Before you press play
Watch if
You've seen every season and just want old faces back on screen, whatever the story does with them.
Wait if
You're new to American Horror Story, or you want a season that makes sense. This one assumes you know twelve seasons and still loses the plot.
American Horror Story: 13 takes the most loved seasons of the show and mashes them into nonsense. To me, Murder House and Coven are the fan favourites, with Hotel close behind, and whatever their launch ratings were, they built a strong fan base. This season feels like an attempt to milk that fan base for everything it has left.
Apocalypse already linked Coven and Murder House, with a little Hotel, and the fans showed up for it. Season 13 tries to link everything to everything and falls flat on its face, ruining the seasons it borrows from along the way. Under it all sits an okay plot, but it feels like about 90 minutes of story stretched across 13 episodes, and the execution is horrible.
Explaining what happens is hard, because half the time I was asking myself what had just happened.
What American Horror Story: 13 is about
Season 13 is about the show itself: a reunion of its famous faces.
The setup follows Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari), a man afraid of the number 13, who survives a plane crash and takes a job caring for Mr. Nas (Fedor Steer), a bedridden old man on the 13th floor of a New York building called the Apollyon. His daytime caregiver is Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange) from Murder House. In New Orleans, Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson), who now runs the coven, senses something coming.
From there, characters from nearly every earlier season keep turning up. If you're not a devoted fan, you won't follow it. If you are, you'll be left with questions the season never answers.
Too many returning characters
The cast list tells the story. By my count, Jessica Lange plays five characters, Sarah Paulson five and Evan Peters three, before you get to the witches, killers and ghosts who return. They're the show's original stars, and they seem to be here because they're the original stars.
I don't blame the actors, who mostly do a good job. So much time goes on scenes that never move the story forward, which is where the stretching shows.
The story and the witches' power
The season starts as one thing and ends up as something else entirely. Everyone colludes with everyone, everyone turns on everyone, and most of it has no rhyme or reason.
The witches' power follows no rules either. Earlier seasons set up power levels: in Apocalypse, Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) was far stronger than Cordelia, and he rescued Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) from the Hotel Cortez when Cordelia couldn't. Season 13 throws that away, so very little the witches pull off feels believable.
What fills the gaps is fluff. The witches take over the middle of a road in slow motion to show how powerful they are, and the script keeps swapping "bitches" for "witches". Those walks are more padding in a season that already has too little story for 13 episodes.
Jessica Lange's five characters
Jessica Lange plays Constance Langdon, Fiona Goode, Sister Jude, Elsa Mars and Margaret Thatcher, and I kept wondering whether any of her old roles had been left out. Constance's long monologues sound like she has lost her mind and is talking to herself, and half of them go nowhere. By the later episodes, Jessica Lange doesn't seem to be playing separate characters at all.
Elsa Mars, from Freak Show, gets a ritual sequence that goes on and on. I kept asking why it wasn't ending. A much simpler scene would have done the job.
Fiona was the return I waited for. In Coven she is the baddest witch there is, the witch you'd send into the final fight, and here she is mostly left on the sidelines. If you bring back a Supreme, let her do Supreme things.
Sarah Paulson as Cordelia Goode
Cordelia was a crybaby in Coven, but less so this season. Here she's stuck in doom and gloom, and every scene plays on the same note, with nothing good coming out of her. Go get a cup of coffee somewhere, Cordelia.
Sarah Paulson also plays Wilhemina Venable from Apocalypse, Hypodermic Sally from Hotel, and two Double Feature characters: the first lady Mamie Eisenhower and TB Karen, a homeless artist with tuberculosis. None of them is needed, and I couldn't see why any of them was shown.
Emma Roberts as Madison Montgomery
Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) is the bright spot. She has a sense of style, as she always has: the way she speaks and enunciates, the way she carries herself, broken on the inside and tough on the outside. Emma Roberts plays a single character, so you can focus on her.
Even Madison is let down late in the season by a romance that felt odd, and I didn't buy it.
The rest of the returning cast
Evan Peters plays Tate Langdon from Murder House, Kai Anderson from Cult and James Patrick March from Hotel. Tate is a fan favourite and does nothing, and Cult was never one of the popular seasons, so I don't know why it gets so much room. James Patrick March, the Hotel serial killer, felt like a total waste of time. Evan Peters turns up at Constance's pagan winter party early in the season, and I couldn't tell you what he was doing there.
Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) comes back too. Apart from getting Papa Legba (Orlando Jones) to explain things and helping the witches out, she does nothing. I thought bringing in the big guns meant doing something good with them, and instead they did something nasty. Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates) returns and doesn't do anything worth discussing.
Mallory (Billie Lourd), the coven's rising witch, does some things but isn't given much. Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy) seems to be there so viewers feel the reunion, and serves little purpose beyond that.
Is American Horror Story: 13 worth watching?
No. Nearly every character is useless, and horrible execution sinks a passable plot. It runs on the goodwill fans built up over twelve seasons and gives them very little back.
Plenty of buildings skip the 13th floor. After this, I'd skip the 13th season too.
