The “American Horror Story: 13” finale aired on FX on October 29th and gives the season a real ending. The episode is titled “Devil of a Good Time”, and it is now streaming on Hulu. It closes a 13-episode crossover built around one New York building, with characters pulled from across the show’s history. TVLine calls the season “the most polarizing season” the series has had, and the finale will not end that argument. It does settle the plot.
The setup was simple. The Devil (Paul Anthony Kelly) was one sacrifice short of a hundred years in human form, which wins him a bet with God. The coven went into the last episode in the worst shape of the season. Anyone who has watched this show knows how that usually ends, and the finale does not take the usual route. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “American Horror Story: 13” episode 13 including the deaths and the Devil’s fate.
It closes a 13-episode crossover built around one New York building, with characters pulled from across the show’s history.”
Episode 12 had left Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) and Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) dead after trying to stop him. The finale opens in the Devil’s New York penthouse, where Mr. Phibes (John Waters) has gathered a group of men for the last sacrifice. He serves them milk and cookies laced with crystal meth, and the men start to die. The old Mr. Nas (Fedor Steer) is the Devil’s human shell and he climbs to 99.9 years, one step from the win. Then the Devil walks in and lets one of the men live, which keeps the old body short of a hundred, before he kills that body himself and takes Phibes’s head off with a flick of his finger. The bet is dead before the witches do anything.
The action then moves to hell. Cordelia is working an endless shift at a kill shelter, putting down puppies, with Nan (Jamie Brewer) beside her. The Devil arrives and tells her to kneel, and she refuses and says she would take eternity in misery over bowing to him. He pulls her out anyway and takes her to a park in New York for a talk. There he drops the bet and tells her she can keep her “precious Earth” because he does not want it anymore. Kelly told TV Insider, “He’s not entirely an evil guy”, and the scene is written to fit that. The Devil still wants Cordelia to admit he won, and she will not. She says she will find a way to end him, and he answers that killing him would be like killing a metaphor. Cordelia is his granddaughter. He plans to watch her fight her own nature from a distance, and Kelly says the Devil sees “a little bit of him” in her defiance. He hands her the penthouse as an inheritance and warns her to stay vigilant since he can turn up at any moment. TV Insider’s recap has him leave her with a line about how “Evil thrives where good thinks that it’s triumphed.”
Queenie is back too, because Ben (Joey Pollari) pulled her out of hell. Cordelia tells her the coven did not win, and back at the penthouse Mallory (Billie Lourd) casts a time-travel spell and disappears before Cordelia can stop her. Meanwhile Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) and Ben are alone when the condom breaks. Madison swells at once and gives birth within moments to a girl who appears lifeless. The Devil shows up, brings her back and says “This baby has star power.” That line reads as a seed for a later story. The child is the Devil’s granddaughter, which makes her the obvious next problem.
Time passes. Cordelia writes Mallory a letter to say the coven has grown and now runs out of the penthouse. TheWrap’s recap adds that the coven helped merge the powers of light and dark into a new magical order. Fiona Goode and Constance Langdon (both Jessica Lange) stay in New Orleans, where Fiona teaches her twin sister magic. TVLine’s recap has Constance mastering her first fireball. Cordelia gets tired of waiting and casts a spell that brings Mallory home. Mallory returns from Salem and says she stopped the witch trials and learned a spell that can trap the Devil for good. It works like the spell that trapped Dorian Gray in his painting and it requires “the ultimate sacrifice”.
That sacrifice is Ben. Cordelia and Mallory summon him and explain that he is the 13th Antichrist. Twelve came before him, in a line that includes Hitler and Mussolini, and TV Insider counts Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) from “Apocalypse” among them. Ben is the most powerful of the lot, and the spell works only if he dies. He has just become a father and he pleads before he agrees. The Devil arrives while they are still preparing, and the two Supremes restrain him. Cordelia says the coven’s mistake was accepting his claim that good cannot exist without evil. Ben then stabs himself with a blade and tells his father that he has been afraid of the number 13 all his life and is afraid no longer. He turns to ash. The spell takes the Devil’s soul and puts it inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”, in the place of Judas, the 13th guest at the table. The Hollywood Reporter notes that Constance foreshadowed this fate in her first scene with Ben in the season premiere. Asked by THR about Ben’s sacrifice, Kelly said, “Very disappointed in his choices.”
The finale does not stop there. Ben’s ashes rise and drift into a nearby fireplace, which points to hell and leaves a door open. The season then ends back in hell with Phibes, who is directing a B movie called “Motor Psychos From Hell”. He says he could do this for eternity. Kelly told THR that Phibes was condemned to hell, “but he got everything he ever wanted.” Phibes spent the season chasing a movie of his own, and the Devil’s last act of cruelty doubles as the one wish he grants.
The structure is odd. The Devil quits his bet early, so the coven spends the rest of the episode trapping an enemy who has already walked away from the prize. The witches trap him anyway, and that fits Cordelia because she will not let him leave as the winner. It is a weaker choice for the plot, because the season built a clock and the finale turns it off before anyone touches it. The number is the better idea. The Devil engineered Ben’s childhood, his job and the plane crash. Ben ends the season by owning the number 13 that was meant to frighten him. That is tidy writing.
According to TheWrap, Ned Martel, Charlie Carver and Brad Falchuk wrote the finale and Crystle Roberson Dorsey directed it. Kelly does not close the book on the Devil. “You can always break out of that at some point”, he told TheWrap. Asked by THR whether the Devil is dead or back in hell, he said, “Maybe season 18 will be the rise of young Mr. Nas again.” FX has already renewed the series for a 14th season, announced on October 20th. Ryan Murphy told THR he would not repeat the all-star format: “I don’t think I would ever want to do it again”, he said. Whatever returns next will not look like this.
What Do You Think? Did the Devil quit because he was bored, or because he saw the painting coming? Was Ben’s death the only way to end this, and what do his ashes in the fireplace mean for season 14? And what does a baby with “star power” grow into with the Devil as her grandfather?
Catch up properly: every American Horror Story season in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s American Horror Story timeline.
See you on the next binge!
