American Horror Story: Apocalypse season 8 finale recap: Apocalypse Then

The American Horror Story season 8 finale wraps up the apocalyptic storyline with an interesting twist–one that you may have seen coming.

American Horror Story had fans hyped for season 8–the epic crossover between Murder House and Coven. Was it amazing? Sort of. Did it meet our expectations? Meh. In what was a season of fairly predictable plot twists and turns, it wasn’t that horrible, but honestly the best thing about it was seeing the return of Jessica Lange and Connie Britton.

Everything comes full circle (literally) in the season 8 American Horror Story finale as in the present the apocalypse is just about here. Myrtle goes to pay the apocalyptic spearheads a visit at the headquarters as they are wrapping up all their prep for the impending nuclear bombs set to go off. But why is Myrtle there?

To secure four spots for the Coven, of course. If you’ll recall in the season 8 premiere, Coco’s family had three extra spots available because her family couldn’t make it to the outpost in time. The reason for these spots was because Myrtle secured them during the plan, and then ended the tech dudes’ lives.

To keep their plan intact, the next step was to erase Mallory and Coco’s memories, and set it up so Mallory works for Coco, and Coco has a personality similar to Madison’s (eep). The reason for this is so Mallory’s powers can go undetected from Michael as she comes into power and he’d be none the wiser to it.

Credit: FX

The part of this plan is contingent on Mallory utilizing her one opportunity (once she’s ready) to go back in time and kill Michael before he gains complete and total power. Theoretically, this would prevent the apocalypse from ever happening.

The episode takes us through the events that we are quite familiar with from the first half of the season including when Mallory and Michael have an awkwardly demonic confrontation that alerts Michael to Mallory’s hidden powers. But some additional things that take place while this is happening, Madison, Myrtle, and Cordelia making their way out of graves that they had been buried in for maybe 1-2 years.

This brings everything up to the present moment where the Antichrist is still problematic and seems impossible to defeat. For a while it seems like the Coven is ahead because strength in numbers, and also Angela Bassett returns as Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen. She’s back from hell and ready to do what needs to be done, including killing Dinah.

Everything sort of happens in a blur with Mead the robot spazzing out and dying, and singing “Daisy, Daisy” as her head (only her head, that is) lay next to Michael. Then Madison takes Mead’s gun arm and shoots Michael down, but come on, the Antichrist won’t just die because of some bullets, right? Of course, not! But it will give them some time to get Mallory to a safe place to do her thing.

Credit: FX

While Madison keeps an eye on Michael and his reawakening, the rest of the witches escort Mallory upstairs who runs right into Brock. And out of vengeance and spite, he stabs Mallory for taking his spot in the outpost, which just made the whole plan a lot more complicated.

Myrtle lights him on fire and Mallory is rushed to the bathtub where they attempt to continue the spell. And, oh, by the way, they had to rip off some of Michael’s hair to make it all work. Mallory doesn’t exactly make it because her wounds are too extensive, and she’s simply lost too much blood.

It also doesn’t help that Michael wakes up, blows Madison’s head up, rips out Marie’s heart, and then breaks Coco’s neck and tries to get to Mallory before anything can happen. Basically, Mallory is useless at this point and Cordelia is left with only one option–kill herself so Mallory can rise to power.

And she does just that. One stab to the heart later, Mallory snaps out of her death-like state and continues with the spell as Michael stands dumbfounded at Cordelia’s sacrifice. Bet you didn’t see that coming did ya Mr. Antichrist?

Then this American Horror Story finale takes us back to 2015 when Michael murdered a priest in his room, and Constance (yes, Jessica Lange came back once more!) conveys her frustration and anger over Michael’s erratic and dangerous behavior over the years. She basically kicks him out of the house because well, dealing with murders of people and animals for so long can get to a person.

Credit: FX

The moment Michael leaves the house, an SUV comes out of nowhere and runs him over! And guess who is behind the wheel? MALLORY! Yep, the spell worked and she came back just in the nick of time to take care of the Antichrist situation. Even dearest grandmother didn’t care much for Michael’s final moments and told him to go to hell instead of fulfilling his request to take him to Murder House so his spirit can live on.

Presumably, this is where one would assume season 8 of American Horror Story would end–but don’t worry there’s more. After all, we have to find out what happened after the timeline was changed right? Well, Mallory goes back to the Academy and “meets” everyone for the time as she starts from the start there.

More from Show Snob

• The Santa Clauses season 2, episode 6 recap “Wanga Banga Langa!”
• Lawmen: Bass Reeves season 1, episode 7 preview: Non-spoiler thoughts for Part VII
• Goosebumps season 1, episode 6 recap: “Night of the Living Dummy”
• Beacon 23 season 1, episode 3 recap: “Why Can’t We Go on as Three?”
• Upload season 3, episode 2 recap: “Strawberry”

Things are a bit different because the apocalypse never happened including the fact that Myrtle isn’t there because Cordelia never had to summon her, Zoe is teaching classes, and even Queenie is alright.

In fact, Mallory is able to disrupt Queenie’s plan to go to this hotel in LA (Ugh, not the hotel!) and dissuades her from a hellhole that she has no idea about.

Mallory also uses the fact that she killed the Antichrist to basically get her way which includes having Misty freed from Hell.

She’s not too keen on releasing Madison from her personal hell just yet, but eventually, she’ll get to it.

It seems for a moment that maybe, just maybe American Horror Story will have a happy ending, but when the episode continued past the Academy, then we could sort of see what was going to happen. The young couple from the beginning of the season that fell in love at the outpost made their return in the finale in an interesting way.

They bump into each other during a protest, and a flash forward to a year shows the young girl giving birth to their child, and then another time jump of three years shows the tired parents worried about their “angry kid”. You know where this is going right?

Of course, everything seems off from the red sky to the crows flying above their home, and when they go inside to pay the babysitter they are met with blood on the walls leading to their son’s room–where the babysitter is lying dead on the floor with a slit throat and their son sitting on the rocking chair smiling.

Sound familiar, anyone? And right at that moment, the doorbell rings and a group of people (which also includes Mead) state they have been waiting for a very long time. Guess you really can’t change what’s destined to happen, huh?

What did you think of the American Horror Story season 8 finale? Share your comments below!