‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Season Finale Recap: This Means Nothing To Me

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

“Alone,” ACS Versace‘s finale, is based almost entirely on such disconnection. Andrew Cunanan becomes a superstar literally overnight and ends his life with a stomach full of dog food and scrounged garbage. His sociopathic, spotlight-hogging father announces that the film of his son’s life is to be titled A Name to Be Remembered By — unnecessary verb, dangling participle and all — while reporters the world over mispronounce his name in increasingly comical ways. Andrew spends his life seeking the approval and affection of mostly older men and ends it after discovering empathy in the form of two women: Lizzie, his old friend, who pleads with him on television to show the world the loving and lovable person she and her children (“your godchildren”) have known all along; and Marilyn Miglin, wife of the man he tortured to death, raised (like Andrew) by a single hardworking mother after her fondly remembered father (like Andrew’s) was no longer there. Marilyn recounts the story of her family and her desire to create a perfume like something her late dad would have given her mom to show her she’s special and loved, and discovers her husband did things like this for strangers all the time without her knowledge. Andrew’s own mother, who wanted nothing more and nothing else but to be close to her son, hides from the world under blankets and jackets now that his presence is inescapable. The police, who Keystone Kop’d their way through a months-long manhunt as bodies piled up (even their wanted posters are preposterously homophobic, misleadingly tarting Andrew up like a drag Joker), deploy a small army of SWAT goons to corner Andrew in the houseboat where he just up and kills himself anyway. The monster they sought is pronounced by the lead investigator who finds his corpse to be “just a boy.” It falls to Ronnie, an HIV-positive junkie absolutely invisible to the straight world and who only knew Andrew under an assumed identity, to tell the FBI this man spent a lifetime in the shadows, in pain, and now wants only to be seen. At the heart of it all, the magic moment Andrew and Gianni shared in that San Francisco opera house long ago was just that — a moment. “It feels like destiny,” the desperate young man told the older genius. “Why, can’t you feel it?” He can’t.

Across the board, the performances — from Darren Criss, Édgar Ramírez, Penélope Cruz, Ricky Martin, Judith Light, Jon Jon Briones, Joanna P. Adler, Annaleigh Ashford, Dascha Polanco, and Max Greenfield, with Criss and Light especially putting in absolutely crushing work — resist grandiose or valedictory choices. None of them see this as a date with destiny at all. The episode’s only false note comes when writer Tom Rob Smith, director Dan Minahan, and showrunner Ryan Murphy insert a vision of Andrew’s younger self in the bedroom where he’ll die. It feels too grand, too full-circle. But then the boy disappears and the man lies back on a stranger’s bed in his boxer shorts, swallows a gun barrel, looks into the mirror at his own sad reflection, and blows his own head off, his own sixth and final victim.

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The glamour Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch the ACS Versace Season Finale ("Alone") on FX