A year down the line, Ally has picked her life up, Beverly is trying to do the same and Kai is in prison. It’s over.

Except for the fact that Kai still has plans…

Cult has been a mess, pretty much from start to finish. It’s almost felt like this season is five years early, and with the benefit of hindsight its examination of Trump’s America in its most extreme fictional forms would be far more successful.

As it stands though, we’ve had about six episodes of Sarah Paulson endlessly screaming and another two or three of the show doing the near impossible and getting bad performances out of Evan Peters.

Thankfully, not only is the season over but the ending is very strong. Written by genre vet Tim Minear and directed by the always impressive Jennifer Lynch it ties everything off in a manner that like the best AHS seasons, is actually pretty hopeful. Not to mention far cleverer than anything else this season has subjected us to.

Jumping around in time, the episode explains how Kai got busted, how Ally and Beverly didn’t and tells us everything we think we know. It then upends that, at least once, to tremendous effect. This isn’t the battleground the show started with and it’s certainly not the one Kai thinks he’s on. This is something if not better, then at least different.

That energy and tonal change is a welcome one and it’s interesting that this is now the third season of AHS on the run that’s ended very strongly. There are some intriguing callbacks too, especially a possible one to Coven. The show’s creators have talked about how it’s going to start crossing over more overtly and that’s, maybe, the case here. Even the ambiguity in that is, instead of being annoying, fun. And God knows fun has been in short supply this season.

Verdict: Great performances from Adina Porter and Sara Paulson, a strong script and great direction bring this massively choppy season of AHS in to land far better than any of us dared hope. A great ending to a massively uneven, often actively bad, season. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart