American Horror Story Season 7, Episode 11
Love him or hate him, you have to admit former City Councilman Kai Anderson knows how to work a room. Of course, if you don’t admit it, you might end up getting shanked in a shower. If you hate him, he hates you right back, with interest. But if you love him, the Divine Ruler will love you with all you’ve got. That’s how he intends, on American Horror Story: Cult season 7, episode 11, to make the country “Great Again.” He made a pinky-swear promise so you know he wouldn’t lie. Kai is never alone in prison, even when he doesn’t have his growing troop of soldiers with him. Kai brought Chuck Manson behind the bars with him and the iconic counter-revolutionary is still wearing a swastika third-eye-patch and quoting Beatles song titles. We’re thrown right into the prison setting without warning, expecting the explanation will be coming, and hoping it will still take us by surprise. The last episode ended with Kai trying to one up the master in an opening mission statement written in truth, blood and amniotic fluid. Manson only killed one Sharon Tate. Kai promised a night of a thousand Tates, but has to lower his expectations when his followers can only confirm the locations of 100 pregnant women in their area. The Night of 100 Tates was intended to stoke the fires of rage in women, an act so horrific it would spur the revolution promised by the SCUM Manifesto, an extremely radical feminist solution that cuts off the heads of society where they live. Kai bills himself as the counter-revolutionary whose movement will survive. It is killed by the betrayal of Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson), who then proceeds to take Kai apart bit by bit. She takes away his movement, his freedom, his belief that her son is his, and his future in a game she’s been playing for a while. Kai brings a checkerboard to a chess match and Allie putting him in jail is only a first move. Beverly Hope is completely broken. The former newswoman had more fire than all of Kai’s followers put together. Fueled by rage, she wanted to be the last person alive. But the Divine Ruler cut her down and now she just wants to die. Adina Porter puts as much ash into her crushed downturn as she put fire into Kai’s political rise. When the season started, Beverly had no fear, she was the baddest bitch in the valley. Fear was her friend, a potent political weapon in her hands, as she used her news reports to scare the citizenry into putting Kai into his city council seat. Hope is the first to realize that Allie is the one everyone should fear, which is worth double its weight in political dividends. After she takes down the political movement, Allie becomes a political star. She turns down the chance to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show. She even says no to Lana Winters, which hurts more because Paulson played the muckraking reporter in season 2. American Horror Story has never shied against actors doing double duty as the characters spill over from past seasons. Evan Peters got to play against himself as both Kai and Manson. American Horror Story: Cult lives up to its promise of subversive frights. The presidential election of 2016 and the Trump presidency unleashed sleeping demons in clown masks into the broadcast subconscious. The season may not ultimately have been as harrowing as earlier seasons but that is only because it strayed from form. When Allie takes Kai’s senate seat on a promise to do away with the cults of democrats and republicans, she is in the position to bring in same evil as the one she fought. But it’s implied she could always have been angilng for the position since the day she voted for Jill Stein. Her politics and the ones we read in SCUM are pretty close. Kai could have been a Manchurian candidate all along, and Allie is just his Queen of Diamond trigger. By the end, she’s racked up as many lethal casualties in what could be seen as a cut-throat path to elected office. In a feat of poetic justice, Senator hopeful Mayfair-Richards has a higher death count than the male president on House of Cards. She also gets 80% of the female vote. “Great Again” is as subtly effective as the season has been peripherally horrific. Real life settings, secret organizations, crypto-SuperPACs and brown shirted thugs pick at the scabs of deep-seated conspiratorial paranoia. Politicians are every bit as scary as sad clowns and serial killers, and they have the power to affect more lives. That’s pretty frightening, and fear is trust. But the season ends on a reassuring note for horror fans as we see Allie fitting herself in the cloak of the cult she now leads. “Great Again” was written by Tim Minear, and directed by Jennifer Lynch.
