The sight of a murderous, misogynistic troll brought down by the women he abused offers unabashed pleasure.
The episode manages to get back to the inspired lunacy of the season’s first few installments.
The episode is at its most effective when charting the gut-wrenching effect of Kai’s madness.
The latest Cult understands how Kai Anderson’s power is made possible by concentric circles of enablement.
There’s plenty of room here to send-up Trump’s distraction politics, but Cult isn’t landing the punch.
Almost everything in the latest episode of American Horror Story plays a bit too much like a thesis presentation.
As the series elaborates on all the things that brought Ally to madness, she’s been placed on the backburner.
The latest Cult manages to imbue its eventual villains with a level of empathy that’s new to American Horror Story.
The episode all too happily reminds us that strong emotions make people do crazy, often nonsensical things.
For better and worse, the horror on American Horror Story: Cult is all text and no subtext.
The premiere episode’s random acts of violence don’t confront fear so much as exploit it.
With scattershot vigor, the series roots through pop culture old and new to borrow images, sounds, and tropes.
The episode ends American Horror Story: Freak Show on an unsurprisingly dour and haphazard note.
Freak Show helps to confirm an unofficial rule about the series at large: The more a season actively utilizes its chosen setting, the better it is.
“Magical Thinking” finds the series resorting to its usual bag of boring, hyperbolically over-plotted tricks.
“Orphans” finds Freak Show taking a surprisingly earnest detour from its usual preachy, ultra-violently “relevant” shenanigans.
You may be inclined to wonder throughout the typically atypical murder sequences and arbitrary character epiphanies how this series is written.
“Blood Bath” is another of American Horror Story: Freak Show’s housecleaning episodes.
The episode is intended to remind audiences who Freak Show’s denizens precisely are before a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Bullseye” sports a tempo that’s decidedly slow, obsessive, and damn near ponderous for Freak Show.
