In the ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ recap for the season finale, Cordelia and the witches square off with Antichrist Michael Langdon one last time with the fate of the world in the balance…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The final battle has arrived — the witches versus the Antichrist — in the ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ season finale.
Since the fourth episode of the season, a series of flashbacks have told the story about Michael Langdon coming into power as the Antichrist and his mission to wipe out the greatest threat to the mission of remaking the world in his father’s vision — killing all the witches and warlocks.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Cordelia Goode has been doing everything in her power to get her coven ready to face off with the ultimate evil while also preparing her replacement to take over if that’s what’s needed to bring down the Antichrist.
When the last episode ended, just about everybody wondered if the series would have time to wrap up everything up in one final hour and the answer to that question was yes!
We even found out why those two random people — Timothy and Emily — were rescued at the start of the series and what actually made them so important.
There was even some time travel this week.
Overall, ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ ended as a very strong season overall — albeit with a bit of a slow start — but combining all the elements of the crossover from ‘Murder House’ to ‘Coven’ and then mixing in a dose of new characters, this was probably one of the strongest offerings from Ryan Murphy and company in a few years. Every season of ‘American Horror Story’ has its own merits — even the not so great versions — but this one started weak and ended on top.
With that said, let’s recap the season finale of ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ titled ‘Apocalypse Then’…
Declare This An Emergency
Before returning to present day, we get one final series of flashbacks to reveal how Mallory and Coco ended up in that Outpost after the nuclear bombs went off and the plan orchestrated by Cordelia to finally strike back at Michael Langdon.
As the episode begins we find Myrtle Snow arriving at the Satan compound where tech geniuses Mutt and Jeff are configuring their outpost schemes in the final days before the bombs go off. When Myrtle shows up she uses her witchy magic to get past Ms. Venable and does the same to Mutt and Jeff in order to secure a few spots at the outpost that once served as the Hawthorne school for warlocks.
Back in the Louisiana swamp, Cordelia decides the best course of action involves casting identity spells on both Coco and Mallory in order to protect them from Michael — as Madison so deftly comments, he can sniff out a witch like an evil truffle pig — but this little bit of magic will keep them hidden from him until it’s finally time to reveal their true powers. Cordelia knows the only way to guarantee Coco and Mallory will remain safe is to hide them right under Michael’s nose.
Unfortunately to achieve complete anonymity, Cordelia has to transform Coco into an insipid asshole and make Mallory her handmaiden to achieve the necessary appearance when they are finally drawn into the outpost thanks to a handsome donation to the Cooperative.
Cordelia plans to wake both of them up years from now after the world has been demolished so Mallory’s powers can fully develop, even if she never realizes that she has them in the first place.
With one blow of pixie dust, Coco and Mallory are turned into the people we met when the series first began. Coco is a demanding, entitled brat and Mallory is forced to serve her every need. Despite their new personalities, Cordelia still kept a close eye on her witches with Madison serving as a wild Uber driver to take Coco and Mallory to their appointments.
That’s when Madison discovers one more very important piece of information — she spots an advertisement on the side of a bus for a new talk show starring voodoo queen Dinah Stevens. When Madison reports back to the swamp, she requests permission to burn Dinah to the ground because only selling her soul to Satan would have landed that woman a talk show.
Cordelia agrees that Dinah has to pay but she has a different plan in mind — one that involves putting the voodoo queen in the same bunker as her witches. And with that, the bombs go off and the world is destroyed — for now anyways.
It’s Time We Saw a Miracle
Following the nuclear war, Cordelia, Myrtle and Madison wake up after being healed in the Louisiana swamps for the better part of two years. They travel to Los Angeles to the site of Outpost 3 aka the Hawthorne school for warlocks and we reconvene with a scene we saw back in episode three — Cordelia revives her witches and removes the identity spell to help them remember who they truly are.
When Michael arrives, he doesn’t seem all that surprised and believes he’s already defeated them despite this clever rouse to hide right under his nose this entire time.
Cordelia tells Dinah that it’s finally time to pick a side and because she made a deal with the devil, she chooses to stand by the Antichrist.
That was the wrong move.
It’s at that moment when Cordelia pulls out the ace up her sleeve as Marie Leveau (Angela Bassett) has returned from the underworld!
It seems Cordelia struck a deal with Papa Legba to exchange Marie’s soul for the most evil, conniving voodoo queen of all — Dinah Stevens. Marie ends up using a machete to kill Dinah and now she will spend all of eternity as one of Papa Legba’s servants.
As for Michael, he still doesn’t seem all that concerned but when his Robot Mead decides to unsheathe her machine gun arm, Cordealia casts a spell and blows her into a million pieces. Mead’s final moments are an homage to Hal 9000 singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ until she expires. Madison then picks up the machine gun arm and fires about a hundred bullets into Michael.
