American Horror Story: Double Feature / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: Does the Muse make its talented users cruel or does it simply bring out the respective user's capacity to be evil just as it does their talents?
Audience-Alienating Ending: Big time. While the endings of past seasons have become known for being of weaker quality when compared to previous episodes of the season, they still were usually considered to be at least adequate and watchable. This definitely was not the case for Double Feature. Furthermore, all the previous finales had been examples of Bittersweet Ending and Earn Your Happy Ending; both halves of Double Feature have a straight-up Downer Ending for the first time in the series.
- While much of Red Tide was lauded by critics and viewers for its high-quality tone and writing (even by the show's typical standards), that praise came to a screeching halt once its finale aired, which was heavily criticized for its rushed pacing, lazy execution, and cynical direction.
- For the season as a whole, Death Valley was considered by many to be among the worst episodes in the entire history of the show; the needlessly convoluted and lackadaisical plot — constantly jumping from the mid-20th century scenes (which were comparatively more well-received due to their clever historical in-jokes and providing something new to the show with a conspiracy-driven narrative) to an incredibly underwhelming present-day story (despite the already vastly shorter episode runtimes), its total lack of connection to Red Tide, the awfully written protagonists, weak performances (with Kaia Gerber often being singled out in reviews for her terrible acting) and complete absence of direction quickly caused viewers to cry Seasonal Rot.
- To put into perspective how negatively received the season as a whole eventually was, both finales of each half are the lowest-rated episodes in the entire series on IMDb, with the other episodes of Death Valley close behind.
Complete Monster:
- Red Tide: Ursula Khan is a snarky literary agent who progresses from being simply shallow to wickedly heartless when given a chance to make more money. Visiting Provincetown to investigate the sudden rise in creativity of her "favorite" client, Ursula uncovers the existence of Muse, a drug that enhances talent but also turns most of its users into Feral Vampires. Coming to see the Gardners as mere pawns in her game, Ursula disposes of Harry and his wife before going to Los Angeles with a new supply of Muse, distributing the drug to several people—including an entire class of writing students—and flooding the streets in blood to satisfy her bottomless greed.
- Death Valley: Theta is an emotionless human-alien hybrid with no regard for the lives of others, thinking of her own humanity as her greatest shame. Hired as part of the coalition between the US government and the invading extraterrestrial forces, Theta leads the Super Breeding Program on Area 51, where innocent men and women are both impregnated by the aliens to create more hybrids. Some of Theta's subjects are on the "annual plan"; these people have been immortalized and spend their eternal lives as breeding slaves. If the newborns are too abnormal to her liking—meaning all of them—Theta has their throats slashed and drowns them in a tank, feeling no remorse despite being a failed hybrid herself. When it is revealed that the aliens have no intentions to share the world, Theta coldly declares her allegiance to them and their plan to Kill All Humans.
He Really Can Act: Macaulay Culkin, who mostly left the spotlight after his childhood successes, proves to still be a very effective performer in adulthood. He manages to make Mickey both tragic and likable, even as his ego gets blown out of proportion.
Love to Hate:
- Ursula is an utterly sociopathic businesswoman driven by greed who will unrepentantly turn people into mindless bloodsuckers or talented psychopaths just to run the best talent agency ever and Leslie Grossman nails that performance with charisma and sass.
- Austin and Belle are both murderous narcissists (especially the latter), but Evan Peters and Frances Conroy play their parts so well that you can't help but love them.
Narm: Death Valley gives us a life support system for an unwilling host mother for the hybrid species. It's a giant silver orb where her head should be, and it's meant to be horrifying instead of laughably out of place in the modern setting.
Narm Charm: The Feral Vampires dress like 80s new wave artists. This is explained as them all buying from the discount rack of a local shop prior to them turning feral; as silly as it is for them all to copy the aesthetic, it's a striking visual.
Questionable Casting: One of the main criticisms of Death Valley was the casting of Kaia Gerber as one of the lead roles due to her very noticeably flat performance, especially after her appearance in American Horror Stories was criticized for similar reasons. While it definitely could be argued that the writing did not benefit any of the cast, her acting was still heavily panned in comparison to the other newcomer actors (who at least were considered to have done well with what poor material they were given).
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Amelia Earhart in Death Valley. Given Lily Rabe's knack for impressions (such as her lauded portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in Hotel), many looked forward to seeing her take on the character, but she's Killed Offscreen in the second episode after only two short scenes.
- Also from Death Valley, Rebecca Dayan's Maria Wycoff. She gives a spooky performance as an envoy for the aliens, until her head suddenly asplodes and her role is taken over by the decidedly less spooky Valiant Thor.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many viewers agreed that Death Valley had a very promising set-up and could have worked as a full season, but greatly suffered from being merely four episodes, leading to things being either too oversimplified or too rushed. Most of the audience also agreed that despite presenting an unusual take on the alien abduction and alien encounter mythos, and seemingly bringing back themes introduced in Asylum, Death Valley quickly devolved into a mass of overdone conspiracy theories hastily stitched up together (no matter how rushed or illogical it sounded) and with very little creativity or twists added to them.

YMMV / American Horror Story: Double Feature

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