Some thoughts on American Horror Story Season 2

this post originally appeared as a comment to io9's season finale recap.

Right. So, first off, this has been an uneven season; from mutants to aliens to possessions, nazis, Murder Santa and other serial killers. With the season finale they excellently repeated what this show did last year; make twelve episodes where they threw out tons of plots and things, then pull everything down to the characters and make a satisfying conclusion, gathering all the plotlines. Sure, this time around it was a bit less satisfying because of some strange plotlines (they never did figure out what to do with those aliens, did they?), but ultimately I felt it worked.

The only thing I'm sorry for is that they've used some clichés that they could've easily built their own seasons around, namely possessions, demons vs. angels and aliens, all of which could fuel an entire season of horror instead of short sub-plots in what's really about a mental hospital and what horror does to you. But oh well; this is AHS after all, so it wouldn't surprise me if they brought some of these ideas back.

I was surprisingly pleased by the way it ended. This season has been a glorious mess, and the ending was just that - messy - but at the same time they grounded the extreme plot pretty well in the characters, what it means for them to go through this and how they came out on the "other side".

My interpretation of that last scene with Lana and Jude was that it played on the whole "it's a slippery slope; the more you confront evil, the more you fight it, the more you become obsessed by it and the bigger the evil inside yourself grows". Typical "he who fights monsters"-shtick, but it worked very well; the fact that Lana was pretty innocent in all this when she came to Briarcliff, but look how easily she manipulated and shot her son in cold blood. I don't think she killed her demon; I think she embraced it.

Much of this season has been about putting people in horrible situations, and some of these characters learned things about themselves that no one should ever learn. Bloody Face jr., for instance, was a perfectly normal kid - at least through what we've seen - until he figured out who his father was. That made him confront himself, and he turned evil - just like Lana did. Remember, she waited a while after she came out to expose Briarcliff too, being more interested in her own experiences.

So I guess the thing is, if you're ever put in a mental hospital pray that you're a part of the alien plot: that way, not much will happen to you, you won't have to confront your demons or any one else's, and in the end you'll get taken by a ray of light to your masters after getting out and living a long, nice, life. If you're a part of the serial-killer-plotline, Nazi-plotline or heaven vs. hell-plotline... Just embrace your inner evilness at once. It'll save you a lot of trouble.