My thought too…that one son indicated that the family was familiar with the show though, so maybe the producers offered them a nice load of money?
Last night’s episode was incredible!
The camera footage was used in such a great way - imagine watching yourself being gutted!!
I think what I loved the most was when the two kids were in the control room watching the monitors and they saw Lee heading towards the house - the girl screams “she’s gonna kill Lee!” and the guy replies, “that IS Lee!!”
Perfect example of the YouTube generation trying to get followers, and being so invested in a “reality” show that they still call the actors by the names of their roles.
I gotta say, I never saw that ending coming…of all the people who could’ve survived…just…wow.
Ugh, from the preview of next week’s finale…
[spoiler]Lana Banana interviewing Lee
Reusing talent is a staple of the series, but it’s really jarring when they play multiple characters in the same season. Particularly this one, with it’s reality TV theme. What, no one noticed that dead actress with a terrible british accent looks identically to this Barbra Wawa wanna be and that maybe it’s not the best idea to put her in a room with with Lee for a TV interview?[/spoiler]
A friend of mine hadn’t seen any of the new season, so on Saturday I watched the whole thing again. I think I enjoyed it more the second time.
The first time through, I thought the show was going for straight horror, at least until the reality show business really kicked in. The second time through I was not distracted by questions of who is and isn’t a ghost (the spirit medium has real-world credentials, but it is only one line, I guess I missed it. The professor guy was just a guy). I thought it was more coherent without waiting a week between episodes.
I thought they had taken most of the humor out of this season, but really I just missed a lot of it. Taking the episodes back to back, it really jumps out how all the characters interpret everything through their own hangups. They’re ridiculous! The ghost gang is kind of the same way- talk about being stuck in the past. I appreciated better the games this show is playing with time- there is the original documentary, there is the history of the house, and these rather ridiculous pre-Colonial killer ghosts who never expected the world to change, and seem oblivious to the fact that it has. Contrasting them with the silliness of the present information age is just really funny. It feels like maybe there is a broader point being made, though I am not sure what.
So that brings us to last night’s episode. Lee wins, but she did it by eating the pig heart offered her by Scathach. Surely she is set to go berserk next episode.
I thought the internet-hit seeking college kids were a lot of fun. The contrast between what they think is important compared to the Butcher’s gang’s motives just cracked me up. I can’t put my finger on how the show pulled it off, but the scene at the end where they get impaled and set on fire, all broadcast over Facebook Live, was just really, really funny. ← I can’t believe I just wrote that!
I love this show 
More berserk than when she started killing people she had no reason to kill this episode?
Well, yeah. She ate the witch’s pig heart, she isn’t really herself anymore I don’t think. And besides, it’s the finale.
Well…that was one heck of finale.
I won’t post any spoilers but I thought it was very well done. The format just kept you guessing and guessing…right up until…
Why did they just drop the reality TV/found footage/documentary concept ten minutes before the end? That lost me there, because all I could think was “no one is filming this.”
I was skeptical earlier in season, but I thought overall it really worked. The first part of the season was decent, but having the “second season” really pulled everything together. It’s not my favorite season, but it might be the most interesting. And Adina Porter was great as Lee, I’m glad she got a chance to shine.
I was momentarily distracted, thinking about how all of the Ghost Chaser camera people had already died and there shouldn’t be any cameras filming anything anymore, other than maybe some of the thermal ones that were left. But once I realized that it was the first “real” part of the show we’d seen all season, I thought it was a good way to end. It wasn’t just forgetting where a camera should or shouldn’t be, like some mockumentary shows sometimes do, it was a deliberate contrast that I thought worked, though I can understand thinking it didn’t.
So inbred cannibal boy (band name!) shoots several people invading the studio and they keep broadcasting, but the cops blow the shit out of him and suddenly they have “technical difficulties”?
She’s better on True Blood and the 100, IMO. If you liked her and haven’t seen those, you might want to try them.
That’s a great observation. The actual AHS audience gets to sit back and laugh at these fools, trapped in their reality-TV POVs and stumbling like sheep to the slaughter because they just Do Not Believe anything they see on TV as actually being real. The actual AHS audience gets to laugh at the 3 Days in Hell audience for cheering on the deaths of all their favorite actors. I liked how there was the brief moment of self-awareness when the super fan from London was all like, “wait, are they Really getting killed?” The characters in the show all live in their TV land or social media delusions, while we, the audience, are the only ones who actually live in reality.
Overall I thought it was a very entertaining season, original, shocking, weird and thought-provoking like I expect out of this show. It seems like they are making a point about the emptiness of TV culture, but contrasted with the absurd gravity of the colonists’ existence, even though the colonists sure had it rough. So- their point is that human existence is absurd? I liked the show, and it almost seems like it has a message, but maybe it isn’t anything more than poking fun at things. I could believe they are poking fun at us for enjoying their show, kind of a gotcha! kind of thing. The joke’s on you, TV viewer!
ETA: Ha ha! If the point is that media and entertainment have drifted into unreality and that people are devoted to it to the point that they might as well be spending their lives chasing ghosts, and that that can be dangerous, it is a clever justification for telling a ghost story. Sure, it works for me as more-intricate-than-usual TV entertainment, but it seems to be trying to say something. Am I reading to much into it?
But then, of course, the show was not entirely about unreality. At the heart of it is Flora and Lee. Lee is, in many ways, a terrible person. A murderer, after all. But she will do anything out of love for her Flora, up to sacrificing her own life, and more. If anyone survives the ghost slaughter at the end of the finale, it is going to be Flora, with the help of Priscilla and her new ghost mom. Lee ends up accepting a sort of damnation in the end, but since she does it for love, there may be a kind of redemption in it for her.
So. The show explores the absurdity of reality show/celebrity enthusiasts. And it explores the absurdity of the American Colonial mindset with its associated supernatural mumbo-jumbo. And perhaps the inherent absurdity of death and mortality (and ghostly immortality). Set against it all is the love of a mother for her daughter, or more simply just- love. The wrapping is about as ghastly as can be, but I’ve seen worse themes. Way to go, AHS, you put on quite a show.
Excellent analysis and I agree 100%.
It was all summed up for me when GoCam girl was watching the monitor in the production trailer - “She’s gonna kill Lee!” and her friend replied, “that IS Lee!!”
Perfect. Blurred lines of “reality” TV and how fans of the shows think the characters portrayed on TV are real people.
Yeah, thanks. One the one hand, the reality show enthusiasts give it up in all kinds of ways but aren’t really clear even on the object of their affection. It is just “celebrity”, I suppose. On the other end of the spectrum, Lee, the locus of all this entertainment, is giving up her life and perhaps her very soul for the sake of her Flora having a chance at a normal life.
You have to see the whole season before you can look at it like this. I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where the characters were either tortured by the insignificance of their lives, or else by the crushing significance of them. The reality show enthusiasts are in the “lightness of being” camp, while Lee, Flora and Priscilla are in the “crushing significance” camp.
The show really does give the viewer an awful lot to chew on, given that the themes presented, on the surface, as “reality TV” have a lot more history and depth than may at first be apparent. At least to me. I love this show.
This season inspired me to give AHS: Freakshow another chance. I hadn’t watched that one all the way through. I was glad to have a season starring Jessica Lange “in reserve”- she really understood how to present this kind of material and probably won’t be topped. I got the feeling that Roanoke builds on themes that had already been developed in Freakshow, if you know what I mean…