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There is closure to be found everywhere this week, all told through the framing story of a present-day Lana Winters granting an interview (Lana having become something of a tougher version of Barbara Walters). We find out that Lana gave up the written word for television, and her groundbreaking story was that takedown of Briarcliff that Kit lectured her about last week. She tried to find Jude, but Jude was nowhere to be found. Because it turned out Kit smuggled her out! After last week's encounter had turned into weeks and months of him visiting her, Kit broke Jude out and took her home to live with/terrify his children. He detoxed her and tried to help her work through the crazy, but ultimately, it was his freaky alien babies with their supernatural calming powers who took Jude out into the woods and made her better. For six months anyway -- six wonderful, idyllic months that might be the most beautiful thing this show has ever produced. Then she got sick, and the Angel Conroy came to retrieve her, and she was finally ready. Kit's children would grow up to be doctors and lawyers and perfect little half-alien role models to the rest of us. Kit got pancreatic cancer at age 40 and was alien'd up to heaven.
Lana, meanwhile, managed to take down Cardinal Timothy Howard, uncovering Dr. Arden's human experiments and hounding the Cardinal into a bathtub suicide that was far too dignified for what he deserved. Lana then comes clean to the reporter about the child she gave up at birth. She says she tracked him down once, rescued him from a schoolyard bully, even. This story isn't news to Dylan Face, who managed to impersonate a crew member and sneak into Lana's house.
After the interview wraps, Dylan Face emerges from the shadows. Lana's been ready for him -- turns out the FBI is a bit better at the whole investigation thing that pathetic mama's boy Dylan Face. They had already put the pieces together about Bloody Face 2.0's identity and questioned Lana about her biological son. So Mom and Kid have at it, Dylan Face once again whining about how Mommy didn't love him, and how she killed Daddy who DID love him. Lana sets him straight on his father-worship, not that he's listening to her. He pulls out his gun and puts it to her forehead, but with a few precise motherly words, Lana manages to talk him out of it. She even absolves him of his guilt ... right before taking the gun herself and shooting her son through the head. Boom. Done.
The season ends with a flash back to the beginning, moments after Sister Jude christened her "Lana Banana." She warned Lana about digging too deep into murder and mayhem. "You stare into the face of evil, evil stares right back." And how.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Season finale time already! It seems like just yesterday that we were following Adam Levine and Mrs. Channing T into that broken-down Briarcliff Manor and waiting for them to get their various appendages ripped off. And actually... we're back there again for the cold open. Dylan Face breaks into present-day Briarcliff, boarded up and crumbling, with a machete in one hand. He puts on headphones and listens to Tales from Briarcliff, an audiobook read by its author, Lana Winters. So it looks like she did go back and write about Briarcliff after all.
Dylan Face walks the halls, smokes some crack and listens to his mother describe the hellish conditions therein. In the hydrotherapy room, he imagines her in one of the tubs, telling him that he's an abomination who was conceived not in love, but in hate. Later, on the staircase, he imagines his dad, Ollie Thredson, who puts a kind hand on his shoulder and assures Dylan Face that he loved him even before he was born and it was Lana who took that love away from him. Dylan's nearly in tears. This all comes together later on in the episode, but for now it's hilariously simplistic, the workings of a mind that only operates on the most childish of levels. I know Dylan Face kills people and that's super scary and all, but for real: what a whiny wet noodle of a bad guy he is.
From outside, Dylan hears the familiar (to us) voices of Adam Levine and Mrs. Channing T, who are still on their honeymoon thrill tour, about to enter its last stop. It's "Four months ago" per the title card. Hey, remember when Adam and Mrs. Channing were having sex on one of the gurneys and heard a noise? That was Dylan Face. Remember when Adam went sticking his arm into slats in doors that he shouldn't have? That was Dylan Face inside. Remember when Adam then got his arm hacked off by the monster inside? That was Dylan Face, too. Hilariously, watching his end of it, all Dylan Face wanted was a place to be quiet, smoke his crack and listen to his book on tape. He really only donned the mask and picked up his machete when Adam started shining his obnoxious phone all around. Lesson to be learned, kids. With the same scream that closed the first episode of our season, we head into our final scary-ass opening credits.