It doesn’t kill him but it gives the witches enough time to get Mallory ready for her trip back through time where she can stop these events from happening in the first place. With a piece of Michael’s hair in hand, Cordelia, Myrtle and Mallory rush upstairs to the saltwater bath so she can perform the spell.
Sadly, everybody forgot about nuclear waste Brock still floating around the house because he shows up and stabs Mallory in the stomach — one last act of vengeance against his former fiancée Coco. Myrtle quickly dispatches him by setting Brock on fire but the damage is already done — Mallory is severely wounded.
Downstairs, Michael wakes up and dispatches Madison by exploding her head like something out of ‘Scanners’ and then makes his way upstairs to find the witches. Marie Leveau slows him down very briefly but then he rips out her heart and has it for a snack. Coco stabs Michael in the back but he returns fire by snapping her neck and drawing the knife out like it was nothing.
Finally with Mallory wounded and unable to perform the spell, Cordelia figured out the way to save her witches — she would have to sacrifice herself so all of her powers would transfer to the next Supreme.
Cordelia does get one final stand off with Michael, who she warns about what is coming for him.
“You will get to watch me die but you won’t find it satisfying. Satan has one son but my sisters are legion motherfucker!”
~ Cordelia
With that, Cordelia stabs herself in the heart and all of her powers rush into Mallory, who is finally able to perform the spell that allow her to travel back in time to find a moment in Michael Langdon’s past when he was most vulnerable.
This is the End
In a snap we return to 2015 when Michael Langdon had suddenly become a teenager over night and he had murdered a priest that his grandmother Constance sent to save him. When Constance finds the dead body this time, she decides that she can no longer raise such an evil grandson.
She casts Michael out of her house and refuses to raise him any longer. Both enraged and upset, Michael runs out into the street only for an SUV to mow him down. The driver happens to be Mallory — and for good measure she backs up over him and does one more pass to ensure this boy will never realize he’s the Antichrist.
When Constance runs outside to find her grandson, he asks her to pull him inside the ‘Murder House’ so at least his spirit can live on forever. Constance thinks about it for a split second and then tells him to go to hell. With that, Michael Langdon is dead.
From there we get a series of new moments with Mallory arriving at Miss Robichaux’s academy all over again — her memories are in tact but everybody she’s meeting has no idea that the timeline has changed. Cordelia is alive and well and so are Zoe and Queenie.
In fact when Queenie mentions going to the ‘Price is Right’ in Los Angeles, Mallory makes a suggestion to choose a different hotel (remember she stayed at the Hotel Cortez in ‘American Horror Story: Hotel’ and that’s where she met her demise). Mallory did manage to pull off one final bit of magic thanks to sending Michael Langdon to the underworld — she earned enough credit to return Misty Day to the land of the living.
We even get to see Nan one more time, except she plans to return to Papa Legba’s side because she likes working with him. With the timeline was reset, Myrtle Snow is no longer alive because Cordelia didn’t have to bring her back from the dead to stop the apocalypse. And poor Madison Montgomery has returned retail hell where she will be forced to suffer for all eternity — or at least until Mallory gets around to saving her.
The coven has been reunited but Mallory knows the battle between good and evil will never truly be over and she wonders by changing the past, what she may have done to the future.
Prophecy
We flash forward to 2020 and we catch up with Timothy and Emily — the two random people who apparently had good ‘genes’ worth saving from the apocalypse the first time around. In this alternate future, they’ve still managed to find each other, fall in love and actually have a child.
A few years later, we find the happy couple living in suburbia raising their rambunctious three year old son Devin but when Timothy and Emily return home from dinner one night, they notice a blood red sky and ravens flying overhead.
When the couple gets back inside the home, they find blood on the wall and then discover their precious baby boy sitting overtop of the body of his dead babysitter. Timothy and Emily are shocked to find Devin gleefully sitting there covered in blood after murdering someone for the first time.
A moment later there’s a knock on the door — it’s Anton LaVay, the black pope of the Church of Satan, along with Ms. Mead and they’ve come to talk about this special baby named Devin. With the timeline reset, all of those people are still alive and just because Michael Langdon didn’t become the Antichrist doesn’t mean there won’t be an Antichrist.
Something Michael said during his stand off with Cordelia rings true as this episode came to an end.
“Prophecy is inevitable. I was always going to win”
~ Michael Langdon
It appears the inevitable showdown between good and evil, heaven and hell, the witches against the Antichrist was going to happen no matter what. We’ve just got a new Antichrist on our hands now.
With that, ‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ comes to an end.
