At this point, it almost seems as if Ryan Murphy’s anthology horror series American Horror Story is nothing less than an American institution. Though the seasons have varied in terms of quality, the show has proved to have a remarkable amount of longevity. Of all the seasons that have aired so far, Asylum is one of those that has held up the best to the test of time, in large part because its narrative makes more sense than so many of the other ones.
However, there are still quite a few things in this season that defy logic, both narratively and in terms of character.
Shelley is one of the stranger characters to appear on this season, and her storyline is one of the most tragic. After she is experimented on by Dr. Arden, she is then strangled by the Monsignor. However, as compelling as she is as a character, it’s hard to see exactly how she fits into the arc of the rest of the season, and there are times when she seems like a bit of an unnecessary distraction from the rest of the season’s events.
Almost everyone who has watched this season of the show knows that the aliens are one of the most divisive plot points to have occurred in any season. Once again, it strains credulity to think that aliens would somehow be involved in the season, and they honestly take something away from the rest of the season which, after all, is focused on the ways in which many asylums in America were little better than torture chambers for those who lived in them.
This show has a bit of a bad habit of indulging in stunt casting. This really is a shame, since it ends up distracting from the otherwise stellar casts that populate the rest of the season. In this season, the viewer gets to see none other than Adam Levine, the lead singer of the band Maroon 5. He’s a very good singer, obviously, but one really has to wonder why the writers thought that it would be a good idea for him to come into the universe of Asylum.
As the series has progressed, it’s become obvious that Murphy has a bit of an obsession with bringing in characters that have some basis in historical reality. In this season, the viewer gets to see a young woman claiming to be Anne Frank.
Of course, it turns out that she isn’t, in fact, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, but it does seem like a rather random thing to throw into the mix of the season (as well as, frankly, a bit tasteless).
Obviously, a show like American Horror Story isn’t always concerned with being realistic, but there are times when things happen that really do strain the ability of the viewer to accept. In this season, one of those things is the appearance of the Angel of Death. While Frances Conroy is always a welcome addition to any season of this series, it still seems a bit odd to have an angel of this sort making random appearances in an otherwise rather obscure asylum.
James Cromwell’s Dr. Arden is one of the season’s most sinister villains, made all the more so by the fact of his Nazi background. Unfortunately, he develops a bit of an obsession with Sister Mary Eunice, one so intense that, when she is killed, he ends up feeding both of them to the flames of the crematorium. It makes for a compelling scene, of course, but one can’t help but think that a man like Arden surely had more to live for than merely this obsession.
American Horror Story is one of those shows that tends to just throw a whole lot of plots at the wall in the hopes that one will eventually stick. While this season does that less than most, there are still a few points that should probably have given the writers some pause, and one of those is having Dr. Arden turn out to have been a Nazi. It makes sense for his character, but ultimately seems a bit excessive.
Anyone who has seen a few episodes of this series knows that it loves to jump through different time periods while telling the same story. While this works sometimes, there are more than a few where it just starts to feel disjointed, and this is particularly the case with this season, in which the rapid shifts of temporal location sometimes don’t seem to have a lot of rhyme and reason and end up doing more to confuse the viewer than anything else.
Evan Peters is one of the fixtures of the series (though he’s been absent from the most recent season). In this season, he ends up getting into a polyamorous relationship with two women.
While it’s a little titillating, of course, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in terms of the characters themselves and how they might behave, and it’s another example of the ways in which the series tends to go for adding plotlines that might be attention-grabbing, rather than really fitting with the story. Now, if there was a more logical polyam relationship, there would be nothing wrong with that.
It’s always a pleasure to see Ian McShane on the screen. The man just seems to have a powerful presence that causes everything to crackle around him. However, even with his star power, it’s a bit hard to see what the point was of the killer who dressed up as Santa. Of course, it’s always disturbing when a homicidal maniac dresses up as one of the icons of the Christmas season, but in this case it began to feel more superfluous than anything else.
