The third season of American Horror Story (FX, Wednesdays, 10/9C), entitled Coven, comes to a satisfying close this evening with an episode that finds girls of Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies facing the trials that comprise the Seven Wonders – and remind us that one person’s heaven is another’s hell.
The Seven Wonders opens with what amounts to a very cool Stevie Nicks music video. As she sings, we watch her wander through the house as the remaining girls – Madison (Emma Roberts), Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), Misty (Lily Rabe) and Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) – prepare to reveal who will be the next Supreme.
The seven trials will overseen by Cordelia (Sarah Paulson), the head of the Academy, and Myrtle (Frances Conroy), the resurrected witch whom Lily brought back from the dead. Fiona (Jessica Lange), Joe (Danny Huston), Spalding (Denis O’Hare) and Papa Legba (Lance Reddick) also make brief, telling appearances. Kyle (Evan Peters) makes a key contribution.
Although the third season of AHS has been campy, crazy, dark and twisted, it hasn’t been as scattershot as the first two seasons, where there was a bit of a feeling of throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and seeing what stuck. Instead, this tale of a coven of witches and their negligent Supreme was more controlled, more precise than previous seasons and, as a result, far more effective.
We got to know the characters and see plot arcs developed. There may have been far fewer elements, but they were deployed far more successfully. Even if we knew that aliens weren’t going to appear out of nowhere, or that no one (except for Ms. Nicks) was likely to burst into song, we never quite certain of precisely where the story was going (other than that there would probably be a new Supreme by the end of the season finale), or how twisted the path to that conclusion was going to be.
Douglas Petrie (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pushing Daisies) has crafted a finale to the tale of the girls of Miss Robichaux’s Academy that plays fair within the constraints of the rules of the story. People die; people live; there are punishments and rewards, and when we leave this version of New Orleans for the last time, we’ve seen justice of a sort – and some interesting ironies.
Beyond the events of the teaser, most anything I could use as examples of the way things work in the finale could be construed as a spoiler – outside of a few elements that were mentioned last week. Thus it is that I can say that each of the girls has, for example, a very different idea of what hell is; or that the trial of Consilium (Mind Control) yields some highly comic moments, or that none of the girls passes their trials in exactly the same way. Each Wonders is easier for some of them; more difficult for others.
Petrie basically has constructed The Seven Wonders in such a way as to answer the question set in the season premiere – who will be the next Supreme – and then give us an idea how the New Supreme will be running things in the future. At no point is there any feeling of certainty that any of the witches at the Academy will survive – until a very brief coda that winds things up beautifully.
Alfonso Gomez Rejon has a tough job here. As director, he has to move through enough stylistic changes to make another director faint dead away. The teaser is very ethereal; other acts are stark, lush and warm, and impressionist. Yet he pulls off all the tonal shifts and pacing changes with aplomb, creating a finale that feels of a piece rather than a stitched together mass of a range of wildly divergent fabrics.
In the end, American Horror Story: Coven is the show’s best season because it is simultaneously wild and crazy and as precisely as a surgeon’s laser – and The Seven Wonders is the perfect cap to the season.
Final Grade: A
Photos by Michelle K. Short/Courtesy of FX