(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season finale of “American Horror Story: Apocalypse”)
Hail a different Satan?
If you just finished the “American Horror Story: Apocalypse” finale, you probably have a lot of questions racing through your mind. But the biggest has to be, “What the heck just happened at the end there?” Yes, the season closer for the eighth installment in Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series simultaneously gave us way too much information and not even remotely enough context for that information in the last couple minutes, which resulted in us knowing even less than we did going into this finale.
So what happens here is those two teens who were kidnapped and brought to Outpost 3, who haven’t been seen since Episode 3, popped up with just a few minutes left on the clock. We see them in the new timeline after Mallory (Billie Lourd) turned back the clock so she could kill Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) before he rose to power, eliminating the threat of the Antichrist and canceling the nuclear apocalypse once and for all — or so we thought.
Right, so these two — their names are Emily (Ash Santos) and Timothy (Kyle Allen), and it’s OK if you don’t remember that because who even are these people — meet randomly in that new, apocalypse-free timeline. She’s protesting in front of a coffee shop and they bump into each other in a meet-cute and then we cut to a year later and she’s having his baby. Things seem OK-ish, but then we’re already meant to have a bad feeling as it looks like someone is spying on them from the shadows?
Then we cut to three years later, and the teens are now parents coming home from a date night. They complain about how their now 3-year-old son is so angry all the time and how it’s nice to have a break. Emily and Timothy head back into their home and go to relieve the babysitter. But as they do, Timothy notices bloody handprints smeared on the wall going toward their little boy’s bedroom. They rush to the door and see the little guy sitting in a rocking chair, covered in blood while his dead babysitter lies motionless on the carpet. He’s killed her, a la Michael Langdon as a toddler.
This scene is basically a shot for shot shoutout to when Constance found her grandson at the end of “AHS: Murder House.” Only Emily looks horrified, and Jessica Lange’s character was a little giggly.
So while these two are freaking out about what their son has done, the doorbell rings. Timothy goes to answer it and we see the Black Pope Anton LaVey (Carlo Rota) and Mead (Kathy Bates) — the Satanists who once came looking for Michael Langdon and performed the ceremony that turned him fully into the Antichrist — now searching for this new son of Satan.
Now none of this makes sense, because up until now there’s been no indication there is anything special about these two — even after they were taken to Outpost 3 for supposedly having something unique or great about their DNA worth saving. And they certainly don’t appear to provide anything like the pedigree that Michael Langdon, who was born of a union between a ghost and a living woman, had.
So, presumably the takeaway here is that Emily and Timothy were taken to Outpost 3 because of whatever they had in them that ended up creating this other Antichrist baby. But, like, in that timeline the Antichrist was already around and actively destroying the world — why would the Cooperative need them, given they’re already superfluous?
We probably shouldn’t ponder any of this too hard, because there’s no way to figure it out without speculating wildly. So we’ll just leave it at that.