After the break, we're still in the present day, only this time at what looks like a chichi New York penthouse apartment, with a generously stocked wet bar and photos of one miss Lana Winters adorning the walls. Lana is being prepped for an on-camera interview, and her interviewer is gawking at all the photos of Lana with various celebrities. Bono drew a drawing of her on a cocktail napkin! The interviewer -- who IMDb tells me is named April Mayfield, so okay -- reminds Lana of her own reputation, which is awfully convenient for the rest of us. "Six best-sellers, a reputation as the only one that men will open up to -- world leaders, stars, disgraced politicians..." So she's Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters, but with teeth. And I should note that while old-lady makeup still looks awkward on just about anyone, the hair/make-up/wardrobe work on Lana throughout this episode across all time periods is a wonder to behold. April asks about any "one that got away" interviews, and the question is answered ("Mao and Rielle Hunter") by Lana's partner, a grande dame Broadway type played by Joan Severance. Her name's Marian, and while she and Lana are open, you can tell they don't want their personal life to be the focus of the interview, so Marian jets. After Lana coaxes the lighting guy to move his key light ever higher -- gotta light those old gals as flatteringly as possible -- she and April prepare to get down to business. Lana doesn't want this career retrospective at the Kennedy Center to feel like a eulogy. April assures her she'll spend plenty of time on Lana's "nail-to-the-cross interview with Madoff," but she does want to start by spending some time on the "Bloody Face years." Lana says in no uncertain terms that she will no longer speak of Bloody Face. He's become a "goddamn household name," like some kind of "Heath Ledger Hollywood villain." She refuses to participate in that narrative any longer. April decides that discretion is the better part of valor and instead suggests with the exposé that made her reputation. Sarah Paulson gives the most fantastic, business-y reaction to this, throwing a thumbs-up while taking a sip of wine, perfectly semi-interested.
So while present-day Lana looks into a mirror (she likes to do her own eyebrows), we're transported to what I assume is the early 1970s, where a gussied up Lana has taken a film crew to Briarcliff. They observe that the chances aren't great that they'll just be let in the front door. Good thing Lana knows another way inside. As they walk through the tunnel, Lana communicated her intentions to the crew: she wants shocking footage and as much of it as possible. She wants to shake the public out of their complacency by the horror of the conditions. Back in the present day, with the cameras rolling, Lana confesses to April that the image she projected of herself was one of a crusader for social justice, when the reality was, she operated out of ambition. She left print for television because that's where she saw the future and she made Briarcliff her first big story because it was full of buzzy things like crazy people.
We cut back to the '70s with an absolutely pristine recreation of an era-specific prison documentary. Actually, intentionally or not, it looks uncannily like the 1972 Geraldo Rivera exposé on the Staten Island children's asylum, Willowbrook. As we see footage from the film -- crowded, unattended, filthy, twitching patients -- present-day Lana explains that her hook for the piece was going to be finding Sister Jude among the other forgotten remnants of society's fringe there. '70s Lana mesmerizes as she flips into on-camera persona (earnest, sympathetic, outraged) and back to off-camera persona (demanding, pragmatic, all-business), making sure she's getting exactly the story she wants. She also says "the state of Massachusetts," but whatever, that was my pet peeve last week. She's interrupted at one point by Andrea Zuckerman's Husband the Intern, who tells them they shouldn't be there, but who also has no more power to remove them as he does to herd the crazies into their rooms. There are just too many people to take care of. Lana then demands to see Judy Martin and we then cut to Lana opening a cell door and approaching the twitching shell of what used to be Judy Martin inside. Jude hides her face from the camera's light as Lana tries to remind her of who she is. She tells her she's here to get her out. Finally, Judy unsteadily climbs to her feet and puts her arms around Lana. As Lana leads her out, a dazed Judy manages to squeak out, "Lana... Banana?"
