The 4-episode Death Valley plot may actually be the worst and most random and unnecessary story of the entire show. Apocalypse should thank it's lucky stars that it's not the worst season anymore, or at least not the worst story. At least Apocalypse had that singularly great Return to Murder House episode in an otherwise bad season. Death Valley had NOTHING other than good performances from Neal McDonough and AHS stalwarts like Sarah Paulson, Leslie Grossman, Cody Fern, and Lily Rabe, most of whom were woefully underused or surrounded by clownish cosplay level acting by the likes of the ones playing Nixon, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe.
Also, very surprisingly, I found Kaia Gerber to be the best out of the 4 actors playing the college students! LOL Not saying much, but Kendall was the only one who had a pulse or a personality because Jamie, Cal, and Troy were horrendously written and acted. I don't even know what Jamie's purpose was here. She spent the whole arc making weird, bug-eyed faces. And Cal and Troy were just an awkwardly forced gay couple with zero chemistry. I didn't buy this relationship for a second. There's no way Gerber did the worst acting of this arc when that awful Nixon impersonation exists.
This finale THE FUTURE PERFECT is a microcosm of this entire alien subplot: goofy, random, convoluted, and ultimately filler. Barely anything made sense or tied together cohesively. There were plotholes all over the place. I could have sworn that one of the earlier episodes featured the Eisenhowers during the 1970s even though this finale showed Dwight's death in 1969. This is addition to the fact that they showed Marliyn Monroe alive and well in 1963 even though she actually died in 1962. Also, Dwight and Mamie barely aged across like 20 years of story. How did Mamie just take over the story so abruptly in the finale when she was low-key a bit player in the prior 3 episodes? It seemed like this was done for the sole purpose of showcasing the immense acting talents of Sarah Paulson and nothing more.
Why did the aliens randomly kill and not kill with no logical reasoning? They let Troy live in a prior episode even though his baby was a failure yet killed Jamie in the finale BECAUSE her baby was a failure. And since Kendall's baby was the first success after 60 years of trying, why did they waste their supposedly depleting resources to keep people like Calico around since neither she nor anyone prior to Kendall were producing successful hybrids? Also, why did Calico, who's been pumping out babies for over 40 years on the alien ship and had no emotional attachment or maternal instincts whatsoever, all of a sudden decide she wants to be the mother of the hybird alien race?
Also, if the aliens themselves could just take over human bodies and replace them throughout the years, isn't THAT a way they could have tried to have the perfect hybrid created, by humans disguised as aliens mating with other humans? Why all the need for abduction, especially since that wasn't working for so long?
Finally, this entire arc just felt like the writers grabbed all the historical facts they could (and they even messed the dates and years up) and mixed it in with some alien nonsense loosely tying them together: JFK assassination, Marilyn suicide, Nixon Watergate conspiracy, Moon landing, Earhart disappearance? It was all because of the aliens! And throw in Area 51 for kicks. They were all just played as throwaway punchlines in a story with no depth or meat. This is the second consecutive season where the writers really phoned it in on the storytelling in the second half after a great first half. Season 8 was terrible, the second halves of Seasons 9 and 10 terrible. I'm sensing a pattern that the showrunners and writers for this show have gotten so full of themselves they think any kind of nonsense writing is acceptable and they're living off the name AHS at this point. And this show has been renewed for 3 more seasons! Three more seasons of THIS and people will be calling this series one of the worst instead of the best.
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