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

Dandy Mott has taken over the freak show, and, unsurprisingly, is already acting like a diva about it. Reinventing the show to incorporate himself as the star attraction (“Dandy Mott sings Cole Porter!”) [Insert “You’re the Top” joke here], he’s very frustrated that the show hasn’t sold any tickets despite advertisements for the event only being up for roughly thirty minutes. Naturally, this is all of the freaks’ faults, and he lets Paul, Penny, Eve, and that large lady (normally I would look it up, but there have been about forty characters in thirteen episodes and I am tired) know that it’s all their fault, because they are stupid, boring, and mediocre. And then Eve punches him in the face.

And through a fish-eye lens, because the people who make this show still think that this looks cool and not super cheap and lame, we see the freaks finally gang up on Dandy and tell him that they won’t put up with his bullshit or his Cole Porter. “You think you’re special,” Paul tells Dandy. “But I have news for you: you’re not special. You’re rubbish. And even worse, you’re boring.” Ya burnt, Dandy!

After the gang of freaks announce that they quit, Dandy is left to sulk in his plaid pants all alone.

Elsa is also alone, but she’s alone in Hollywood, where she marches right into the WBN (“World Broadcasting Network,” sure) offices to meet with the head of the company, where she is swiftly shooed away by a very annoyed secretary that she cannot simply waltz in and meet with him. But Elsa refuses to leave, instead hanging out in the waiting room, chain-smoking and looking angry and Germanic, which I realize is a little redundant. But at closing time, Elsa notices that the president of the network hadn’t come out yet, and the secretary tells her he went out the back to avoid her. And then she offers some unsolicited advice, because this is Los Angeles: “Change your act. Marlene did it better.” Ya burnt, Elsa!

After Elsa causes another ruckus in the lobby after striking the sassy secretary, who comes to her rescue? None other than Neil Patrick Harris’ husband, David “But I’m Famous, Too!” Burkta. He lifts her off the floor and reveals he’s also German, and Germans have to stick together, meaning that he’s going to use his pull as Junior Vice President of Casting to get her a gig.

Back at the freak show, Dandy outs on his makeup and saunters through the deserted fairgrounds in fancy white suit, humming a jaunty tune. When Paul confronts him about his last week’s pay, Dandy, without saying a word, shoots him in the head. Ya burnt, Paul! And then he finds that Gummer girl and shoots her, too. Ya burnt, Meryl Streep’s daughter! And you get the idea: he hunts down the rest of them, continuously humming in a way that’s probably supposed to be menacing but is, in fact, annoying, and all I can think is, “Thank goodness there’s only forty more minutes of this bullshit.”

Yet, on the other hand, there’s still forty more minutes of this bullshit. Dandy barges into Desiree’s trailer, where’s she hiding in a closet desperately trying to keep quiet. Just as Dandy raises his gun to shoot through the closet door, in bursts Amazon Eve, who has proven consistently to be the only not-annoying character on this show simply because she beats the shit out of all of the bad guys, quite literally destroying the patriarchy with every uppercut. Yet Dandy makes a grab for his gun, and shoots her in the head. Score another one for the patriarchy, I guess. Angry when he can’t find Desiree in the closer (twist, she’s hiding in under the bed!), Dandy returns to his tent where he’s got the twins gagged and tied to a post. “Come with me,” he says, ominously.

Jimmy returns to the camp that night and notices, hmm, how everything seems to be disheveled and quiet. That’s not good, is it, Jimmy? He goes into the big top and finds all of the freaks dead and arranged delicately across the stage and in the audience. (Say what you will about Dandy, but the dude knows how to beautifully stage a room.) After he collapses to his knees, Desiree grabs him, and they embrace in a mutual state of despair.

Back at the Mott mansion, Dandy has set up a fancy wedding scenario complete with a flute-playing twink and a harpist (is that you, Joanna Newsom?), and the twins walk down the aisle to him in a scene that only rivals the climax to The Muppets Take Manhattan. (I only wish the fifty or so characters who have passed through this mess of a season were all there in the audience, quietly humming “Somebody’s Getting Married,” but, yeah, I guess that would be too crazy.) I’m only assuming this is going to turn out to be a fantasy sequence, because how the fuck is Dandy going to get a priest to wed him to a pair of conjoined Sarah Paulsons? Of course, this is Florida. You can’t get gay married, but you can get hitched to two women, but only if they share a vagina.

