Well, the haziest animated blood-drip of our lives has finally exploded along with an unlucky pizza guy. Lea Michele’s creepy, death-obsessed character has been the other Red Devil killer all along, Dean Munsch and Professor Dad find unexpected love at the bottom of a playlist, and all three evil but not necessarily murderous Chanels end up totally divorced from reality in a mental institution. Don’t worry: They feel right at home.
The final Red Devil tally: Boone, Hester, and Pete, who entered late in the game once he rationalized that he’d be helping to take down the real beast at large: the insidious Greek system itself. “Someone needs to cut its highlight-covered head off!” Pete thunders at Grace in his dorm room/torture chamber. He’s sexually humiliated by Chanel in a flashback so that his character will finally make “sense” and so the show can send up the classic 1986 Daryl Hannah vehicle Clan of the Cave Bear. Pete throws his current girlfriend against the wall, insisting she wants to kill them all, too.
Things get so violent-bleak — or is it “horror-comedy”? I can never remember — that he even makes a Nietzsche reference: “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, Scream Queens will gaze back at you.” Not sure if that’s a direct quote, but there’s no time to check, because…
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…The other Red Devil has arrived to murder Pete! It’s the other bathtub baby. It’s Boone’s twin sister. It’s another one of the Kappa sisters. WHO IS IT? Tell us! Why are there so many commercials? Wait, this finale is two hours long? Does any of this stuff matter?
Nope, not if Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts) has anything to email about it. The furry friend to no one fires off her own version of the real world’s infamous “insane sorority rant” to her sisters. Surprise: Everyone thinks she’s the worst. What?! But she’s a pillar of the community! She helped invent shaming! “You can all suck it!” Chanel announces in a press conference to all the “unwashed whores on Twitter” clicking mindlessly from their stained futons. Now that her glamorous reign of terror is dead in the deep-fried water, there’s nothing left to do but kill herself. But wait, isn’t that venomous serpent she ordered just a garter snake wearing a sweater? What is going on here? Why haven’t more people died yet? BAM! A Red Devil-suited pizza guy with a bomb strapped to his back explodes in the foyer, just for fun. “There’s pizza?” wonders Chanel No. 3 mere seconds before he detonates.
Meanwhile, Grace convinces her dad to take one for the team and seduce Dean Munsch while she and Zayday uncover the incriminating paperwork that points to Hester as the last living Red Devil. If you’re one of those cynical types who’d assume that a person who grew up on Sesame Street and attended Sweet Valley High might have a pretty solic chance of turning out to be a serial killer, then girl, it’s your sunny day. Neck Brace has been the brains and perfectly sturdy spine behind the anti-Kappa operation this whole time. So stop accusing the acid-burned spray tan victim of multiple homicide while stabbing her with scissors on your apology tour, Chanel! There’s a real murderer to torture back at the house.
But there’s also a twist, of course, just past the optic nerve: Hester has stabbed herself in the eye with one of Chanel’s most ambitious red stilettos. We get to see this twice and it is utterly disgusting. And this psycho is about to blame not 5… not 1… but ALL three remaining Chanels for over a dozen murders.
Her painful upbringing made her this way, okay? Hester and her twin brother Boone grew up in the American Horror Story asylum, “homeschooled” by caretaker Gigi and her teachable moments — namely knives, hammers, and a revenge plot against the Kappa Kappa Tau 20 years in the making. The neck brace she wrenched from a patient’s body became Hester’s cloak of invisibility on campus, as she needed something dramatic enough to edge out the “super tight bod” and “BJ lips” (yep) that would otherwise draw attention. And in light of the school’s new mandate for special needs diversity, Dean Munsch let her in, even though she apparently knew Hester was the bathtub baby because she remembers every detail of that newborn’s face. Hester’s been running the show ever since.
But it’s not enough to get away with murder, not on this network. The Chanels may not have killed anyone, but they did perpetuate the system that created Hester, Boone, Pete, and Gigi. So they need to pay somehow, and a lump sum of cash isn’t nearly twisted enough for Hester. She works her magic on the grand stage of Kappa’s pink parlor, heaping so much mad logic onto new police chief Denise Hemphill that she has no choice but to make a triple arrest. Chanel No. 5’s parents eagerly sell her out because they’ve always hated her anyway. Chanel No. 3 is so dim and messed-up that a split personality strikes her as totally plausible. And Chanel is an obvious murderer — I mean, we’ve all seen her email on the news by now, right? Nothing left to do but call in the cops who used to be strippers for a slow-motion temper tantrum set to Martika’s “Toy Soldiers”!
Finally, the Chanels are flung outdoors in orange jumpsuits, dazed but with heads held high in the style of The Breakfast Club, whatever breakfast is. “Maybe we were sociopaths,” Chanel Oberlin admits. “Maybe we didn’t know it because we surrounded ourselves with girls who had also gone crazy.” For now, the sisters thrive in a princess-friendly palace strewn with lesbian nurses, hot trays of real food, and no boys to stay skinny for. So raise your Dixie cups of toilet wine to the idea of living in heaven, ladies. The Red Devil will see you in hell. Tonight.
(KNIFE SOUND!)