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chelseagirlSo I just watched the last episode of this season's American Horror Story, Freak Show. It was a mess and all over the place, but I really liked the ending.
Then I realized why. It was the same ending as Life on Mars, second season. Which, yes, at the time annoyed a lot of us, but in retrospect holds up for me. Or here it works. Or something.
The freak show's proprietor is named Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange), and for some reason the show uses music anachronistically (it shares its creator with Glee, enough said?), so that even though it's set in the 1950s, Elsa uses Bowie's "Life on Mars" as her theme song. (They also use Lana del Ray and Nirvana at other moments in the series; you just have to kind of go with it.) Lots of spoilers follow:
At the end of the series Elsa has achieved what she always wanted -- mainstream Hollywood stardom [just like Sam finally gets back home], only to discover she's miserable. There is a freak show legend that if you perform on Halloween, Edward Mordrake [deformed 19th c. British aristocrat who ran away and joined a freak show and then other stuff happened] will come and steal you away to his eternal freak show. Elsa discovered this was true earlier in the series, but he took someone else that time. She's about to lose everything -- Hedda Hopper has discovered her past (as a dominatrix & porn actress in pre-war Berlin, and freak show proprietor afterwards) and won't be bribed by the network to sit on the material.
So, she agrees to the network's request to do a Halloween broadcast, which of course was live. She sings Bowie's "Heroes" (coincidentally my other favorite Bowie song) and Mordrake comes for her to steal her soul away. He realizes this is a suicide, and he's been coveting her "black soul" since they first met. But he says "your place is not with us" so instead of joining the hell that is Mordrake's group, she finds herself back in her own freak show, headlining once again. For various plot reasons, a number of the characters had died, and all of the *good* ones, and none of the bad, are there together, in the freak show. And it's all good, like it was before various serpents entered their Eden. So she's gone back to be with her "family", back to where she was really happy, if she'd only known -- for eternity. It ends with her about to perform, and the opening music for "Life on Mars" plays, and then it fades to black.
HMMMMM. Just like Sam, finding he no longer fits in with his current life, jumps off the roof that Annie kept him from jumping off in the first episode. And wakes up back with Gene, Annie, Chris and Ray in 1973 . . .
Because I was expecting Elsa to come to a bad end, whereas I wanted LOM to be time travel, and Sam to maybe make the choice of going back but NOT for the producers to cheerfully say it was suicide, I reacted differently this time. Elsa's suicide made sense, and bringing in the whole Mordrake legend from earlier in the series turned a lost plot thread into a moment where she is able to make a clear choice. I liked it. And then I realized that I'd just watched the end of LOM.
That's it for me and AHS, though. I hear the first two seasons were excellent and might catch up on them. Unfortunately, I joined in progress with season 3: Coven, which I kinda liked because it was very female-centered, but was a mess. This season was an even worse mess, and there were a lot of non-disabled actors who'd been made up or digitally altered, so that was problematic. However, there were some real performers as well, who seemed to be sidelined at first but who came into the forefront more and more as the season went on. I totally have a crush on Mat Fraser, who played Paul the Illustrated Seal. He's a Brit with that London accent that always does it for me -- who was a thalidomide baby and IRL is a Coney Island sideshow revival performance artist. The reviewer for the New Yorker, by the by, clearly had a crush on him as well . . .
Then I realized why. It was the same ending as Life on Mars, second season. Which, yes, at the time annoyed a lot of us, but in retrospect holds up for me. Or here it works. Or something.
The freak show's proprietor is named Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange), and for some reason the show uses music anachronistically (it shares its creator with Glee, enough said?), so that even though it's set in the 1950s, Elsa uses Bowie's "Life on Mars" as her theme song. (They also use Lana del Ray and Nirvana at other moments in the series; you just have to kind of go with it.) Lots of spoilers follow:
At the end of the series Elsa has achieved what she always wanted -- mainstream Hollywood stardom [just like Sam finally gets back home], only to discover she's miserable. There is a freak show legend that if you perform on Halloween, Edward Mordrake [deformed 19th c. British aristocrat who ran away and joined a freak show and then other stuff happened] will come and steal you away to his eternal freak show. Elsa discovered this was true earlier in the series, but he took someone else that time. She's about to lose everything -- Hedda Hopper has discovered her past (as a dominatrix & porn actress in pre-war Berlin, and freak show proprietor afterwards) and won't be bribed by the network to sit on the material.
So, she agrees to the network's request to do a Halloween broadcast, which of course was live. She sings Bowie's "Heroes" (coincidentally my other favorite Bowie song) and Mordrake comes for her to steal her soul away. He realizes this is a suicide, and he's been coveting her "black soul" since they first met. But he says "your place is not with us" so instead of joining the hell that is Mordrake's group, she finds herself back in her own freak show, headlining once again. For various plot reasons, a number of the characters had died, and all of the *good* ones, and none of the bad, are there together, in the freak show. And it's all good, like it was before various serpents entered their Eden. So she's gone back to be with her "family", back to where she was really happy, if she'd only known -- for eternity. It ends with her about to perform, and the opening music for "Life on Mars" plays, and then it fades to black.
HMMMMM. Just like Sam, finding he no longer fits in with his current life, jumps off the roof that Annie kept him from jumping off in the first episode. And wakes up back with Gene, Annie, Chris and Ray in 1973 . . .
Because I was expecting Elsa to come to a bad end, whereas I wanted LOM to be time travel, and Sam to maybe make the choice of going back but NOT for the producers to cheerfully say it was suicide, I reacted differently this time. Elsa's suicide made sense, and bringing in the whole Mordrake legend from earlier in the series turned a lost plot thread into a moment where she is able to make a clear choice. I liked it. And then I realized that I'd just watched the end of LOM.
That's it for me and AHS, though. I hear the first two seasons were excellent and might catch up on them. Unfortunately, I joined in progress with season 3: Coven, which I kinda liked because it was very female-centered, but was a mess. This season was an even worse mess, and there were a lot of non-disabled actors who'd been made up or digitally altered, so that was problematic. However, there were some real performers as well, who seemed to be sidelined at first but who came into the forefront more and more as the season went on. I totally have a crush on Mat Fraser, who played Paul the Illustrated Seal. He's a Brit with that London accent that always does it for me -- who was a thalidomide baby and IRL is a Coney Island sideshow revival performance artist. The reviewer for the New Yorker, by the by, clearly had a crush on him as well . . .
