‘American Horror Story’ shouldn’t have given a mass shooter a happy ending

Most of the characters on American Horror Story don’t deserve a happy ending. There are a few true heroes scattered around its seven and three-quarters seasons — the life-loving witch Misty Day, the well intentioned Kit Walker, Cordelia Goode, and Lana Winters come to mind — but the vast majority of the characters are by design the kind of people who kill, rape, exploit, and murder others. That’s the genre and that’s the show. 

American Horror Story draws most of its drama from pushing their characters, many of whom started out as decent people, to the limitations of their humanity. By the end of each season, the truly bad are often punished and the good left to thrive. The gift of a happy ending, even if that ending doesn’t include survival, is how AHS lets the audience know which character’s motivations were defensible according to its own morality. 

So it’s pretty fucked up that Apocalypse just gave one to a school shooter. 

When Apocalypse finally made good on its promise to cross Murder House with Coven and brought witches to the Harmons’ cursed home, it was expected that Season 1 favorites like Violet, Constance, Tate, and Vivien would reappear. 

Over the course of the crossover episode, which functioned as both a way to learn more about Apocalypse villain Michael Langdon and as an epilogue to one of the series’ best seasons, witches Madison Montgomery and Behold Chablis used their powers to ease some of the pain the ghosts of the murder house have been living with since their passing. 

They reinterred Moira’s bones to reunite her spirit with her beloved mother, encouraged Ben and Vivien to work out the problems in their marriage, and in the episode’s final moments brought Violet and Tate back together to rekindle the fan-favorite romance between a young girl who died by suicide and the teenage mass murderer who raped and impregnated her mother. Feel free to imagine a record scratch at the end of that sentence.

As Madison and Behold pull away from the murder house, Madison sees Violet and Tate reconnent and comments, “at least someone’s going to get a happy ever after,” confident that she did good by convincing Violet to give Tate another chance. 

But Tate never deserved another chance. His ending in the finale of Season 1 — being banished from Violet’s sight for the rest of eternity — was the punishment his character was meant to endure for the evil he wrought in his life and afterlife. No amount of pining should strip Tate of his status as American Horror Story’s OG villain, and rewarding his character with another shot at love is more than bad storytelling. It’s irresponsible. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but when Murder House aired in 2011 the topic of school shootings wasn’t yet a ubiquitous part of the American political narrative. Recent events at that time, like the fatal Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, had failed to generate the kind of lasting conflict over gun violence that permeates American culture in 2018. Tate’s character was meant to invoke the Columbine shootings of the previous decade, and while the comparison was controversial in 2011 it was possible to have a mass shooter as a character on the show and still remain within the realm of edgy, especially if that character was written to experience serious consequences for his actions. 

In the seven years since Murder House aired, the situation has changed. Because of the sheer preponderance of mass shootings that have occurred in just over half a decade, shootings and their perpetrators now occupy a deservedly oversized space in America’s conscience. There is no more flexibility to be had when it comes to determining the character of those who arm themselves with the intent of murdering children, and yet American Horror Story backtracked on its own morality by giving Tate a pass. 

There is no more flexibility to be had when it comes to determining the character of those who arm themselves with the intent of murdering children, and yet American Horror Story backtracked on its own morality by giving Tate a pass. 

It’s not as if the creators of American Horror Story are unaware of the escalated import of mass shootings. In 2017 they recut an episode of Cult that featured a massacre at a political rally in the wake of the shooting in Las Vegas that occurred shortly before its run. While the episode still aired, the violence was intentionally mitigated to avoid upsetting audiences for whom the threat of gun violence was too raw. 

And yet, instead of shouldering the narrative burden of bringing back a character whose abject villainy is aligned with one of America’s most important social and political moments, Apocalypse waved Tate’s actions away with a one-sentence explanation and made sure he got his girl. The explanation, by the way, was that the murder house’s evil influence may have made Tate become a mass shooter. 

In the words of Jake Peralta: Cool motive, still murder. 

With Tate and Violet getting back together in AHS’s version of 2018 and her initial rejection of him happening in 2011, the show’s timeline gave Tate a total of seven years to experience the karmic torment designed as punishment for his actions. Seven years of going to ghost therapy before the writers took pity on Tate and let him try to love again. 

Given the punitive nature of American Horror Story’s endings, it’s hard not to see Tate and Violet’s relationship as a reward for him alone. However desired this outcome was for fans who wished for Tate and Violet to end up together, it spoke better of Violet’s character and her personal growth to have her reject Tate alongside her rejection of the evils of the murder house in Season 1.

Retconning that decision to reduce her to a lovelorn girl whose separation from the man she loves renders her afterlife miserable makes Violet weaker and ignores why she rejected him in the first place. Because he is a monster and a criminal. There aren’t enough vignette gifsets in the world to make that dynamic look good for her. 

There are only two episodes left in Apocalypse and it seems unlikely that the show will revisit the characters of Murder House again. It’s disappointing that the show used its one shot at reexamining some of its most popular characters to give Tate a storybook ending — one that his character did not deserve and speaks poorly of American Horror Story’s ability to read the damn room — but at least that chapter of AHS has come to a close for real this time. It would be gag-inducing to have to check in on Michael Langdon’s ghostly little sibling-cousin three seasons from now, but hey. Can’t put anything past this show.