AHS: 1984 is almost over — so what’s the catch?

With the season racing toward its finale, AHS: 1984 has yet to deliver a gut-punching, jaw-dropping twist. Will we end up shocked, or is what we see what we get?

Every Wednesday night, when I get comfy on my couch, turn on FX, and settle in, excitedly, to learn what fresh horrors await tonight on AHS: 1984, I think, “This is the one. This is where we find out what’s really happening.”

Notoriously — and maybe formulaically — each season of AHS has had a big fat twist. We learn what we’re dealing with, we get comfortable in that narrative and its world, and then, around episode 4 or 5, we’re completely blindsided by brand-new information that changes everything we thought we’d known.

Last night, AHS: 1984 aired its seventh episode. There are only two left. And while there have been small reveals — the relationship between Montana and The Night Stalker, Margaret Booth’s murderous past, Mr. Jingles’ relative innocence — there hasn’t yet been a ground-shaking, season-defining mic drop that changes the whole game. And with the relatively mild revelations of last night’s episode, it’s starting to seem less and less likely that we’ll get anything at all.

In episode 7, entitled “The Lady In White,” we spend much of our time learning the heartbreaking and ultra-dramatic — if not sometimes convoluted — backstory of Benjamin (aka Mr. Jingles). We see scenes from his childhood, wherein his small brother died in a terrible accident under his care, and so his mother, who’d never really liked him anyway, went absolutely mad with grief. We see scenes of his early adulthood, his Camp Redwood years, where we learn that his mother, a serial murderer in her own right (she’d gone on a cabin rampage after blaming everyone on site for the death of her son), has been haunting the camp and its current campers since her mortal demise, which was, of course, at the reluctant hand of a 12 year of Jingles. We see Jingles reunite with his mother, present day. We see her convince her son to end his own life so he can stay at the camp forever. We watch Jingles die… again? And we still don’t really know what it’s all for.

Elsewhere in the AHS universe, Brooke and Nurse Rita (aka DeeDee aka Donna) have joined forces — sort of. Brooke is adamant about going back to Redwood to end Margaret once and for all. Donna would rather stay on the track of clean living. But in the process, they both, somehow and once again, end up in the clutches of yet another serial murderer whom they have to outsmart and destroy.

And back at Camp Redwood proper, the ghost campers are still on their reign of terror, though they’ve hatched a plan: don’t kill anyone else until the festival, where they’ll kill everyone, in the hope of attracting paranormal investigators and armchair sleuths from across the world, who’ll help them figure out why they’re all stuck at the camp.

It’s all entertaining, as siloed out scenes and sometimes even as a cohesive piece. But every week, I continue to struggle to find the through line that’s keeping it all together. There are a ton of murders. Everyone’s motive is revenge. If you die, you can come back. So there are no stakes. Or, the stakes are so extremely high, that they sort of just even out. Which is not like AHS at all.

I’m holding out hope that all of this will converge in the next two episodes, that the vagueness and the stereotypes and the constant (but, up until now, sort of empty) allusions to past seasons will meld together into some perfect 9-season cross-over event that we just didn’t seen coming, but could’ve pieced together had we been looking hard enough. But despite the show’s unwillingness to be afraid to go too far, its goriness, its, for lack of a better word, horror, I think the thing I’m most afraid of is that this season is exactly as it seems. No twist, no underlying metaphor, no brilliant Venn diagram of seasons. Just teenagers running around, constantly provoked and sexed up and rage-filled and bored, desperately looking for something captivating to make their time in purgatory actually worthwhile, hungry for a greater meaning to it all. I feel ya, guys.

Do you think AHS: 1984 is saving its big twist for the very end? Tell us in the comments!