While American Horror Story: Freak Show was far from the worst season of the anthology horror series, messy plotting did result in a terrible ending for one potentially great subplot. Despite receiving much acclaim, American Horror Story has a tendency to set up a lot of intriguing stories at the beginning, only to drop many of these as the series moves onto other promising plot lines. This can be frustrating, as characters who have huge potential and plots that initially seem intriguing can end up abandoned before they reach their conclusion.

One of the most frustrating cases of this is American Horror Story: Freak Show’s wasted supporting stars. While this anthology outing ostensibly focused on the eponymous freak show and the sympathetic outcasts who comprised its cast, American Horror Story: Freak Show ended up following an array of plot threads that never amounted to all that much. Infamously, American Horror Story: Freak Show’s terrifying villain, Twisty the Clown, barely bore any connection to the season’s overall storyline, even though he was the source of some of the outing’s most memorably scary scenes.

AHS: Freak Show Wasted Neil Patrick Harris’ Chester

Similarly, Neil Patrick Harris’ Chester was an unforgettably weird villain – a ventriloquist whose deranged doll convinced him to kill for her. This led to one spectacular death, but nothing else, as American Horror Story: Freak Show swiftly abandoned the character. Chester proved once again that the scariest villains in American Horror Story are usually humans rather than supernatural threats, but this alone did not justify his screen time. In a less busy season, Chester could have been a seriously creepy villain, but in the overstuffed Freak Show, he only had time to show up, join the freak show, kill Maggie in front of everyone, then turn himself into the police.

The fact that Chester went so far as to turn himself in, albeit for the so-called murder of his doll, rather than the murder he actually committed, shows just how much American Horror Story: Freak Show had no idea how to wrap up his gory story. While the anthology horror show has forgotten antagonists before and since, Neil Patrick Harris’s star power and the creepy potential Chester had as a character made this subplot’s outcome particularly disappointing. While Maggie’s American Horror Story: Freak Show death was memorably gruesome, Chester’s entire story was seemingly introduced only to facilitate this punchline.

Maggie’s Freak Show Death Wasted An Obvious Setup

In American Horror Story: Freak Show, the freaks take care of their own, and while Maggie was originally a morally ambiguous figure, she had started to warm to Jimmy by the time she was killed off. However, the freaks did not take revenge on Chester, and instead simply let him leave after he murdered her. It would have made more sense for the freaks to subject Chester to the sort of cruel and unusual punishment they meted out on Stanley and Dandy.

Instead, American Horror Story: Freak Show‘s Chester plot was dropped once its purpose became clear. Chester’s presence could have at least triggered a retribution angle, but not even that transpired. Like 1984 having an unnecessary role for Richard Ramirez, this American Horror Story: Freak Show plot thread proved that less is sometimes more.