American Horror Story: Apocalypse’s Finale Showdown was Epic but Rushed – Still Good Though

First things first: Mrtyle easily infiltrating the co-operative tech gurus’ stronghold was a great, hilarious start and seeing Conroy trade insults with Paulson’s Venable was worth whatever ill feelings we had toward Venable (We are still quoting the “purple is for royalty, not middle management” line every chance we get). Myrtle uses her magic to ensure Coco and Mallory’s inclusion in Outpost 3 (via Coco’s family’s money, weirdly). Other recaps incorrectly list that Myrtle kills the tech gurus which makes no sense because they then wouldn’t have been around to accept payment and get Coco and Mallory in. Which means that the fan wiki is correct and they likely died in the fall of Outpost 2.

This means that Brock and Gallant were just separate characters played by the same actors. Typical Ryan Murphy casting confusion, as was Joan Collins playing two unrelated characters (Evie Gallant (outpost 3 resident, not a witch), and Bubbles Mcgee (witch killed by Michael in episode 9 with nails to the face)), but we press on. Cut to Madison aggressively ubering her now identity altered sisters to Gallats salon where we see Coco meet Brock and where Madison sees a bus advertising Dinah’s new show and she quickly puts two-and-two together about Dinah’s deal with the devil and reports back to Cordelia where Myrtle is 100% on Madison’s side to burn the voodoo queen, but Cordelia has other plans. The smartest of which is to bury her and her sisters in the Louisiana Swamp mud to wait out the fallout until they feel the time is right.

We then get annoyingly recycled footage of the episode 3 Mallory vs. Michael power reveals which we could’ve lived without and used that time for more of the present day or epilogue, but we digress. The real meat of the episode is the showdown we were waiting for — the coven vs. Michael Langden. Dinah sides with Michael, but is quickly cut down by Marie Laveau. In a very “Surprise, bitch” reveal we see Cordelia rescue Marie from hell (thanks Nan!) by making a deal with Papa Legba to trade the soul of truly evil Dinah Stevens for the more conflicted soul of Marie. The short glimpse of Delphine LaLaurie in her hellish prison was a great use of time and icing on the cake for us, almost as good as Marie’s execution of that treacherous bitch Dinah Stevens.

Then the real battle starts, but before the mechanical Mead open fire, Cordelia utters a spell to make the bot explode (should’ve taught Queenie that spell). The explosion blows Michael off the landing down to the witches’ level and if that wasn’t #symbolism enough, Mead’s head sings him Daisy a la Hal9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Madison, being the bad bitch, goes all Rose McGowan in Planet Terror and uses Mead’s gun-arm to go all Scarface on Michael.

While it obviously wouldn’t kill him it gave Cordelia and her crew time to run upstairs and prep the Tempus Infinitum for Mallory (Myrtle snatched a lock of the antichrist’s easily snatchable hair on the way). This is when our weekly reminder that Brock was still lurking upstairs came into play in the fun, almost too real twist, where he stabs Mallory as she rounds a corner. Myrtle makes short work of him while a panic-stricken Cordelia tries to revive her. To buy more time Marie tries a voodoo spell to block Michael’s path after he revived and made short work of Madison by blowing her head clean off [we’re sad she didn’t use her powers to keep him down longer but that’s what happens when the show squanders time with repetitive flashbacks].

Of course, the voodoo barrier doesn’t last long, but it allows Coco time for a rogue backstab sneak attack. The women are quickly murdered but bought just enough time for Cordelia to get everything in position, including her own suicidal sacrifice to give Mallory the Supreme power she’d need. Her suicide served as a double middle finger to Langden, as he so desperately wanted the kill for himself. This helps us hold 0 sympathies and makes the following scenes of Mallory’s time turning all the sweeter.

As Mallory plunges into the past we are met with more repetitive flashbacks. Specifically, when Michael kills the priest and Constance kicks him out (always nice to see Jessica Lange). The big change comes in a black SUV that Mallory hilariously runs Michael over with. We want to say it’s anticlimactic and a little unbelievable that bullets didn’t kill him but a car accident did, but when we jokingly said “now throw it in reverse hur dur” and then she DID we laughed so hard it doesn’t even have to make sense. It’s too good to care about semantics, and really without his powers having grown maybe it would’ve been enough to kill him!

The epilogue is decently satisfying, and we aren’t as bothered with Mallory getting to stay in the new timeline as most people since she was in a time where she herself existed and also it was an entirely theoretical spell that caused her own timeline to no longer exist. Maybe that is why she couldn’t save Anastasia? We don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over a broken magic system. And Mallory was nice enough to change Queenie’s fate and to rescue Misty by using her new fame in hell (they appreciated the killing of the antichrist…everyone hates their boss apparently).

What did bother us was the final use or Timothy and Emily (the “genetically perfect” inhabitants of Outpost 3) as the new parents of the new antichrist. If that was their role, why kill them, or even have them in the first place since they had Michael? Did “Sanctuary” even exist or were the apples conjured by Michael? Regardless we regret ever rooting for them and it was a decent twist at the end to keep things from looking like a happy-ending Coven 2.0, the title was Apocalypse after all!