Thank goodness it’s time to check out of this Hotel. Although the season finale of American Horror Story: Hotel is titled, “Be Our Guest,” I feel like I overstayed my welcome and would not recommend the accommodations to anyone. I’ve been hard on the series this season, but I always held hope out of respect for seasons past. It’s time to acknowledge now, though, that this was my least favorite season.
I hate wording it that way because it suggests it was a favorite to start with. I hesitate to say it was “bad” because someone may have liked it. I did not. At times there were interesting characters and subplots, but it turns out they were all half-baked and ended up nowhere. As the episode ended, I literally sat through more commercials, thinking it was coming back for another segment. Nope; it was over, ending flat with me, as I predicted, scratching my head.
If you’re looking for the final episode of the season to wrap up loose ends in a satisfying way, like many TV series do, you’re looking at the wrong series. It begins over a year after the last episode and characters who I thought were major during the previous eleven episodes aren’t heard from until mid-to-late episode. For example, I always thought John Lowe (Wes Bentley) was this season’s primary character. He does not appear until near the end.
Further, the circumstances that brought him here are briefly recounted in yet another flashback, an overused storytelling device this season. He deserves more screen time than that. Even worse, when we last left him, James Patrick March (Evan Peters) was telling him he had great plans for him. Well, now, out of nowhere, March mentions in passing that, I thought the Ten Commandments killings were the beginning, but it turns out they’re the epilogue.
Why? What happened to so abruptly change his mind. I often accuse American Horror Story of stretching out the story for too long. Here, though, it’s like we missed an episode, and the only way to wrap it up was to jump forward and reflect on how everyone got to that point. I don’t care, though. By the end of last week’s episode, practically everyone was a ghost tied forever to the Hotel Cortez. I don’t really care what else happens to them after that point.
Then, to add insult to injury, the show returns to something it did earlier this year. I hated it then and I still hate it now: the October 30 “Devil’s Night” feast with all the famous serial killers. And that raises another question. All the ghosts in the hotel are tied to it because they died there. How do serial killers who died elsewhere get in? If they can go other places, why can’t the Hotel Cortez ghosts?
Related to this is the last-minute, last-episode character introduction of psychic Billie Dean Howard, played by Sarah Paulsen, who also plays Hypodermic Sally. This was Paulsen’s role in the first season of American Horror Story, the infinitely better Murder House. This season hammered home the connection to other seasons a little too hard. It used to be fun to figure out how they might be related, but the connections were blatant, obvious and dull in Hotel.
I’m not going to continue with a recap because the entire episode is superfluous. Just let your creativity loose following last week’s episode and imagine your own fates for the characters you care about. They’re bound to be more satisfying. I hated this episode and it spoils my memory of any episodes I liked better at the time they aired. American Horror Story leaves a bad taste in my mouth this season and, even worse, leaves me with no appetite for more.
