Once again, I was wrong about the killer’s identity. None of the Green Meanies turned out to be Grace, the woefully hatted former sorority girl turned mental patient who was completely left out from season two. I was waiting for it to be revealed that she was seeking revenge all along, but that didn’t happen. Unless it was Grace in the final frames dressed as the Red Devil to terrorize Chanel once again? Maybe I was right all along.
Sadly, this episode is completely devoid of any real twists whatsoever. This is the season finale (and based on the sad ratings, possibly the series finale), but it doesn’t feel like the season ever built to anything. “Drain the Swamp†doesn’t feel special at all, just another bunch of zany antics for the Chanels strung together with a few forgotten plot threads and a couple of lousy serial-killer attacks. Yawn.
It seems like this season forgot that Scream Queens was originally intended as a horror comedy. The show needs both of those elements to be successful, but they forgot all of the horror and suspense elements to focus on the funny. As a result, there simply wasn’t quite enough to fill up 60 minutes each week.
In this episode, Nurse Hoffel is intent on finally murdering the Chanels, who killed her sister back in the first episode of season one. Her first plan is to set up a deadly pitching machine in the halls of the hospital. Between this and her plot to send the Chanels to the deadly “Blood Island,†Nurse Hoffel is really bad at coming up with ideas to kill people. When she beans “Chanel Mobius†with a ball in the head, it doesn’t even kill her. It just gives her a bruise on the head that’s cured by the next scene.
Since the Chanels are so difficult to kill — it has something to do with a force field created by their narcissism and stupidity — Nurse Hoffel decides that she is going to drain the swamp that the hospital sits on and use all of that fertilizer to blow the place sky high. At least someone has a real plan, even though this one stinks more than a generator failure at a cheese store.
Meanwhile, a bunch of other story lines finally converge. Hester suddenly has a huge thing for Dr. Brock and convinces him to marry Dean Munsch before she dies of kuru, the disease she acquired by eating human brains. (It’s apparently a real thing, Wikipedia told me.) They want her to die and leave him all his money so they can turn Blood Island into an extreme tourism destination and then kill all of the visitors. However, Chanel No. 5, who is now a genius, figures out that Dean Munsch doesn’t really have kuru; she just has extreme dehydration because she has drunk nothing but Scotch or vodka for the past decade. Oopsie.
Cassidy decides that he doesn’t want to kill Chanel No. 3 and that, actually, he’s done with killing altogether. His mother doesn’t take the news well at first, but Zayday, who is still chained in her basement because no one bothered to look for her, convinces Jane that she should embrace her son the doctor rather than her son the killer.
They barge into the basement, where Nurse Hoffel has everyone gathered around some sparkling apple cider and Styrofoam cheese so that she can blow them up with her stinky fertilizer bomb. Did anyone else notice that she only left herself six minutes to get out of the blast radius of the bomb? Don’t you think she’d need a little bit more time to get entirely free of the hospital before it all goes kablooey?
Turns out she has all the time in the world because Denise Hemphill returns from her frozen state just in time to diffuse the bomb using what she learned on an old episode of Quantico. There you have it. Everyone is saved. Told you Hoffel is really, really bad at killing people.
The best part of the episode comes when they chase Nurse Hoffel out into the swamp and discover that she is quickly sinking in the muck. “In my experience, costumed serial killers are never adequately punished by the law,†Chanel says. “Sometimes vigilante justice is the only way.†The whole pack agrees to let Hoffel drown. At the last minute, Munsch and Brock decide to save her, but their efforts are dashed.
This is a bit of an odd choice. Of all the people who would probably save her life, the No. 1 candidate is Zayday. (She’s always been a bit of a goody two-shoes.) Munsch has been dumping bodies in that swamp for the entire season, so what is one more dead lady after this body count? Also, Brock was plotting to kill Munsch in surgery with Hester, so why does he want to save all of these women all of a sudden?
Hoffel’s ending is much more satisfying that anyone else’s. Cassidy dies while trying to save No. 3 from a flying machete. Hester goes to the bank and steals all of Dean Munsch’s money so that she can run off with Brock and buy Blood Island like they always planned. No. 5, who is now a genius doctor, runs the hospital with Zayday because, hell, why not? This is Scream Queens and anything goes. Dean Munsch moves to Aspen to help rich ladies have orgasms again, which is the closest thing to charity that any of these characters have ever performed.
The most annoying ending is given to Chanel (and No. 3), who is a TV doctor and the host of Lovin the C. It’s not her job that makes my blood boil, but the title. The joke of Lovin the D was that a doctor named Lovin hosted the show. The D stood for doctor. Get it? But what is Lovin the C? Does this mean we’re just all loving the C, which stands for Chanel? I don’t get it. It makes no sense.
But nothing about this season made sense. I’m willing to give Scream Queens a pass because, at its best, it’s a campy treat that doesn’t need logic because it has smarts, sass, and plenty of bitchiness to keep everything humming. This season lacked all of that. It seemed like a lame retread of an idea that ran out of steam 15 episodes ago. Honestly, the best death of all would be for Fox to euthanize this show for good.