Present day, April acknowledges the powerful nature of such a scene, though she sheepishly admits she doesn't recall it. Lana's like, "Because it never happened. I made it up on the spot right now. Because I am fucking goooood at this shit." Lana says that by the time she got to Briarcliff, Jude was gone. She regrets not having gone sooner. "It wasn't the ending I wanted. It was a hell of an ending, just not the one I wanted." She then smiles and tells April she's got her promo now. She then asks to take a short break to freshen up and get something to drink. April asks a crew member to get Ms. Winters a sparkling water, and when it arrives, it's handed to her by Dylan Face himself. She thanks him. He glowers at her. They've got natural familial chemistry. Oh, also, he's planning to kill her in a bit.
After the break, Carole King's "I Feel the Earth Move" picks up our mood a bit. 1970s Lana is paying a visit to her old friend Kit Walker, who is just so pleased that she managed to make good and take Briarcliff down. He's slightly unnerved when he looks down his porch and sees her crew, already filming him. Lana says she wants to talk to him about one "Betty Drake." Kit's face falls and he gets all conspiratorial with Lana, telling her he'll talk -- just not on camera. So with the crew off taking a smoke break, Kit peruses the Betty Drake paperwork that Lana produced. Clearly, she's figured out that Betty is Judy Martin. We see footage from the documentary of Lana digging through strewn paperwork in one of the Briarcliff offices (at one point she's startled by a patient sleeping under a pile. Like, that's awful but also pretty funny), and she miraculously manages to stumble upon a file with Jude's photo. Okay, AHS, I will allow you ONE unrealistic thing to happen all season and that's it. The file said that Ms. Drake was released into the care of Kit Walker in March of 1970. Kit gets defensive about why Lana cares about this at all, but while Lana's professional ambitions are never far below the surface, I do think that she honestly just wants to know how Jude ended up and I think Kit can see that. He says that rescuing Jude felt like the one thing he could do, the one injustice he could right when it came to Briarcliff. He says that after his encounter with her after Alma's death -- the one we saw last week -- he continued to visit her every week, sometimes more often than that. We get a beautiful, touching 360-degree time-lapse shot showing Kit, week in and week out, slowly showing Jude how to play a game of checkers, at first physically placing her hand on the pieces to move them, eventually getting her to play and react and smile on her own, at one point putting a sweet arm around her shoulder. I kind of can't believe what I'm seeing, that a season that has spent so much time in the muck of humanity's worst has managed to build to something this genuinely kind and wonderful.
So one day, Kit brought Judy home with him, to meet his toddler alien children and some new chick he appears to be shacking up with. The music is reminiscent of the score from The Hours, which could also be contributing to how beautiful I find this. Lana can't quite understand why Kit would do something like that for a woman who brought so much atrocity down on him. He says he didn't do it for Jude or even for him; he did it so he could finally leave Briarcliff behind and be there for his kids. We watch Judy go through a painful detox from all the drugs she'd been prescribed at Briarcliff. Kit helps her through it. The kids bring her juice and put flowers in her hair. They took to her pretty much right away, the kids, though things with Jude's psyche remains precarious. One day, she ends up chasing the kids around the house, ranting about how there's no children's ward here; she sees Kit and attacks him for being a woman-murderer. She's back where we found her when the series began. Kit tells the kids to go outside, but they calmly approach Jude and tell their dad that it's okay. These preternaturally calm alien babies are ON IT. It watches as his son and his daughter each take one of Jude's hands and walk her outside into the dusk, across the field.
