Truncated by the writers' strike, season three of American Horror Stories concludes with five more episodes which, whilst perhaps the best little run the series has done, are still fairly terrible.
A man starts losing time in "backrooms"; a young man receives the lifelike AI double of his dying lover; a nurse discovers secret experiments taking place at her hospital; a group of friends in a small-town plan to rob the bank and a woman sees a monster emerge from under the bed to take her husband.
From a series that, I think, has been pretty universally awful, the fact that there are a few decent elements to a couple of these episodes is a big improvement. The first "Backrooms" is too slight to be worthwhile and the second "Clone" isn't awful but certainly isn't scary. "The Thing Under The Bed" isn't a bad idea but the execution isn't there. The other two though do have something going for them. "X" has perhaps the most genuinely scary imagery of any episode in this series, with the Alice Taylor character in a permanent silent scream when she appears. The episode "Leprechaun" is probably the best overall, in that it has a fun set up and characterisation - and a nice time jumpy set up - but then it all falls apart when the monsters of the episode a revealed.
As I've said with each review I've written for this show, whilst the quality of an anthology series can always be mixed, the consistently awful episodes of this show must be put down to the tedious and unimaginative writing. This is the show where Ryan Murphy should be finding the new writers to work on his other series, but instead it all to often uses his established ones and indulges their half-formed ideas. Poor.
