AHS: 1984 is over: Here’s every moment from the finale that’ll make us miss it

AHS: 1984 is officially over. Through all the played out drama, trope-ified trauma, and slasher film homage, here’s what we’ll actually miss about the season.

AHS: 1984 aired its finale episode last night, and despite the season’s relative emptiness, its lack of an overarching goal, its seeming refusal to ground or contextualize any of its big moments with more than a 2-minute monologue explaining what we have just seen, I will miss it.

The season started out with promise: a group of just-stereotypical-enough teens escape to a fated summer campground, and immediately become embroiled in a real-life slasher film. Throughout the season, they overcome, they spill their own secrets, they form new alliances, they reveal wild motives. They never, however, figure out the truths of their reality (they die at Camp Redwood, they stay at Camp Redwood, they don’t know why, they just let it go, I guess?), they never bother to focus on anything other than murder in their immortality, they are still obsessed with sex and revenge, they spend the rest of the season waiting around, plotting, killing, monologuing.

In all the attempts at drama, and with the addition of the last-minute heavy-handed familial trauma related to Jingles & Co., AHS: 1984 seemed to have burned out and lost its edge long before the finale aired. But last night, in its last episode, some bold moves were made, some wacky lines were uttered, and the camp was, for a brief and shining part-of-an-episode, brought back to Camp.

The follow is a comprehensive list of all the times the AHS: 1984 finale reminded me of its best parts, made me pine for what could have been, and mostly made me want to tweet a synopsis followed by the phrase “I’M SCREAMING.”

It is a tribute to what I truly love about American Horror Story: its absolute singularity in tone and execution (no pun intended) that is seemingly made for gays only. Here are a bunch of moments, big and small, from the finale that what will actually make me miss this season.

• When Bobby (Finn Wittrock) appears at Camp Redwood after thirty (30) years, the banners, stage, and all signage for the Billy Idol concert are all 88% perfectly in tact.
• Upon learning he is from the present, Montana asks Bobby what the outside world is like now- what’s the music, who’s the president, what did people think about the 80’s, did Judd Nelson ever get an Oscar? All amazing q’s!
• Back in 1989, the best Trevor can do to foil the plan of three serial killers is to redirect traffic away from the camp so the massacre can be avoided.
• While Trevor is dying, Montana emotionally exclaims that he’s the best sex she’s ever had.
• All the ghosts hatch a plot to lure The Night Stalker to a cabin to kill him once and for all. Because Satan is somehow capable of reincarnating him no matter what, they have to make a pact for someone on the Ghost Squad to be on watch and ready to kill him *again* for the rest of infinity. 
• Right before his murder, The Night Stalker casually says, “The festival seems like a bust so I gotta go kill some kid in Alaska.”
• Thirty years into their ghostly tenure, Chef Birdie decides to shoot her shot with Chet, who she also outs as bi in the midst of the flirtation.
• As always, the ghosts use murder as a threat and a manipulation tool even though, because they all know they’ll just come right back after dying, there are approximately zero stakes to accompany that death. Nevertheless, the threats always work.
• Margaret Booth’s eventual demise plays out as follows: the ghosts surround her, they chop her extremities off one by one and throw them into a wood chipper, the open end of which is aimed at the property line. Tiny, shredded pieces of her flurry over the forest floor, right outside of Camp Redwood’s jurisdiction. She’s dead dead.
• Turns out, DONNA IS THE FINAL GIRL!!!!
• We find this out when Bobby visits her to get more tea on his dad. They have put age makeup on her. She is now around 60. She looks 29.
• Bobby and Donna track down Brooke, who Donna had presumed to be dead as a victim of the final Margaret battle of 1989. She, too, has been made up to vaguely resemble a grown woman. In 2019, Brooke should be, at the very least, 47. She looks 19.
• She explains her unagedness away by making a joke about getting fillers.
• Bobby goes back to the camp for closure. Margaret, whom nobody has seen for 30 years, suddenly appears, saying, “I’ve been here all along but I’ve been hiding and waiting to kill you.” Perfect.
• Margaret and Mr. Jingles take turns killing each other again, even though, as previously mentioned, this means nothing.
• As Bobby flees the camp, Montana implores him to share his stories with his future children so that “the 80’s will never die.”

So there we have it. AHS: 1984  is done.

Every single thing happened in a way that had no stakes and didn’t really matter. I guess the tagline of the season was that the 80’s will never die, even though nothing ever worked to serve it except maybe in the last 7 minutes.

And I did — despite all of the missteps and my frequent criticism and my complete lack of understanding of what anyone thought they were trying to say — in fact scream at least twice in the season finale.

That’s the great American Horror Story curse: if you die on the hill of Ryan Murphy, no matter how badly you want to escape, you’ll always keep coming back.