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American Horror Story: Freak Show Finale Recap: “Curtain Call”

Take your final bow!

ahsf

As the final episode of Freak Show begins, new owner/psychotic serial killer Dandy Mott thinks he’s close to becoming what he’s always wanted to be: someone who people pay money to see sing Cole Porter songs. Some of his new employees are already putting up new banners, advertising him as the show’s star.

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Dandy’s show business dreams have always been a little incoherent to me, but I’ll admit it fits with the insanity of the character. He’s mad because no tickets have been sold to his showcase – half an hour after the banners go up. He lashes out at everyone else, nastily disparaging their unusual characteristics, and receives a well-deserved punch from Amazon Eve.

Meanwhile, Elsa is on the other side of the country. She’s reached Hollywood, and is walking through a TV studio with her embroidered demon-head bag, in the same kind of shot as the one in which we first met her, as she infiltrated a hospital to get to Bette and Dot. But unlike that situation, she’s far from in control here. She asks the receptionist to see the head of a TV network, and gets told that she can’t see him without an appointment. Clearly, she’s been here many times before.

She says she’ll sit and wait all day, and then throws a tantrum when, at day’s end, she realizes the receptionist never intended to introduce her to the network head. (Didn’t we already establish that…?) I guess this is meant to show how determined she is, but I found it pretty hard to root for her after this petulant display. She’s rescued by a junior VP played by David Burtka named Michael Beck (formerly Beckenbauer). They bond over their Germanness, and that’s the last we’ll hear from Elsa for eight years.

Back at the freak show, Dandy is putting on makeup. It looks like he’s getting ready for his Cole Porter routine, but as he steps out onto the grounds, it’s clear that a very different type of performance is about to take place. When Paul approaches him asking about “last week’s pay,” Dandy shoots him in the head with a gold-plated revolver.

Then, while he hums the “March of the Toy Soldiers” from The Nutcracker, Dandy shoots Penny in the head. Then Toulouse. Then Ima. Then he enters Desiree’s trailer, and right before he finds where she is hiding, Eve jumps out at him. Eve proceeds to get shot in the leg, and then in the head. Finally he enters the Tattler sisters’ tent, but doesn’t shoot either of them in the head – they are already bound and gagged.

Even in a series that loves to pile up the corpses, I have to say this was shocking. I never would have expected the core Freak Show cast to see their storylines end in an indiscriminate massacre. These individuals, who were feared and shunned for their entire lives by society at large, created their own humanity-validating community, only to end up as mere fodder for an entitled madman’s destructive urges. If there’s a message in that, it’s pretty damn depressing.

The only ones to survive the slaughter are Desiree, Jimmy, Bette and Dot. In the next scene, we see Bette about to marry Dandy in his house… what? Is this a dream? It’s not – there’s a priest and everything, plus all of Dandy’s (probably evil) stuffed animals as guests. But it’s also a setup. Desiree and Jimmy both snuck in to the wedding to pose as servants, and poisoned Dandy’s champagne.

Is Dandy really this stupid? I suppose he’s never actually been shown to be that smart – he just always buys his way out of trouble. But that won’t work this time. As he loses consciousness, Bette shoots Dandy in the arm with his gold gun, and in a very characteristic moment, he seems more concerned with the fact that someone took something he owns than with the fact that he’s been shot.

He wakes up in a water torture cell, from which a magician is meant to escape. Of course, there will be no escape this time. Desiree asks if they can simply cut his testicles off instead, to which Jimmy says, very seriously, “We’re carny folk. Showmen. It has to be theatrical. It’s what Ma would have wanted.”

That line was an eye-roller, but I did appreciate Jimmy’s reply to Dandy’s attempt to bribe his way out. “We always win,” he says, “because we defend each other to the death and have no one else to turn to. The freaks shall inherit the Earth.” I doubt his legions of dead compatriots would agree that they “won,” but it’s a nice sentiment for the survivors at least. The four of them literally eat popcorn as they enjoy watching Dandy die onstage.

Flashforward to 1960, and we learn that Elsa’s TV star status, glimpsed on a Life Magazine cover in the Briarcliff Manor library a few episodes prior, was no illusion. A newsreel of her receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame confirms that she has a weekly variety show and is also a recording artist with three German-themed albums. She’s also married to Michael Beck, who became her manager.

Everything seems to be going great for Elsa, right? Well, not really. She has a meltdown while filming a coffee commercial and is being asked to do a special Halloween show – she might not be a carny any more, but she doesn’t want to risk a redux of the Mordrake Experience. And in private, she snaps at her husband and says marrying him was a huge mistake – the only thing they seem to share is Teutonic heritage and a proclivity for BDSM.

She heads to her Beverly Hills mansion and finds Massimo there. The master “carpenter” who created her wooden legs and Jimmy’s wooden hands has put his talents to use building fake towns in the Nevada desert to be blown up by atomic bomb tests. You know, like the one in this much-maligned scene that I actually kinda liked. [Editor’s Note: We don’t judge you for that. Much.]


Massimo is the only person Elsa still loves, and she wants to run away with him – but he has lung cancer and will die within the month. “I have always been cursed,” Elsa says, “first by having all my dreams ripped away, and now by having them all come true.”

