Scream Queens Season 2 Finale Review

This Scream Queens review contains spoilers.

Scream Queens Season 2 Episode 10

Scream Queens managed to turn body horror into bloody humor with mindless med students, deplorable doctors, and new candidates for the morgue in every episode. The Green Meanie was frightfully elusive early on. Trails of glowing goop in the hospital hallways kept you guessing if you had enough time to breathe between gasping at the Chanels’ shenanigans. However, with the swamp spawning too many reveals at once later on, the plot started to drag towards the end of season two, dying on a finale overblown on the faux-shock and critically low on suspense—kind of like Chanel’s brain if she has one.

Unless you’ve been living behind a reptilian Beelzebub mask, you know who the Green Meanie is (and has been). Wes, aka Grace’s psycho dad from season one, who also happens to be Hester’s psycho dad, had the highest body count until Nurse Awful turned him into a corpse in a boiling vat of fry oil. Not like that was anything to mourn. Wes was an even sketchier character than Dr. Brock, and even more so for his perverse progeny. Cassidy Cascade only joined the killing spree because his homicidal mother—who also happens to be the sister of sleazebag Wes—wasn’t into DIY murder. She just brainwashed her brother and son into avenging her husband’s death at the hands of doctors who would have rather gotten plastered at a Halloween party thirty years ago.

 

Nurse Awful was the brains behind the masked operation until putting on the suit herself in a vendetta against Chanel. She not-so-surprisingly ended up Last Meanie Standing after Cassidy revolted against his revenge-obsessed mother in the middle of a crowded restaurant where there were obviously no police. She manned the final destruction plot herself, which started with logging on to a suspicious web page where you needed to click “yes” or “no” to the question “Are you a terrorist?” just to get in and ended with the party that she hoped would end all parties. Still, it goes without saying that from the moment she was released from her basement cell with an ankle bracelet, even without the special effects of glowing green party-store slime, the master of ceremonies was Hester.

There were too many elements in this episode desperately tried to cram into one hour, or really forty-five minutes if you take away the blizzard of jingle-belling holiday commercials that so innocuously to get you into the spirit between murder scenes. That in itself was creepy. What was even creepier was that almost all the bizarre romances that ever existed in this season (may Chad Radwell and Chamberlain rest in peace) just had to come to some strange conclusion right when there should be almost as much suspense building up as the body count in the swamp. At this point, romance and fetishes just fall flat. Nobody really cares if Chanel is more into selfies than sex or if Hester, who is admittedly a terrible artist, would have to draw unmentionable things to keep herself entertained in prison.

The overwhelming soap opera factor of this episode almost turned the swamp into a bubble bath. Too many heart complications made for a negative prognosis. Now is not the time to be Googling cheap engagement rings when your fiancée-to-be could have a knife in her throat the next minute. From Brock’s ulterior motives that sent a supposedly dying Dean Munsch rolling down the hospital hallway in her IV-attached wheelchair to marry him, to his three-timing with Chanel on one end and Hester on the other when he didn’t find himself trapped in Munsch’s hospital bed with a strained smile, to #3 convincing Cassidy to plead with his mother not to be used as her machete-wielding puppet, partially because it turned her on, to someone in pink having yet another boyfriend murdered, it was like a serial killer suddenly infiltrated Love Boat. Shudder.   

Besides Nurse Awful’s intentionally awful party, which was sparkling with cheap green anti-Chanel décor and those infamous champagne flutes of sparkling cider, but would actually make some great Pinterest fodder for next Halloween, the end of this ending was one long, painful I-knew-that-would-happen-since-three-episodes-ago moment. The fluffy pink aftermath should have come with pills to prevent constant eye rolling. There is just one teaser that should have you seeing red, but for impatient patients, waiting for Season 3 is the only prescription.