The finale began in the present day. The mercilessly ambitious Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson, in elegant old-age makeup) has become a sort of grand dame of TV journalism, a lesbian Diane Sawyer who pals around with Bono. Winters made her career not with the trashy memoir “Maniac” that we learned about last week, but later in the ‘70s with an exposé on the depraved, disgusting conditions at Briarcliff. In the finale, she is taping a TV interview for the Kennedy Center, and as she talks, she flashes back to what has happened since the release of “Maniac” to herself, to Jude, to Kit, to the Monsignor, while her fully grown, serial-killing son Johnny (Dylan McDermott) bides his time, pretending to be part of the TV crew, waiting to kill her.

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