It's nighttime now with Kit and Lana. He's been telling this story all day. He says he doesn't know what happened when the kids took Jude into the woods, but when they came back, Jude was better. I love that Kit knows his babies are alien babies and knows the aliens have rehabilitation skills and still he's like, "I dunno, something?" In the flashback (of the flashback, yes), Judy is clear-headed and so wonderfully happy I could cry. She's teaching Kit and the children how to swing dance. She's smiling and making jokes. She's the Judy she was always meant to be. She taught Thomas how to sow, Kit says, and trades Julia's dolls for trucks so she'd learn to be tough. Kit tells Lana it lasted for six months. The blood dripping from Jude's nose as she starts to dance with Thomas is the signal that six months are over. She got sick. I don't know if it's alien sick or just regular old fragile people sick. Not sure it matters. Kit and the children tend to her throughout. We see Jude, through tears, give some last words of hard-won wisdom to Julia and Thomas. She loves them so much; they love her. They call her "Nana." I don't even know what to say about Jessica Lange this season. Few things on television in my whole life have been as rewarding as watching what she's gotten to do across these last 13 episodes. Kit ushers the kids out; she knows she's going. "I'm here," he assures Jude. "I'm not going to leave you alone." Jude says she's not alone. She's here. Whatever hateful perverse form the Angel Conroy took last episode is gone now. She's back to the kind face of welcoming death she always was. "I don't know who she was talking about," Kit tells Lana. "...I do," says Lana. The Angel Conroy asks Jude if really now, after all those false alarms, she's really ready. We get the Angel's POV as Jude says she's ready. Her bed seems to float up to meet the Angel's face. "Kiss me," she asks, serenely. All alone now, the world having gone away, Jude gets her final blessing. May she rest.
After the break, we're back in the present with Lana and April. April kind of gathers herself before asking Lana about a controversial period in her career. Lana says that half of New York wanted to lynch her when she went after Cardinal Timothy Howard. April remarks that he was a rising star in the Church, but Lana is unrepentant. She says the man had questions he needed to answer. We flash back to Lana hounding him in a parking garage, crew in tow. On camera, she questions him about the evidence that has come to light about Dr. Arthur Arden and the human experiments he was conducting at Briarcliff. Howard, true to his loathsome character, stonewalls and tries to get the eff out of there as soon as he can. When Lana questions him about the patients who were killed in the name of Arden's experiments, Howard flashes back to his strangling Shelley in her hospital bed. Lana keeps after him, all, "What are you running from?" and "Answer the question!" April says that many people still hold Lana responsible for what became of the Cardinal, but Lana says she can't take credit for the man's guilty conscience. And indeed, we get a shot of Timothy Howard dead in his bathtub, wrists slit, tub water a deep red. As I said in the recaplet, it's a much kinder demise than the man had coming, though you could probably convince me that him dying pathetic and cowardly like this is exactly what he deserved.
Lana tells April that Cardinal Howard was a liar -- such a deluded and arrogant liar that he believed the lies he was telling. "Lies are like scars on your soul," she pontificates. "They destroy you." April catches that we're not talking about Cardinal Howard anymore. Lana indeed has something she wants to come clean about. A lie she's been telling for 40 years. God, does this woman have an innate grasp on the dramatics of live TV or what? So, yes, here's where Lana confesses about having lied in her book about the baby she had dying in childbirth. She didn't raise the child, she says, but someone did. We cut back to that moment where she had to nurse the infant Dylan Face, and she finally hands the baby back to the nurse and tells her to never make her do that again. The child, she says, will have to learn to live without his mother. Through the frosted glass, we see present-day Dylan Face eavesdropping on the conversation. April asks if she's had any contact with the child and Lana says there was a period in the mid-'70s were she was hit with terrible remorse for giving him up. We're then hit with a flashback to a schoolyard somewhere in New England or thereabouts. I know I've already talked about the stellar wardrobe work on this episode, but you really have to get a look at what Lana's wearing here -- from the giant rose-colored shades to the fur-trimmed jacket -- she's a vision. Anyway, Glamorous Lana spots some dick kids picking on a smaller boy for liking dinosaurs. They're shoving him and calling him a faggot, and Lana strides across the playground and shoves the bully away, promising to hurt him in ways he's never dreamed of if he picks on this kid again. She then crouches down to the boy and hands him back his glasses. "You know he's the asshole, right?" she says to him. He knows. She then reaches a gloved hand out to touch his face. The lookie-loos in the schoolyard will probably all use this as fodder to bully young Dylan Face even further, but for now, Lana's his angel of mercy. After an uncomfortable moment or two, he runs away. It was the last time she saw him, Lana tells April. "I wasn't his mother." Out in the foyer, Dylan Face takes a tortured gulp of his drink. Because I guess crew guys get to drink out of the good tumblers now? AND he's eating an éclair? AN ÉCLAIR? How anyone can maintain a glower while eating one of heaven's finest confections is beyond me. Anyway.
