Before I start this review, I feel like I should preface this by saying, if there was some sort of target audience for this season, I'm well aware that it wasn't me. A desperation for pregnancy and motherhood is not something I will ever understand or relate to, and I, in general, am grossed out by pregnancy and everything that comes with it, so this season was turning my stomach before it even got into anything overtly horrific. Also, like much of the fandom, I was unimpressed with the majority of the casting. However, Kim Kardashian's Siobhan wound up being my favorite character, solely because she had some great lines.
But anyway.
Delicate is the story of Anna Victoria Alcott, an actress teetering toward washed up, who desperately craves motherhood. She seeks out the help of New York's greatest fertility doctor, Dr. Hill (notably portrayed by Denis O'Hare, who I would watch read the phone book, but I really don't have much to say about his performance in this one. He was just kind of...there?) and soon starts having strange things happen. Hallucinations, appointments moving around on her calendar, that sort of thing...and so on and so on for the first six episodes.
That's literally all the first half and then some of the season felt like to me. Six episodes of Anna seeing shit and trying to get to the bottom of it, being told she's crazy, going more crazy, rinse and repeat. Every time it felt like the plot was going to move along, or that something was about to be explained, it didn't happen. I felt as though my Hulu app got stuck on the Ba'al episode from the first season of Stories and was just playing it on a continuous loop, without the ending.
Finally, in the seventh episode, we get a little backstory, finding out who Anna's husband, Dex's, first wife was, that his father was somehow involved, etc., but it still didn't explain enough or provide enough backstory to make me feel anything for any of the characters, or even tell me who they are. These people just kind of exist, and we're just supposed to be like, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense." But it really doesn't. I don't understand waiting until the season was almost over to start providing most of the backstories and explanations. There are things that could have started being explained along the way, rather than trying to cram it all into what I'm assuming was supposed to be a "big reveal".
I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to say ends up happening at the end, because to be quite honest, I didn't really get it. It turns out almost every woman around Anna is a part of some...coven? Cult? Circle of Hell? Alien race? Fashion house that really likes black feathered hats? It's never really said. But these women are apparently, much like several characters before them in different seasons of AHS, trying to create a perfect society and need Anna as a surrogate. The scene where this is explained literally plays out exactly like when Theta explains the aliens' mission at the end of Death Valley. It's more or less the exact same scene with different actors. And then out of nowhere, Dex's dead ex wife appears, starts chanting what I guess is supposed to be the light version of the satanic chant the other women are doing, Siobhan turns to dust, and Anna is in some normal nursery with a normal baby. Oh, and a lot of the hallucinations Anna was having weren't even from the coven/cult/whatever you wish to call it, they were caused by a woman Dex was having an affair with. (A worker at the fertility clinic, once again a la Ba'al.) Because why not add another subplot in the second to last episode when so little else had already been explained?
Umm, what?!
I honestly have no idea what really happened, how it happened, what I was supposed to take away from it, etc. And I'm not really sure why they went with affair partner and maybe-supernatural group of women with feathers on their heads and not just one or the other. It felt like overkill at that point, or a plot twist gone wrong.
I also think it was a very strange choice to base a season off of a book that had only very recently been released at the time of the premiere. Part of the fun of AHS for me has always been finding the little connections to previous seasons and characters...and with this season being based on something completely outside of the established AHS universe, that went away entirely. Also, I feel like basing a season off a book so recently released could do damage in either direction. Either the show or the book is guaranteed to get spoiled, though it is interesting to see different adaptations. I, personally, just hate when AHS doesn't feel like AHS, and this season definitely did not. It was very clearly based off of something else and while the plot was interesting enough, not once did I even come close to reaching the edge of my seat. It was all very predictable, that obviously Anna had been chosen for something and her baby was basically going to be a bargaining chip. And again I say it was a very "been there, done that" storyline for the show.
My biggest issue, though, is probably just how full of, well, filler, this season was. Part of me feels as though I could have watched the first and last episode and been fine...nothing was truly set up in between that really made the ending easier to understand. You can only watch a woman walk around unsure of what's going on for so long before it gets boring. Perhaps the biggest surprise this season offered me was the fact that Dex actually wasn't in on it. The husband is always in on it when someone is being gaslit in the AHS universe. So, I guess, thanks for not being such a cliche, Dex.
All in all, this is a season I likely won't be coming back to. I gave it a chance, knowing the subject matter wasn't for me, mainly because of how much I wound up loving NYC despite thinking I'd hate it. I could never truly walk away from AHS; I may chase the highs of my favorite seasons for the rest of my life, but Delicate just didn't do anything for me and I hope that the show goes back to original material next season.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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