Now that season nine of American Horror Story: 1984 is over, I’ve gathered my thoughts on the whole thing. But first, a brief recap of the last four episodes.
Jingles and the Nightstalker go on a one year killing spree, but Jingles has had enough, so he drives off, causing the Nightstalker to be arrested. Jingles ends up creating a new life for himself in Alaska with a wife and son. Elsewhere we see Brooke on death row, with Ramirez offering her life if she chooses to devote herself to Satan. She refuses and seemingly dies…until Donna (aka Nurse Rita) brings her back! Ramirez escapes in all the death row chaos and ends up killing Jingles’ wife. Enraged, he leaves his son with her sister in-law and heads back to Camp Redwood to end Ramirez. Meanwhile, at the camp, the gang is living in a sort of purgatory there, and kill random stragglers. We also find out that Trevor survived and married Margaret for her money.
The next episode flashes back to when Jingles was a child at Camp Redwood, which was known as Camp Goldenstar back in the day. His mother is a cook there, and Jingles is always supposed to look after his younger brother, Bobby. One day, Jingles is distracted an Bobby ends up getting decapitated by a boat in the lake. When Jingles returns to Camp Redwood, we learn that the other ghosts are being tormented by his mother’s ghost. Meanwhile, Donna and Brooke pick up a hitchhiker named Bruce who helped them fix their car. On the way, we learn Bruce is also a serial killer. After a failed attempt to kill the girls, they flee to Camp Redwood where they try to stop Margaret from killing musician at a music festival she’s having set up there.
Bruce eventually makes his way to Camp Redwood where he teams up with Ramirez to kill Jingles. That ultimately doesn’t matter since Jingles was already a ghost. Margaret enlists the help of Bruce and Ramirez with killing all the bands at the festival. Jingles awakens to all the other ghosts at Camp Redwood who have him tied up so he won’t kill Ramirez. He is eventually taken by his dead brother’s ghost to a shore on the lake where he and his mother have been.
The last episode is a flash forward 30 years to 2019, where Jingles’ fully grown son heads to the long abandoned camp to find his father. Instead he runs into Montana and Trevor who tell him all about what’s been going on. He also stumps them with things like cell phones and who’s president. We learn that the gang of ghosts have been taking turns killing Ramirez every time he wakes up so he can stop wrecking havok. We also learn that Bruce got killed by Trevor and kicked off the camp so he wouldn’t re-wake there. Then we find out that Margaret was chopped up and fed through a wood-chipper that was also shooting her remains just outside of camp. While trying to find his father, we see Margaret who died just before she was sprayed over the property line and she tries to kill Bobby Jr. Jingles and his mother intervene, killing Margaret and telling Bobby to leave (after a very emotional goodbye). We ultimately see that Donna and Brooke are the two final girls, and end up connecting with Bobby Jr.
We ultimately see that Donna and Brooke are the two final girls, and end up connecting with Bobby Jr. Overall, the finale was a very nice wrap-up, with the best version of a happy ending that AHS can deliver. Ultimately, the middle of the season really let me down. It was just sort of clunky and all over the place. I did like the over-arching themes of the season, like poking fun at 80s slasher films, Camp Redwood being a sort of purgatory, and the integration of real-life serial killer, Richard Ramirez. So I suppose this season falls in the middle of the pack for me, in terms of my favorites.