The Scene In American Horror Stories' Game Over That Went Too Far
Contains spoilers for "American Horror Stories," Season 1, Episode 7, "Game Over."
Do you believe in the delicious power of meta? Ryan Murphy does, and in the final episode of the first season of his "American Horror Stories" anthology, entitled "Game Over," he's thrown up his hands and given fans of the show a good tweaking.
Initially, it seems that we're following a couple of obsessed "American Horror Story" fans into the Murder House for an escape-room style weekend. Our couple, Connie (Noah Cyrus) and Dylan (Adam Hagenbuch), are hipster influencer types much like the frat boy "heroes" from "The Naughty List," making them easy marks for murder. Connie and Dylan have extremely brief sex and smoke pot within minutes of arriving at the house. They are very, very dead ducks.
But that turns out to be just a portion of the prologue. They were simply characters in a video game being created by a divorced coder mom named Michelle (Mercedes Mason), who's been assigned to create a game out of the Murder House setting. Her son, Rory (Nicolas Bechtel), who is AHS-obsessed and continuously critiques her attempt at milling the subject for tension, provides her with someone to impress. Michelle slowly slips into an obsessive spiral as she battles sexism and disapproval, intensely studying every aspect of "AHS" lore. She enters the Murder House on Halloween Night. Naturally, this does not bode well for her future.
It's not that simple, of course, and naturally there are oh so many twists to be had. Which of those twisted moments went too far? We have some thoughts on that one.
Fire, Fire Burning Bright - or is it?
There's meta humor and blood-soaked Rubber Woman sex in "Game Over," but the most outrageous step it takes is in destroying an iconic locale in the show's canon — or so it seems.
After Michelle dies, Rory returns to the Murder House a year later to see her on Halloween. He vows to burn the house down and set the spirits within (including his mother) free. Though the other ghosts desperately want this to happen, this isn't something Ruby (Kaia Jordan Gerber) or Scarlett (Sierra McCormick) approve of, as they've been using the house to have Halloween trysts ever since Ruby was killed there. Though both women try to stop him, Rory succeeds in soaking the grounds with gasoline.
With the flick of a match, the Murder House burns down and the land left behind is later reconfigured into a phalanx of condos. After becoming a globetrotting assassin, Scarlett returns to California, buys the last available condo and plans her own death in the hope of reuniting with Ruby. Ruby does return, and Scarlett learns that Ruby chose to stay behind while the other spirits moved on, making for a happy ending – or it would be, were it, too, not taking place within a video game created by Michelle.
Beyond the heavily meta aspect of the episode, the loss of the Murder House – even though it really didn't happen within the show's 'reality' – is definitely the moment which goes too far.