[Excerpt from Houston Press review of AHS by Jef on January 30, 2014]
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/artatt...y_coven_se.php
Somewhere in the thousands of hours of television I have consumed in my lifetime I once heard an adage that goes something like: "Everyone dies, not everyone truly lives". I have never seen that sentiment more perfectly, if slightly ironically, expressed than in the season finale of Coven.
First things first, and there's no getting around it. The episode opens with a
Stevie Nicks music video. Seriously. It is a music video for Fleetwood Mac's 1987 song "Seven Wonders", which I went back and looked up the official music video for and let me tell you, it's pretty much the same exact approach except done with the cast of Coven.
I'll say it again, I have nothing but love for Stevie Nicks, but it's like this... I rewatched the entire season before catching the finale because my wife had a break in her nursing studies and wanted to try the show out. She lives in a perpetual state of disappointment that they never made a movie out of Anne Rice's The Witching Hour you see.
She also grew up with a sister who was obsessed with Stevie Nicks, and throughout the course of viewing the whole shebang in one big chunk she would pause it continuously to show me a whole bunch of references to the White Witch I had missed. Little musical cues and costume choices that were subtle homages to times in Nicks' life.
That should be cool, but it never, ever pays off. Nicks sings her song as the four remaining girls prepare to try for the position of Supreme then saunters out in a top hat because why the hell not? Nicks is never revealed to be any sort of figure of true importance, and her music doesn't offer a leitmotif that takes us there as a plot device. It's like the makers of the show just had a bunch of her songs stuck in their heads and exorcised the earworm through television.
It's not the only thing that was pointless.