So, you may or may not have noticed that my weekly tradition of reviewing American Horror Story episodes ended rather abruptly after the conclusion of Red Tide.
If you’re wondering why, well...I just simply didn’t enjoy Death Valley enough to want to put my head back into each episode week after week. There are so many other things that need my time and creative energy in October, that spending significant amounts of time each week talking about something that I truly had no real interest in just sounded like a recipe for misery.
But, now that the storyline is over (Or is it? Hard to tell with a nonending but we’ll get to that later.) I would like to take a moment to express my thoughts.
I am really not much of an alien fan. My father was always the sci-fi fanatic, not me, and perhaps years and years of it being background noise in my childhood home burnt me out on it. I don’t know. I went through that phase in the 90s like most other kids around my age at the time, when it was cool to wear and collect alien-themed things, but I could never really get into many things that actually featured storylines centered around them, at least in the traditional sense. The only exception that really comes to mind is the movie Mars Attacks! , and that likely has more to do with sentimental memories of my grandfather than the subject matter. Aliens were never really my thing, and despite how others may argue, I don’t really consider them to be part of the horror genre. Yes, they can be scary in certain forms...I’m pretty sure I had more than my fair share of nightmares after overhearing the recounts of abductions that people would tell in the documentaries my father watched, but they just don’t set the same tone of horror for me that other creatures, or humans, do.
So, I suppose you could say that I went into Death Valley with a shitty attitude. I loved Red Tide, and I will always wish there had been time to make it into a full season and not have to rush the ending. To switch from something I was so invested in, to something I knew I likely wouldn’t have half as much interest in, was a sad thought. I also didn’t care for the alien subplot back in Asylum; it always felt unnecessary to me and didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so my expectations were probably as low as they’ve ever been for anything related to AHS.
I will say, I think the black-and-white portion of the season was done very well. It was definitely an aesthetically pleasing period piece, and very well acted, particularly by Neal McDonough and Sarah Paulson. I could’ve done without every conspiracy theory ever being the result of President Eisenhower’s forced treaty with the aliens, but it all made a lot more sense than some of the other “rewriting history” storylines the show has tried to take on, particularly the identity of the Zodiac, and Richard Ramirez’s death at Camp Redwood. The addition of a Martian robot calling himself “Valiant Thor” was a little silly, but again, he was portrayed well by Cody Fern, in almost a “Michael Langdon Lite” kind of way. Still wondering where the name came from, but I suppose an alien race would make up a name like that. All things considered, even though it wouldn’t have exactly been my thing, and probably would’ve seemed better suited to a spin-off series called “American Sci-Fi Story” or something along those lines, I would have enjoyed an entire season, or at least half-season, of this Twilight-Zone-esque story. It held my interest, maybe not in the same way Red Tide did, but I liked it enough.
And then came the modern-day side of the plot.
At about the halfway point of each episode, we would switch from the black-and-white almost-brilliance to the colorful world of 2021, where the four most annoying college students in the history of television have been abducted and impregnated (even the males) by aliens. Each week we’re subjected to them lamenting their circumstances and spewing dialogue that sounds like it was written by an alien whose only exposure to the human race has been TikTok’s “For You” page, with the only saving grace being a fun character named Calico, who is Leslie Grossman basically trying to give us her best impression of a non-murderous Mama Firefly from the House Of 1000 Corpses franchise. It’s truly been agony trying to get through the modern-day portion of the show. The young people here overact like they’re in some sort of CW teen melodrama. The finale was the only episode in which the modern parts were bearable, because all of these kids wound up dead and it freed up some airtime for more interesting things to happen.
Long story short, back in the 50s, President Eisenhower signed a treaty with the aliens allowing them to abduct so many people per year for experimentation, to both keep the Russians from advancing their technology, also save his wife Mamie from being killed by them after they possessed her. The period piece timeline progresses through the early 70s, and we learn that aliens are responsible for pretty much everything even remotely political or controversial that’s ever happened. It’s stated by Valiant Thor that the first truly successful human/alien hybrid will be born around 2021, and in our annoying as fuck modern world storyline, it finally is, to perhaps the most pretentious of the four annoying college students, a girl named Kendall. How this chick of all people managed to deliver the best baby is so far beyond me it’s not even funny, but at least they chop her head off immediately after. Then things start to take an interesting turn as Mamie Eisenhower, who’s been kept alive at Area 51 for all these years, finds out that the aliens mean to destroy the human race and repopulate the Earth with these hybrid babies. She recruits Calico and attempts to recruit the strangely revered but obviously imperfect hybrid Theta into helping her stop this, but in the end Theta betrays her and Calico agrees to go along with things after she’s given the job of helping to raise the babies. The episode just ends, with no real resolution, as Theta and Calico look at the babies and talk about the future and how awful humans are, and that’s that. I guess it was meant to make some kind of statement on our society and how we’re “the worst” but it all just falls completely flat. And, are we supposed to take this as the canon of the AHS universe from here on out? Do we have to wonder now if everyone is an alien? Is there going to be some epic battle in which the witches fight the aliens? Or is this just another random inclusion of aliens into the story that ultimately means nothing?
All in all, this is easily my least favorite thing AHS has ever done and I will never rewatch it. I kind of just want to forget it ever happened. Also, between this mess and the vast majority of Stories, I need a goddamn break from “young adult” storylines, because whoever is ultimately writing this stuff, can’t seem to write a character under thirty as an actual person and not a parody of what “boomers” think “millennials” are like. It’s absolutely grating and teetering dangerously toward unwatchable. I swear, if I see Kaia Gerber’s name on the cast list for next season, I may end up skipping it entirely.
I’d say that Death Valley suffered from “Roanoke Syndrome” and was ultimately brought down by the freaky formatting, but even with its convoluted shows within shows within shows plots, Roanoke was infinitely better than Death Valley ever could’ve hoped to be, unless maybe if they’d just kept it as a period piece.
At any rate, I’m glad it’s over. I’m sure I’ll start missing it soon once it hits me that there’s now another year to wait for AHS to return, but I’m certainly hoping for better things next season.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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