In the ‘American Horror Story: Cult’ season finale recap, Ally finally gets her vengeance on Kai but will she get the last laugh?
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
A politically charged season of ‘American Horror Story’ had to end with a politically charged statement and perhaps a bit of a politically charged fantasy as well.
What started out on Election Night 2016 was a season that unfolded the horrors of living in Donald Trump’s America and the wave of fear, hatred and paranoia that spread throughout his campaign to become president. Those same emotions played a major part in his proxy coming to power this season with a charismatic young man named Kai Anderson, who was slowly transformed from a person willing to acknowledge the kind of power Trump was amassing during his run for the presidency all the way to using those same tactics to put himself in a similar position.
His run towards power trampled over all sorts of people — including one very fearful, very paranoid woman named Ally Mayfair-Richards, who was soaked in regret after casting her vote for Jill Stein and then made to feel guilty for that ballot by the woman she loved. From the moment Trump was elected, Ally’s entire world fell down around her as she was scared of everything from clowns to holes to blood and perhaps most of all by a world where she wouldn’t be able to raise her son because the President of the United States had burned it down already.
As the season got moving, Trump fell into the background and Kai became the forefront for his movement on a much smaller scale but still dangerous nonetheless. Unfortunately for Kai, he underestimated the power of woman kind, who eventually banded together to bring him down.
Perhaps this entire season was a love note from creator Ryan Murphy trying to fire up the liberal base to fight back and never give into the kind of politics that Donald Trump played to become president. Perhaps this season was just a fantasy that Murphy cooked up in a lucid dream the night after Trump got elected.
Then again judging by the end of the final episode, perhaps Murphy’s cynicism about American politics really has boiled over once and for all because you could also easily take away the message that anybody can win with those same tactics that Trump used to get elected — even if it’s someone we’re supposed to believe in.
With that said, let’s recap the season finale of ‘American Horror Story: Cult’ titled ‘Great Again’…
Night of 100 Tates
To keep things less confusing, we’ll recap the episode in chronological order rather than how the actual finale unfolded.
Last week saw Kai’s impassioned plea to finish what the Manson family started by butchering Sharon Tate and her unborn child except by multiplying the murder rate by killing 1,000 pregnant women in one night and then seemingly blaming it on his Senatorial opponent, which would in turn help him get elected.
Well sadly, Kai had to admit that finding 1,000 pregnant women was a little too ambitious even for him but he was able to track down 100 of them so now he’s dubbing his plan ‘The Night of 100 Tates’.
What Kai doesn’t know as he orchestrates his murderous plan — including a lesson on how to properly stab a pregnant woman to kill her and the baby (a rather heinous and disturbing moment even for this show) — Ally has been plotting against him for even longer than we suspected.
Ever since Ally found out about the cult a few weeks back, we assumed that she had started to plot her revenge against her wife Ivy as well as playing the long game to eventually get to Kai Anderson as well.
It turns out Ally has been plotting against Kai even longer because after the faux assassination attempt that landed her in the loony bin, the FBI paid her a visit and asked if she would be willing to go undercover to bring him down once and for all. Of course, Ally signed on to be the FBI’s informant and in exchange she would receive immunity for whatever it took to bring him down — thus why she didn’t seem all that worried about killing Ivy or watching Kai murder his own sister in cold blood.
Fast forward to last week’s episode when Ally found out that Speedwagon — one of Kai’s alt-right supporters — was also wearing a wire. It seems he was much lower level, however, after he got busted dealing drugs for Detective Samuels and the state police put him on a mission to get the dirty cop. When it turned out Samuels was in much deeper with Kai’s cult, the police forced Speedwagon to infiltrate his organization as well while twisting the knife that he participate or risk going to prison.
Unfortunately because Speedwagon’s plans could interfere with Ally’s own agenda, she stabs him to death and moves along with the plot to bring down Kai.
Ally then turns over Speedwagon’s wire to Kai, proving that he was the rat all along, which means he killed his sister Winter in cold blood. Ally never cracks a smile but it’s clear she’s getting some kind of enjoyment watching the torment on Kai’s face knowing that he murdered his own sister — the last real family he had left — and she never actually betrayed him.
Back to the living room where Kai is putting together the final touches on his Night of 100 Tates and Ally is nowhere to be found. After talking to a downtrodden and defeated Beverly Hope, who literally asked for Ally to kill her rather than serve as Kai’s puppet any longer, it was time to call in the calvary.
Ally goes outside to an FBI van that’s been sitting on the street all along. She tells them that it’s time to act and the FED’s rush through the house, killing most of Kai’s troops in an effort to bring him to justice. Beverly gets some small piece of revenge by killing a member of Kai’s alt-right army but ‘Divine Leader’ was captured without harm after one of his followers took the bullets intended for him during the raid.
As Kai is being led out in handcuffs, he sees Ally standing there alongside the agents, which lets him know that the woman he had trusted and believed he shared a child with was the one who betrayed him and put an end to his tyrannical reign that he hoped would end with a seat in the White House.
