To be clear, I am not a fan of Ryan Murphy. Glee was okay, I hated Hollywood, and (besides Lizzie Borden) I have no interest in Monster. However, when it comes to American Horror Story, Coven is absolutely brilliant.
So, when it was announced that the witches would return, I was excited. However, I felt the exact same thing when Apocalypse was announced. I was ecstatic, and then crushed. So going into 13, I was nervous that history was about to repeat itself.
And for the first few episodes, I wasn’t entirely wrong to worry.
This season is chaotic. Messy, gratuitous, chaos. Murphy has called it a “greatest hits” season, and he wasn’t kidding: Murder House, Asylum, Freak Show, Hotel, Cult, and Coven collide in a beautiful disaster of magic and mayhem – often with the same actors playing multiple roles.
Evan Peters pops up as Tate, Kai, and James Patrick March. Sarah Paulson is Cordelia, Venable, and Tuberculosis Karen. Jessica Lange is Constance, Elsa Mars, Fiona (with a cameo as Margaret Thatcher). The early episodes jump between a hospice worker in Satan’s house of horrors in New York to the witches back in New Orleans, and most of the time I was lost. Entertained, but lost.
Then they aired “The Return of Devil’s Night,” and everything just clicked in one magical moment of storytelling that brought March and his Cortez Devils (a serial killer supergroup), to Miss Robichaux’s, giving Cordelia a sickle to the back of the head, and suddenly entertainment manifested into addiction
Then Fiona sweeps in to proclaim: “Mother’s home!” And every gay lifts their head and wipes their chin to do the second thing they do best: celebrate the season of the witch. Fitting, since one of the best lines in the entire series comes from the Pope of Trash himself, Mr. John Waters: “My three rules in life: I never turn down a rimjob from a married man, I never turn down a free drink, and I never ever cheat at cards.”
It’s campy, it’s chaotic, and it’s truly outrageous and while I can’t wait for most of Ryan Murphy’s series to end… I am disheartened that the episodes this season have basically been cut in half to 22 minutes an episode.
There will be more series to review soon so…
Stay Tuned!
