioned Doris killing Alma, which I like the idea of)...the move to LA, while stupid and pointless, especially with the three most unlikely of villains to survive, might have been forgiven by a final scene of an adult Alma, back in P-Town, purchasing TB Karen's last painting, the one left on the beach after she killed Mickey, and after her suicide, and taking it home to a now elderly chemist, being cared for by Lark (remember her? The writers didn't), and still making her pills, with Ursula still manning the franchise in LaLa Land, if you had Ursula live that long at all, which, now that the series has ended with her unscathed, I wonder why they kept her one note, typical selfish agent, heartless character around like they did...but, they chose to have Ursula hijacking a Writer's Seminar, pushing the Muse Pill on potential screenwriters, and causing a blood bath of carnage in the streets of LA, with a stupid voiceover, while the Chemist skips town with the baby, seemingly nonplussed, musing about giving the baby everlasting life...sloppy and, honestly, who cares? If the writers didn't, why should we?
It's all over now, and "Death Valley" starts next week...if "Red Tide" is foreshadowing for what's to come, I guess, like most family reunions, which the AHS Anthology, with it's regular pool of amazing actors, seems to be, we can expect it to start out great, until Cousin Wayne gets drunk, knocks over the buffet table, and ruins the whole thing right before desert....
What happened to Billie Lourd's character, Lark? She just kind of disappeared for no reason...where was Doris? I guess eating a raccoon in a cemetery is our final image. What happened to the State Trooper who refused to listen to the City Council about the missing Police Chief after her body is discovered in the ocean by fishermen? In fact, great opening scene as it was (and, it was), in retrospect, with the "ending" they chose, what was the point of that? We'll get to the ending in a minute...
This installment of AHS, much like previous seasons, didn't have a lot of innocents, save Doris and Chief Burleson, who both didn't fare well, but, the best of the bad went very quickly in this finale...truthfully, once Belle Noir and Austin met their fate pretty quickly--in, to my mind, in the laziest and most unimaginative way possible--after getting their urgency to do something about the Hollywood people by being threatened by Code Enforcement (ummm...really? Seriously? Code Enforcement?), I was completely hopeful that, if you're going to get rid of your most sinister characters like that, something equally shocking and sinister must be coming up...unfortunately, I was wrong...if you didn't see Alma killing her father, Harry, soon after Belle, Austin, and the Pale People were out of the way, then, maybe you're new to this series...it was as predictable as predictable could be...I was only surprised that it happened nanoseconds later, and not after a couple of commercial breaks...
When "Three Months Later," appeared on the screen, after one of the aforementioned commercial breaks, and we suddenly saw a sunshine filled screen, after five episodes of a dark, cold, Massachusetts backdrop, I knew it was time to cue Fonzie, rev up that motorcycle, and tell the shark he's on in five--there was some serious "Jumping the Shark" in our future...The Chemist, Ursula, and Alma, with baby in tow, have relocated to Sunny LA, and if P-Town gave them a character studded Bon Voyage Party to send them on their ways, we surely didn't see it...somehow (don't ask, I didn't), the Chemist has been able to infiltrate the LAPD to weed out bad cops, and give them the Muse Pill, turning them into Pale People, and marvels at the swift justice they receive for killing innocent tourists on the street...Alma has turned into a slightly less endearing version of Claudia, from Interview With the Vampire, and Ursula is, well, Ursula...I thought feeding Alma a Street Hustler was a nice, macabre touch--but, that novelty wore off when she killed her first chair competition at an audition a few scenes later...
There were many ways they could have wrapped this installment up--many mentioned on here already (someone mentioned Doris killing Alma, which I like the idea of)...the move to LA, while stupid and pointless, especially with the three most unlikely of villains to survive, might have been forgiven by a final scene of an adult Alma, back in P-Town, purchasing TB Karen's last painting, the one left on the beach after she killed Mickey, and after her suicide, and taking it home to a now elderly chemist, being cared for by Lark (remember her? The writers didn't), and still making her pills, with Ursula still manning the franchise in LaLa Land, if you had Ursula live that long at all, which, now that the series has ended with her unscathed, I wonder why they kept her one note, typical selfish agent, heartless character around like they did...but, they chose to have Ursula hijacking a Writer's Seminar, pushing the Muse Pill on potential screenwriters, and causing a blood bath of carnage in the streets of LA, with a stupid voiceover, while the Chemist skips town with the baby, seemingly nonplussed, musing about giving the baby everlasting life...sloppy and, honestly, who cares? If the writers didn't, why should we?
It's all over now, and "Death Valley" starts next week...if "Red Tide" is foreshadowing for what's to come, I guess, like most family reunions, which the AHS Anthology, with it's regular pool of amazing actors, seems to be, we can expect it to start out great, until Cousin Wayne gets drunk, knocks over the buffet table, and ruins the whole thing right before desert....