Summary
Grotesquerie has a bizarre and inconclusive ending designed to set up a second season, but I suspect audiences will find it more frustrating and annoying than anything else.
Oh, boy – people are going to hate this. And rightly so, frankly. It always seemed likely that Grotesquerie would have a somewhat ambiguous ending, but Episode 10 uses that assumption as a creative license to take liberties. The finale wedges in scenes that seem plucked from a different show entirely, refuses to answer anything concretely, and makes the age-old mistake of confusing “leaving things open for another season” with “leaving things completely and unsatisfyingly unresolved.”
Let’s try and make sense of it anyway, but be warned – I’m not sure any of this is even intended to make any sense, so don’t blame me.
Marshall and Men’s Rights
The finale begins with a rather severe turnaround of Marshall’s attitude toward Lois which we saw in the penultimate episode. He and Redd – the latter reluctantly, to be fair – try to ply her with drinks and dinner and invite her to become part of a throuple. It’s such a ridiculous suggestion that I have no idea why it’s even included, but this is probably the least out-of-nowhere thing involving Marshall.
Following this, Marshall is arrested by Megan and Gale for sexually assaulting one of his students. He claims the relationship was consensual, between two adults, but the scandal is enough to sully his reputation. He has been “canceled”, though that term’s doing a lot of heavy lifting for a professor who slept with a much younger student.
Either way, Marshall tries and fails to take his own life, and then follows Ed like a lost dog to a group that helped “change his life”. It’s framed as some kind of recovery program, but it’s really just a men’s rights advocacy group that auditions Marshall by asking him his opinions on pronouns, #MeToo, cancel culture, and the usual sociopolitical hot topics. Marshall’s all in, and so, too, are some familiar faces like Charlie and both of Lois’s new dream therapists.
Is Lois Dreaming?
Pictured: Courtney B. Vance as Marshall Tryon. CR: Prashant Gupta/FX
I’ll ask the obvious question – is Lois still dreaming? She seems to think so. She even asks Dr. Witticomb for proof that she isn’t, and since he can’t provide it – how would you? – he diagnoses her with Cotard’s syndrome, a trauma-induced delusion that causes people to believe they are dying, dead, or don’t exist (it’s also rather cheerily known as “walking corpse syndrome”.)
It’s easy to imagine Lois’s reality as a kind of punitive hellscape because a recurring theme is that she’s awful, which I suppose is fair enough. Charlie gives her a brutal dressing down after she accuses him of having orgies in her room and impregnating an unconscious patient, and Lois can’t bring herself to disagree. She’s paying the price for it, even if she can’t work out quite how.
When Lois returns to the motel where she shot Justin, she finds no evidence of the crime, only increasing her sense of delusion. Megan denies enlisting Glorious to clean the crime scene, even though Lois is adamant that she did, and Dr. Witticomb turns the tables on her when she implies that he might be the killer who used her case notes to emulate the Burnside killing.
Another Murder
Grotesquerie is always good for a grisly crime scene, just not for a proper ending.
Of course, Lois was right. Megan did tell Glorious to clean up Justin’s murder. She’s not dreaming – it was all real! Or was it? I guess that’s something we’ll have to ponder until a second season materializes if it does at all. But there’s another crime scene to examine in the meantime.
Megan breaks Lois out of the psychiatric ward to show her Grotesquerie’s latest effort – Father Charlie, crucified and impaled along with a contingent of unhoused people and, tellingly, Mary Colsby, the young student who accused Marshall of sexual assault.
So, is Lois dreaming? Is she really the killer, as Witticomb implied? Well, she can’t be, can she? She was in a padded cell when all this took place. She might still be dreaming, but it’s probably more likely that the men’s rights group that Marshall joined at the top of the episode is responsible. I think that’s where Murphy intends us to aim our suspicions, otherwise, why include that scene in the first place?
Either way, this isn’t a very good finale and Grotesquerie bows out with an ending that I think will put viewers off a second season rather than leave them eagerly anticipating one. Episode 7 was a huge leap that deliberately divided the audience, but I think Episode 10 might have been a bridge too far.