Lana continues to talk to April about how she never had any other children -- it was a different time for gay women, she says -- but Kit made her godmother to his alien babies. Flashback to Kit's wedding to somebody new. Another dynamite look for Lana here, looking like Loretta Lynn as she dances happily with the children (kudos to FX for shelling out for the good stuff -- Stevie Wonder's "I Wish," which will never not remind me first and foremost of "Wild Wild West," unfortunately). They're all so happy! This is seriously the happiest hour of TV I have watched in forever. On THIS show! Thomas, Lana says, is a law professor at Harvard; Julie a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins. Kit didn't live to see it, though. Around age 40, he developed pancreatic cancer. We see Lana go to visit him in his final days. She says he was peaceful. Then one day, she tells April, he up and vanished. We all know what that means, but we see it anyway: the flash of light, the buzzy sounds, the barely perceptible reflections of figures in his eyes. The aliens came back for him one last time. I wonder if Kit ever told Lana about the aliens. He must have, right? He was so open and earnest about everything. There was no funeral, Lana says, because the alien children said there was "no reason to mourn."
That's a hell of a note to go out on, but April thanks Lana for her time and tells her what in honor it's been. She especially thanks her for "all the personal stuff," which was above and beyond what she expected. Lana sees them out and closes the doors behind them. As she walks back into her cavernous living room, conspicuously alone, the music gets ominous. She fixes herself a drink -- pulls out two glasses, in fact. "Can I pour you a drink?" she asks without turning around. She beckons for whomever it is to come out. No need to hide. Eventually, Dylan Face emerges, no doubt a bit crestfallen that his big moment isn't going according to script. Lana turns around to meet him: "Let's get this over with, shall we?"
Okay! One last act before we call it a season. Let's stick this landing. So Lana and Dylan Face are squaring off. He scoffs at the beautiful life she's got for herself and now it's about to end. "I knew it the moment I saw you," she says. She asks him how he got onto the crew and he matter-of-factly tells her about skulking outside her building, making friends with the doorman to find out the date and time of the interview, waiting until the first crew guy showed up with donuts. "I cut his throat." He tells her -- again, a little disappointed -- that this is not how he expected this to go. Lana, however, always knew this is how it would end. He asks how she recognized him and she's all, "Oh, Johnny, how could I not know my own son." What she doesn't tell him -- what we see -- is that some time before this, the cops came by asking her questions about the man suspected of committing a rash of murders, including the elderly couple who owned the house where Oliver Thredson tortured her. I guess that was the connection that brought them to Lana. Point is, they showed her Dylan Face's photo and she put it together from there.
Lana lights up a cig and tells her boy that he looks like his father. Handsome. She forgets sometimes how handsome he was. "Until you shot him in the head," Dylan Face boo-hoos. Lana doesn't back down from it. She wants to know how Dylan Face found out his true identity. He says it was that day on the schoolyard. That look she gave him. He just knew. And then he saw her on the TV and was able to look her up. He would dream that she'd come back for him... until he heard the tape. The tape? Well yes, that recording she made of Thredson's confession, the one she took to the police that sealed his fate? That piece of police evidence ended up on eBay somehow. Unlikely? Sure. But in this show about institutional corruption, I'm not going to make a fuss about implausibility when some greedy cop may well have decided to make a quick buck selling Manson Family souvenirs. Anyway, the pertinent part of the tape is where Lana talks about getting rid of the monster baby growing inside her and Thredson begs her to spare the life of their sweet baby. So, as annoying as those manifestations of Cruel Mommy and Loving Daddy from the opening scene were, they at least have some basis now. That recording started Dylan Face on his path of loving his monster father and hating his bitch mother. She tells him Thredson never loved him. "And you did?!" he accuses. No. She didn't. She couldn't. She says she gave him up so he'd have a shot at a life with parents who did love him. This causes Dylan to rage -- she gave him up so SHE'D have a shot at a life, the fantasy life she has now. He looms over her now. Endgame.