Half a bulb out of five: Shattered.
The devil's bet. The devil (Paul Anthony Kelly) is meant to be all-powerful, and he hardly does anything that matters. He is Mr. Nas (Fedor Steer), the old man Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari) cares for, with Paul Anthony Kelly playing his younger self. He has a bet with God: if he lives as a human for 100 years in a row, he wins Earth, Heaven and Hell, and sacrificing 13 women ages him faster so he reaches 100 sooner. I still don't understand how he wanders around so freely while the bet is on.
The sacrifice. The ritual sequence drags on and on. Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange) hosts a sacrifice at Club Hell of 13 women brought back from the dead, with Margaret Thatcher, also Jessica Lange, among them. When the ritual is one woman short, Wilhemina Venable (Sarah Paulson) jumps into the fire.
The family tree. The season's big reveal raises more questions than it answers. Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy) reveals that Fiona Goode and Constance Langdon (both Jessica Lange) are identical twins, born to Sister Jude (Jessica Lange again), with the devil as their father, so Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) carries his blood too. Constance shares Fiona's blood, so I kept wondering why she isn't a Supreme too when Fiona's daughter can be one, and the season never says. Nor does it say whether being the devil's daughter makes Fiona stronger than a normal Supreme.
Cordelia's death and Fiona's return. The season brings Fiona back and then wastes her. During the Devil's Night attack, James Patrick March (Evan Peters) kills Cordelia with a thrown sickle. Fiona, pulled out of hell by Cordelia's own spell, turns March's fellow killers against him, kills them herself and brings Cordelia back to life. After that she mostly gets sister scenes with Constance.
Papa Legba and Marie Laveau. The season shrinks Papa Legba (Orlando Jones). In Coven he stood above Marie and Fiona; here Cordelia blackmails him, keeping Fiona's escape from hell secret in exchange for his help. Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) goes down to hell so that Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) can come up, and Marie mostly helps Papa Legba explain how the devil's plan began.
Madison and Ben. Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) gets the ending I bought least. Ben, the devil's son, turns on his father, wins her over with dates in Italy, and the season gives their romance a whole episode. They panic when the contraception fails, she gives birth almost at once, and then she just starts loving the child. I didn't believe that jump, because anyone in her place would still be terrified of what had just happened to her.
Cordelia's threat. Cordelia's threats are empty. When Ben first comes to the witches, he throws Madison across the foyer, and Cordelia still threatens to obliterate him. As I see it, she isn't a full Supreme any more, with Mallory (Billie Lourd) lined up as the next one, and the devil's son could brush her aside. In Apocalypse, Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) outclassed her.
Mallory's spell. The season's answer to the devil is a spell that traps him without killing him. Mallory travels back to Salem and learns it from Sarah Goode, the woman who inspired the spell that trapped Dorian Gray in his painting. It needs "the ultimate sacrifice".
The devil quits. The bet the whole season is built on simply stops mattering. In the finale the devil blows up his human body and walks away from his bet with God: "You can keep your precious Earth. I don't want it anymore." He also frees Cordelia from her own private hell, where she was sent after being stabbed in Episode 12.
The finale. All the build-up ends with two witches holding the devil down. Cordelia and Mallory bind him to a couch, Ben stabs himself and turns to dust, and his death traps the devil's soul in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, as the 13th guest at the table. The show does explain it: Ben's power as the devil's son makes his death a big enough sacrifice to fuel the spell. Even with that explanation, the payoff felt weak to me.
The sisterhood and the Supremes. The ending leaves most of the witches out. For a season that keeps calling the coven a sisterhood, nobody else turns up for the fight, and Fiona and Constance stay in New Orleans. As I understand Coven's rules, only one Supreme has full power at a time, yet Fiona, Cordelia and Mallory are all alive at the end, and the season never makes clear how that works.
Bright Bulbs
- Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) takes a cigarette from Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) in a fun little power play, and she pulls a few more moves like it.
Dull Bulbs
- Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) is okay without being given much to do, and Coco (Leslie Grossman) doesn't do anything that makes sense.
Shattered Bulbs
- Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy) comes in and shouts "Balenciaga!", which I took as a moment for the fans, and honestly it's pathetic.
Cast
- Sarah Paulson as Cordelia Goode / Wilhemina Venable / Hypodermic Sally / Mamie Eisenhower / TB Karen
- Jessica Lange as Constance Langdon / Fiona Goode / Sister Jude / Elsa Mars / Margaret Thatcher
- Evan Peters as Tate Langdon / Kai Anderson / James Patrick March
- Emma Roberts as Madison Montgomery
- Billie Lourd as Mallory / Winter Anderson
- Joey Pollari as Ben DeSoto
- Paul Anthony Kelly as young Mr. Nas
- Fedor Steer as Mr. Nas
- Angela Bassett as Marie Laveau
- Orlando Jones as Papa Legba
- Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie
- Frances Conroy as Myrtle Snow
- Leslie Grossman as Coco
- Kathy Bates as Delphine LaLaurie
- Jamie Brewer as Adelaide Langdon / Nan
- Mena Suvari as Elizabeth Short