The end of the world is here with the premier of ‘AHS’
By Ann Shelley// Opinion Editor
If you are a fan of fictionalized haunted locations that deal with the living and dead coexisting, you will love this series. “American Horror Story” is known for it’s terrifying and unworldly settings. It is an American anthology horror television series created and produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. The first season premiered in 2011 and the most recent, Apocalypse (2018), just aired on Sept. 12. This series is very popular and has already been renewed for its 9th and 10th seasons that will be in 2019 and 2020.
Apocalypse started out like any other “American Horror Story” first episode, where everything is completely normal (or it seems to be). Then all of a sudden, the most abnormal plotline will occur. The first episode sets up for what the rest of the season will look like. The visuals are fantastic and feel like real-life occurrences. The main plotline for the first episode is that a ballistic missile is going to hit Los Angeles. The setting is in the future and nuclear missiles are to destroy the world and start a nuclear winter.
It opens in a hairdresser’s shop and introduces the first couple of characters who end up being the main focus in the show. Evan Peters plays Mr. Gallant, the hairdresser. Leslie Grossman plays Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt, a millionaire and a social media icon. Billie Lourd is Mallory, Coco’s assistant. Everyone in the hairdresser’s shop finds out about the imposing threat through an alert going off from their cell phones. They find out later from the news that it is a nuclear missile and that it has already hit major cities like Hong Kong and Moscow, utterly destroying them. Many on the news coverage were describing it as “the end of the world.”
The whole opening scene of the first episode seems very similar to a majority of the apocalypse movies in the entertainment industry today. Everyone is running for their lives, there is crazy traffic and individuals are killing each other to avoid the missile. It feels like a World War III. Luckily some individuals like Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt, Mallory and Mr. Gallant with his grandmother Evie Gallant (played by Joan Collins), escape by Coco’s family’s private plane. This left everyone else in LA to die besides a select few that were picked by the Cooperative, an organization trying to sustain society after the nuclear winter. Based on their genetic makeup, two individuals — Timothy and Emily — are chosen to be sent with the rest of the main characters to the Outpost 3. This is one of the very few outposts that saved what is left of humanity from radiation poisoning and the nuclear missiles.
The outposts are underground living facilities, and the specific one these characters are staying in is Outpost 3, controlled by Ms. Venable. There are only two types of people in the Outpost 3, the gray and purple. The gray identifies “the worker ants” as Ms. Venable describes them. The purple, which Coco and the group, as well as Timothy and Emily, are apart of is the elite group. These individuals are worthy and chosen to survive the apocalypse. The outpost life has strict rules and severe punishments if the individuals do not follow the rules. They have limited activities to do during the day and mostly spend it dressed up listening to the same song over and over at the cocktail party before dinner. They are only allowed to eat a small cube of jelly for each meal that supposedly has all the vitamins and nutrients they need. They are not allowed to leave and have to stay true to all the rules within the facility. At the end of the episode, Mr. Langdon (played by Evan Peters) from the cooperative comes to select people that can survive and be brought to the Outpost Sanctuary. This sanctuary supposedly has all the supplies they could ever need. This dramatic ending leads the viewer into the next episode, premiering on Sept. 19, on FX.
“’American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ is going to be very exciting. I think the themes presented in the beginning are relatable to the political themes today,” says Julie Burkett, HPU junior. “I think that this new season will give a feeling of the ‘old’ ‘American Horror Story’ to the old time watchers.”
In the light of the newest episode of the season, it is going to be an “American Horror Story” like never before. It is more realistic in a sense that these experiences have happened to our world before. Nuclear annihilation is something that is constantly being worried about. Ms. Venable says, “It isn’t the end, only the beginning.” That’s the best way to describe the upcoming episodes of this season. We are starting to see fear come out through isolation of the characters with only each other to keep them company. Who will survive in the new world and who will end up like the rest of the world, dead?
The first episode of “AHS:Apocalypse” showed the first of three characters that Sarah Paulson will be protraying, two being from past iterations of the hit anthology series. Photo by FX.com