As it turns out, he’s only marrying the one on the left, which is convenient, I suppose. Dot, of course, already plans to disassociate herself from the whole thing as much as possible, which she tells Dandy right at the alter. “I would hope you would join us from time to time,” he tells her. “I can get very nasty when my manhood is compromised.” YOU DON’T SAY!

That night, at honeymoon dinner, Dandy is drunk in love and over the moon about the prospect of three-headed babies. As it turns out, however, he’s just drunk on poison champagne, and starts to get very woozy when he realizes he’s been drugged. And who sits down but none other than the Motts’ new maid, who, twist!, has three breasts. Ha ha! I guess Dandy never met Angela Bassett? As it turns out, the twins just pulled a big one on Dandy, tricking him into thinking they wanted to get married to him only to exact a plan of revenge on him.

Bette shoots Dandy with his own little golden gun and orders Dandy to sit down. And in walks Jimmy as the butler, who tells Dandy he’ll finally be a part of the show — the star attraction, no less.

Dandy then wakes up in a large glass tank right on stage at the freak show, because, as Jimmy says to Desiree after she insists they cut to the chase and cut off his balls, “It has to be theatrical.” (Also, thirty more minutes of this bullshit.) So Jimmy turns on the hose connected to the tank, which slowly fills up with water as Desiree taunts him from the other side of the glass. Academy Award nominee Angela Bassett, everyone!

 Bless that woman.

And finally, the motherfucker is dead.

Meanwhile, in Tinseltown, Elsa Mars is dubbed “the Queen of Friday night” and is a multi-Emmy winning performer, all thanks to Neil Patrick Harris’ husband. How’s that for an alternate reality? Oh, and she also married Michael (Burtka), and she even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And she’s the spokesperson for an instant coffee brand, like we haven’t seen that sort of thing before. (You watching the same YouTube videos as me, Ryan Murphy??) But, not surprisingly, Elsa isn’t particularly easy to deal with. It’s almost has if she didn’t learn anything from her days at the freak show!

Elsa is adamant about one of her contractual stipulations — an Elsa Mars Halloween show. “I do not perform on Halloween,” she snaps at her husband, who tries his best to control her career even though we know that Elsa is quite dominant in the boudoir. (She can’t perform on Halloween, of course, for fear of a visit from our dear friend Edward Mordrake, so we can all assume how this whole thing is going to end.)

She sneaks out to have lunch with Massimo, who is very proud of her career since he met her when she was just a sad German prostitute without any legs. But she tells him how sad and bored she is, because nothing ever works out for Elsa Mars. “I’ve always been cursed,” she says. “First by having my dreams ripped away, and now by having them all come true.” She then begs Massimo to run away with her, so they can finally be together in some soft focus paradise without and freaks or monsters or Nazis or prosthetics. Alas, he’s like, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that!”

Back at home, sulking with a cognac, Elsa’s husband brings by the president of the network, who tells her that Heda Hopper has gotten her hands on a little German art film starring Elsa. They also have found out about Elsa’s freak show days, and they tell Elsa that everyone from the show is dead — all the victims found buried in a mass grave. And that’s how you lose your job in Hollywood, you guys. But before they can buy her out of her contract for violating a morals clause, Elsa announces she’ll eagerly perform on Halloween. “Might as well go out with a bang.”

Soon enough, Elsa is back in a Bowie suit, this time to croon the thin white duke’s “Heroes.” Tuning in across the land are Desiree, who is not married to Malcolm-Jamal Warner (and with two kids!), and then there’s this charming sight of domestic bliss:

The two-faced Wes Bentley and a sad-faced Twisty the Clown hover in through a cloud of green fog. Elsa stops singing and smiles, and begs for Edward to take her with him. “The day of reckoning is here!” he announces as she stabs her in the chest, and poor Elsa falls to the stage. But what’s an American Horror Story finale without another twist? Instead of taking Elsa with him, she’s trapped forever in a Hellish version of her own Cabinet of Curiosities, complete with all of her old cast of characters. Sure, it may seem sweet, but remember how shitty it was to run that damn show?

“Don’t I have to pay for my sins?” Elsa asks Ethel, who greets her at the foot of the stage. “Can yew imagine the pooolice shewwwwing up at the old Gloooobe,” Ethel replies, “and arrestin’ the guy playin’ Othelloooo for killin’ Desdeeemoooona?” Good point, I guess. (Except not! Not at all! What the fuck does that even mean.)

So, Freak Hell is just a perpetual, purgatorial stage show. This should be shown in every MFA program as a warning to anyone pursuing a life on the stage. “Is this what you really want?”

 

Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!

Photos: FX Networks