American Horror Story Closes The Coven Chapter

If you've already listened to the EHG Mini: The Perfect Song, you know that the right song laid over a well-edited montage can have a weirdly devastating effect on me, and you might have guessed that the cold open to last night's American Horror Story finale plucked all of my heartstrings. Which it did. Here it is. I'm going to watch it again.

It's not just that it was Stevie Nicks returning for one last benediction, because of course she did. It's that this perfectly apropos song, which the show's Seven Wonders test was obviously named for in order to make this moment possible, is playing over a montage of the girls, at long last, doing exactly what people who live in a witches' boarding school should be doing: not just honing their magic skills, but having fun doing them. Studious Zoe is surrounded by books as she levitates her bed. Queenie explores voodoo traditions. Misty perfects her talent for restoring life. And while Madison, after reassembling Kyle, never showed any particular interest in applying magic for useful purposes, watching her relax into the tub and light the candles and fireplace with a flick of her hand, at peace for once, gives us a break from hating her nasty guts. We couldn't have expected a whole season of this — it's American Horror Story, not The Magical Facts Of Life — but the staging of this montage, and the way the episode and season ended on a note of reconciliation and order restored, suggests a yearning on someone's part for an alternate-universe version of how things could have gone from the start.

It makes perfect sense for a season set in New Orleans to focus on witches. And yet witches have had such a feminist rebranding in pop culture over the past decade (or few decades, really) that putting them at the center of what is explicitly supposed to be a horror story is kind of a sketchy proposition, and I often felt over the course of the season that even producers couldn't settle where the viewer's loyalty should lie. Fiona Goode and Marie Laveau are campy antiheroines, ignoring the conventions of the witch traditions they came up in to pursue selfish goals — immortality, or revenge. And if the only good witch opposing them were the weak, watery Cordelia, there would be no question about which side the show came down on. But we also had Myrtle Snow and Misty Day, characters who were both purely good (and yes, I know Myrtle dug those witches' eyes out, but still) and much more interesting for their tonal consistency than Marie and Fiona, avenging angels on behalf of their covens one day; treacherous, self-interested bitches the next.

Can we talk about Myrtle for a second? Because she's the best? I feel bad that I gave her such short shrift in the Particles over the course of the season because her best stuff was almost always off to the side of the actual episode plot, from her theremin playing to her sick fashion burns. Though she was mostly deployed for comic relief, Myrtle was, I submit, the most clearly and fully defined character of the season, her look and her backstory and her motivations all braided together, each enhancing the dramatic effectiveness of the others. After the finale, there really is no question which side the show comes down on with regard to the battle between Cordelia's biological mother and her mother of choice: while both come to Cordelia to request that she end their lives, Fiona's is of a piece with her cowardly grasping after more life (to do what with?), whereas Myrtle's completes her heroic support of Cordelia's happiness and success. Hell, if not for Myrtle, it apparently never even would have occurred to Cordelia that she even could be the Supreme.

And since I brought her up: we all agree that Cordelia is kind of the worst choice for Supreme, after everything we've been through? Rich Juzwiak summed up the reasons nicely over at Gawker, from her total lack of "radiant good health" throughout the season to her idiotic decisionmaking having put the coven at risk. I guess we're supposed to respect the coven blood line and feel that her redeeming Fiona's bad Supremacy means that order, as at the end of any tragedy, is restored. But I would have been just as happy if it turned out that Myrtle, Fiona's childhood rival, triumphed over her in the end and ushered in a new era of bold coven style. Or if Misty's humble beginnings made it all the more impressive that she had ascended despite the odds (including death — twice!) to the Supremacy. Cordelia may be morally uncompromised in the sense that she never killed anyone that we saw, but it's hard to get that excited about her either way.

As the finale ends, the horror aspects of American Horror Story seem to be entirely absent; even our glimpse of Fiona in hell feels less like one last scare than regular old cosmic justice. Order isn't just restored at Miss Robichaux's: what we're seeing is the start of a thrilling new era for a generation of witches who wouldn't be fulfilling their potential if not for Cordelia bravely stepping out of the shadows and bringing them along with her into her girl-power Hogwarts. Hearing the show's foreboding score playing as Cordelia rallies the troops feels completely wrong; Republica's "Ready To Go" or Prodigy's "Firestarter" would have been more apropos. But what I loved about the opening is so disappointing at the end because the question of the Supremacy has been resolved in the least satisfying way: the coven's new leader has spent the season being such a wet rag. Madison would have been a bummer too, but at least she always had the courage of her terrible convictions, you know?

After the premiere, I wasn't that excited about this season: the witch milieu felt limiting after the delicious madness of "Asylum," which hit all my horror buttons. And while the show did complicate its world — with witch hunters, voodoo gods, an unvarnished portrayal of slavery, Halston — I still feel like the events of the season were leading somewhere other than where they ended. I mean, if Cordelia — allegedly a professional witchcraft instructor — always had the power to unseat her terrible mother/Supreme and was just too dopey to realize it, a lot of people went through a lot of shit that could have been avoided. But sure, let's let her be in charge, and hope her successor isn't as dumb as she was.