Lana stubs out her cig and defiantly asks him what he's going to do now. "At my age," she says, "I don't imagine you'd have much use for the skin." Near tears, he tells her he's thought about this a lot. He pulls a gun from his waistband and puts it right to her forehead. She expresses surprise at the choice of weapon. Ollie Thredson, after all, claimed he didn't believe in guns. "Of course, he was lying about that too." Dylan Face tells her to shut up about him. Then things devolve into tearful "I just want my murder Daddy to be proud of me" stuff. I feel very Don Corleone about Dylan Face right now. YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN! Lana's gaze never breaks as she speaks with pity to her tormented son. She tells him his father was a monster; that's not who HE needs to be. She calls him "baby," which actually gets him to lower the gun, almost involuntarily. She says he could never be truly like his father. Not that sweet little boy she met on the playground. Her hand covers his. "Even then I knew you were a better man than he was." Her hand is on his face now. Her other hand gently takes the gun from him. "It's not just him that's in you," she says. "I'm a part of you, too." He starts to break down. "I've hurt people," he says. She tells him it's not his fault. Then she places the gun to HIS forehead! "It's mine," she says, and then PULLS THE TRIGGER.
She did it. The show did it. Stuck the landing. I almost can't believe it. They DID IT. They ended things on the perfect note of darkness. And yet also strength? Terrible, damaged, hard-won strength. Briarcliff ruined Lana Winters. There's no glossing over that. Jude was absolved, Kit's purity could never be truly tarnished, but Briarcliff Manor broke Lana. She escaped. She prevailed. But she never left it behind. I thought about halfway through the season that we were moving toward a reveal where a post-Briarcliff Lana would snap completely and take up the Bloody Face mantle herself, that that would be the big twist. I like this so much better. It didn't turn her into a serial killer, but it's made her capable of murder. Just once. Once is enough. And yet -- and here's where the dark heart of the show really gets me -- I am SO PLEASED that Lana's going out on top. Nobody got the better of her, ever. That bitch came to win.
Before we go, one last flashback. This one starts with something we've already seen: Lana's first trip to Briarcliff, angling with Sister Jude for an audience with accused Bloody Face Kit Walker. You remember. "You're outta your depth, Miss Lana Banana." The scene continues, Jude warning Lana about the dangers of outsized ambition. Lana says Jude seems rather ambitious herself and she's love to hear her story. Jude demurs, saying she doesn't believe their paths will cross again. She cautions Lana about the lonely road of the woman with lofty ambitions, but Lana says, "You have no idea what I'm capable of." Jude does have one word of warning, regarding her interest in the Bloody Face case: "If you look in the face of evil, evil's gonna look right back at you." Boy, I'll say.
A lot of people have talked about this scene as a final-act twist, calling into question the veracity of the whole season. I guess the idea is that Lana cooked up the whole story as a fiction, from this moment on? I get the impulse to read it that way. We've been conditioned to expect the rug to get pulled from under us and the fact that we're seeing a flashback at all makes you want to figure out why. What's the hidden key that unlocks the whole series? Ultimately, I don't think this scene is here for plot purposes. It's here to tie up the theme. It's here for that final line. Lana Winters did look in the face of evil. It did look right back at her. Same as it did to Judy Martin. And Sister Mary Eunice. And Grace Bertrand. And Timothy Howard. And "Anne Frank."
As 1964 Lana strides out of Briarcliff, Judy looks back at the still-intact statue of the Virgin and the triumphant return of "Dominique" plays us out. One last gift to me personally. Ryan Murphy has a reputation for letting things fall apart. Or, more accurately, for blowing things apart of his own spastic volition. I've always said that he made one perfect season of television, that being Nip/Tuck Season 2. This season right here joins that list, right at the top. From inception to execution -- across the board -- he did it. Tim Minear sure helped. Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson sure helped. I'm glad we all got to experience it together. Now, bring on those witches and Season 3!
Joe R is SO PSYCHED that Taissa Farmiga will be back year. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.
Get the scoop on Season 3 and much more from Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe and Frances Conroy from our friends at Wetpaint.
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