Family Values
In prison, Kai Anderson’s goals to become a Senator have been derailed but that doesn’t mean he’s any less charismatic at bringing people over to his way of thinking. Over the 11 months he spends in jail, Kai recruits a strong gathering of like minded people who follow him and begin calling him ‘Divine Ruler’ all over again.
Kai even finds a female prison guard named Gloria willing to buy into his act and while he’s boning her on the side, he’s also quietly plotting his escape from jail.
Kai is able to manipulate two men into attacking him before revealing that one of them was a loyal soldier all along. Kai then kills that man as a sacrifice, but the plan works because it gets him transferred to different part of the prison.
From there, Kai invites a new member — a scared out of his mind teenager who was sentenced to 25 years in prison after killing a kid in his father’s Tesla while driving drunk before dumping the body in an attempt to cover up his crime. Kai welcomes him to the group, but his role isn’t as the latest soldier in an ongoing war but instead he’s given a spot at the table because with a shaved head he looks an awful lot like the ‘Divine Ruler’.
The plan all culminates after that kid gets the same tattoos as Kai and he’s invited into the kitchen late one night for a meeting. It’s there that Kai kills him dead, cuts off his face so there’s no way to identify him other than the tattoos on his body while he sneakily puts on a guard’s uniform and walks right out the front door alongside his beloved Gloria.
Now that he’s free, Kai can finally exact his revenge on Ally and her new movement.
Nasty Woman
Following Kai’s conviction, Ally Mayfair-Richards wasted no time getting back on her feet by re-opening the Butchery on Main and even found a new girlfriend to share her home.
At dinner time one night, Beverly Hope pays her a visit where they have a conversation about Kai for the first time in months. It seems the cops let Beverly go because they believed she was a victim of Kai’s cult rather than a member and Ally did nothing to dissuade them from that line of thinking.
Beverly reveals that Kai confessed to everything that the authorities charged him with, even some crimes he didn’t commit, but the one murder he refused to cop to was the death of Ivy Mayfair-Richards. He pinned that one on Ally but despite Beverly’s questions, she never slips up and admits to killing her wife. Instead, Ally just smiles and puts it all back on Kai where it belongs.
Ally is also enjoying some new found celebrity after escaping Kai’s cult and it leads to her own run at the Senate. It’s the same seat that Kai once hoped to occupy but now he’s behind bars. He even calls Ally at her home one night where she taunts him about how she’s now the one running for Senate while he’s locked away in prison where he’ll stay until the day he dies (at least that was the plan). She also gloats to Kai that he’s not actually Ozy’s father and she used that to get close to him so that she could eventually turn him over to the FBI.
Unfortunately, Ally’s running into some problems in the polls according to her new campaign manager Beverly, who says that the constituents believe in her as a candidate but still see her as a victim more than a victor. That’s when Beverly sets up a debate between Ally and her opponent in the Senate race where she’s able to show her strength while standing up to his ‘man-splaining’ and constant interruptions (that probably sounds familiar from the last election cycle).
Ally is holding her own but that’s when a question is raised from the audience and Kai Anderson reveals himself along with a group of like minded soldiers who have followed him into the debate where they hold the crowd hostage.
Kai makes his way to the stage where he puts a gun to Ally’s head and preaches to her how a woman could never lead, much less have the strength to overcome a powerful man, and this is just further proof that no matter how hard she tries, a woman is always going to end up in second place. With that, Kai pulls the trigger but the gun is empty.
Ally then looks over at Gloria sitting in the audience — it seems months ago she held a meeting with the prison guard and convinced her to help their cause by getting close to Kai and helping orchestrate his escape, which led to this very moment.
Ally smirks as Kai stands there with a gun with no bullets and no way to exact his revenge. Once again, he’s underestimated the other sex.
“You were wrong. There is something more dangerous in this world than a humiliated man — a nasty woman”
A second later, a bullet rips through Kai’s head as he’s shot dead and the woman holding the gun is none other than Beverly Hope. She’s finally gotten her own closure on Kai’s manipulations and with that his cult dies forever.
Following that rather eventful debate, Ally runs away with the election and takes the Senate seat with over 80-percent of women turning out to vote for her. After the win, Ally puts her son Ozy to bed, knowing that he’s going to fall asleep and wake up to a much better world now that his mother is in a position of power.
After putting him down to sleep, Ally has to conduct one more meeting before bed.
She goes to the bedroom and gets ready before living a green hood up over her head. It’s the same green hood that Bebe Babbitt once wore while carrying out the commands of her lover Valerie Solanas after she wrote the SCUM Manifesto in an attempt to channel female rage into a revolution. Back then, Valerie’s followers began committing their own murderous acts but the plan backfired when a rogue member took credit for the crimes as the Zodiac killer.
This time around, Ally is leading her own charge to put down the scum and lead the uprising as the damn has finally been broken and female rage is running rampant across the globe.
‘American Horror Story’ will return with a brand new season in 2018.
