Now, there's something to be said for a show streamlining things as it heads toward its finish. Cult often gave us too many twists and it had gotten to the point where it was easy to assume everything we were watching was a ruse in some regard. Nothing could be trusted. So then why not start giving us a traditional story and showing us things at face value? That makes sense. I get it. But you also don't want to go from a season filled with smoke and mirrors to "Wait, that's it?" That's no good at all.I will say this: I liked the few twists that we did get. Kai discovering that he had an empty gun because Ally had outsmarted him? Nice beat. Also, the reveal, I assume, at the end that Ally was ready to become a cult leader in her own right (and possibly take the SCUM agenda national for real?) was a nifty little nugget to close things out with. But that doesn't change the fact that Cult, even with its swirling fishbowl of ideas and messages (that it sometimes forced out like the bottom of a toothpaste tube), resorted to Horror Story's go-to blueprint of straight-up vengeance - particularly when it involves a Sarah Paulson character.
Hearing that Asylum "Lana Winters" reference hammered it home even more as Ally, having been tortured and tormented for most of the season, found her way up and out of her dark place in order to punish and kill the villains. We saw it in Asylum and Salem before this. Not only does she turn the tables on her boogeymen, but she gets fame bump as well - whether it means becoming a famous reporter, the "Supreme," or a senator. Seeing a heroine triumph over excruciating odds isn't without merit, but we've done this already.If Cult had been a bit more devoted to Ally's plan, drawn it out even longer, and made her responsible for the deaths of Harrison and Rudy and maybe a few others in Kai's cult (she could have still killed Ivy herself), this finale would have made more sense. Like, if she'd actually infiltrated Kai's ranks intent on making him kill his own people and, ultimately, ruining himself. By the end, sure, she had a lot of control over him, but that all only really started last week when she framed Winter. Before that, Kai's cult was already in the business of dismantling itself, and killing off its own members, on various whims. Unfortunately here, for Ally to be fully proactive and clever, Kai had to go nuts and lose his edge. He had to stop being able to be five steps ahead of everyone else.
Cult, as a story, began by addressing the idea that there were people from many walks of life who were angry and ready to "burn it all down." Then it sort of rolled up into a ball and just made it about douchebags who wanted women to make them sandwiches (which is mostly a bad, hack joke and not a dramatic hill to climb and capture) and by the end characters are screaming "snowflake" and "nasty woman" and it all felt like an online t-shirt shop and not a TV series. What happened to Oz's obsession with clowns and Winter showing him dead bodies? How did Kai convert so many people in prison without being able to offer them anything except prison life? I enjoyed the time jump (which was also textbook AHS), but I feel like a lot was left on the table here considering how this season started, and played out for the first six episodes.