Things go from bad to worse for Elsa as the head of her network, Mr. Gable, comes over and says they have to let her go. It seems famed gossip columnist Hedda Hopper got her hands on the pornography and/or snuff films she was involved in decades ago in Berlin. Gable also mentions they researched her past as a freak show leader. She says she did it as charity; Gable wonders, reasonably, how much she could have cared when almost her entire troupe ended up murdered. This is the first Elsa has heard of this, and she’s shocked. Well, what did she expect when she sold it to Dandy, of all people? Her claim that she ran the freak show out of kindness was always paper-thin, and it’s even moreso at this point in time.

Elsa changes her mind – she’ll do the Halloween show. Cut to the “Elsa Mars Halloween Spooktacular.” Looking out on a darkened set, Elsa sees a camera that, in a wonderful bit of cinematography, looks like a red-eyed demon.

The season just couldn’t let us go without one last Elsa Mars version of a David Bowie song, could it? This time we get “Heroes,” and Lange’s singing style on this one was reminiscent of William Shatner’s. We see the only remaining freak show alumni watching her on TV – Desiree is married and a mother, while Jimmy and Dot are married and expecting a child (and living with Bette, obviously).

Soon enough, Elsa’s motivation for agreeing to the Halloween show arrives: Mordrake, accompanied by Twisty and the rest of his ghost posse, walk in as green fog envelops the studio. I didn’t really love the Mordrake storyline, but I sure was happy to see some supernaturalness in this finale.

Elsa expects to be taken with him to join his “true freak” group, but instead he says “your place is not with us,” and simply stabs her to death. So I guess that’s a thing that he can do? Okay then. Elsa dies on camera, but none of the ghosts are visible to the TV audience, which would probably be a lot creepier to watch live than if they were.

Elsa’s soul goes to an exceedingly appropriate afterlife: the freak show! Ma Petite is there! Ethel is there! Everyone is there, including a not-true-to-life huge, adoring audience! Elsa asks Ethel, “don’t I have to pay for my sins?” Ethel’s reply is to ask whether Elsa can imagine police arresting an actor playing Othello for “killing” the actress playing Desdemona.

Uh… what? That’s a bizarre statement to hear from the woman whose death by Elsa’s hands was of the distinctly non-staged variety. Ethel also says, “Like you always said, stars never pay.” True, but she was talking about a diner bill, not the fate of her soul. The final shot of the season sees Elsa, back in her blue David Bowie suit, in front of the whooping and cheering crowd, ready to perform.

A very small part of me wants to like this ending just for the pure, brazen, immorality of it. “Do whatever you want in life! Lie, cheat, steal, it doesn’t matter because everyone goes to heaven in the end!” It’s certainly not the obvious conclusion – and going the obvious route is something I’ve criticized Freak Show for (see: the painfully unsurprising truth about the ventriloquist dummy Marjorie).

But ultimately I just can’t accept the massive injustice of Elsa, a character who acted with unrelenting self-interest while feigning kindness to an exploited, marginalized group, getting this kind of ovation. And I feel uncomfortable with the contrast of our last vision of Elsa’s soul being this, while our last vision of the souls of almost all of those in the exploited, marginalized group is of them being there to support her.

I would have preferred an ending where Elsa’s afterlife was the freak show, but with some kind of twist to it to ensure she did in fact have to pay for her sins. Or maybe, you know, an ending that didn’t focus on Elsa at all. Ultimately, I guess it’s a fitting end for a very (at times extremely) uneven season.

 Random Thoughts

– I’ve seen it suggested online that the final ovation was as much for Jessica Lange, who has said this will be her last season of AHS, as it was for Elsa. Maybe that was the intent, but it doesn’t make me feel any differently. If anything I think it enhances what I find to be an odd dynamic between Lange and AHS fandom – her position as the show’s star has clouded a lot of the evaluation of her characters, who (well-acted by Lange though they might be) have been pretty terrible people for the most part.

– I groaned when I first saw the Life Magazine cover foretelling Elsa’s status as a TV star, but I was surprised at how interested I was in her Hollywood life once it finally showed up in this episode. Maybe I’m just a sucker for showbiz stories, but I think a more drawn-out arc with more of a connection to her freak show past could have been interesting.

– I’m interested in the question of, if Hedda Hopper really did discover something as extremely salacious as a past career in dominance and submission-themed pornography, would she have reported on it in 1960? It’s the type of thing that I could imagine being kept under wraps in that era for no reason other than the standards of decency in journalism at the time.

– Angela Bassett’s Desiree was so criminally underused this season that I feel like they let her be one of the few survivors essentially out of pity.

– Four seasons in, and none of Sarah Paulson’s characters have ended up dead at season’s end.

– I also think next season is when we finally need to see Paulson in a villainous role.

– So now we begin the annual tradition of speculation on what the next AHS season will be about. Massimo’s atomic bomb house construction in the Nevada desert certainly seemed conspicuous. I’m still betting on some form of American Horror Story: Area 51. We’ll see.

Dan Wohl used to blog about baseball for a living, now works for a tech company, and hosted a horror-themed radio show called “The Graveyard Smash” during college. He lives with his girlfriend in Burlingame, California, a town which utilizes the American Horror Story font for  signage at its public library. You can find him on Twitter at @Dan_Wohl.

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Jill Pantozzi
Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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