“美國恐怖故事” Black Out (TV Episode 2022) – IMDb

While the show is circling around itself, admiring it’s setpieces and occasionally showering them in flickering lights, the story is not really moving anywhere, while the characters and their respective actors do their best to escape the black hole of the writing. But even the human drama that normally is the second pillar of every season is just gushing towards nothing in particular, only to fall in on itself – people falling in out of love in mere minutes, people seemingly dying only to be ok in the next scene, and the irony of having the only death of a named character happening offscreen followed by a long rant about nobody noticing that he was dead.

Over all of this looms a weird mixture of prophecy, science and conspiracies about someone trying to murder all gay men in the city, but so far that has still to be explored beyond shooting an island full of deer and taking bloodsamples while some weirdo woman has been promising everyone in the subway that it is coming, but… well, it takes it’s time.

Normally a season of AHS lives of it’s premise, and it takes you a few episodes to see how it wastes away and all that’s left is the potential. Here you don’t even really have that going for it. I mean – there’s a lot of eyecandy, and if you love the 80s, you’ll get them from every direction, but the horror is more or less absent except for the occasional bad guy under a stroboscopic light holding a weapon.