[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 10 finale of American Horror Story: Double Feature, "The Future Perfect."]

For 10 seasons now, American Horror Story has represented the wildest excesses of the Ryan Murphy brand — incredible casts, deliberately outlandish premises and plots, and experiments in form which explode the ideas of what's possible on television. However, while those qualities mean that it's always exciting and fun to track what exactly this show is up to, the drawback, far too often, is that it's rare for a season of the anthology series to actually stick the landing and tell a coherent story.

That said, Season 10, technically subtitled Double Feature, might have finally cracked the code here — by realizing what the best parts of American Horror Story are, and compressing them down to their essences. In short: By realizing that sometimes the best stories are the most concise ones, Murphy and co-creator Brad Falchuk chose to split the season into two separate parts, and the four-episode stretch of Double Feature known as "Death Valley" is quite sincerely the most I've ever enjoyed watching this show.

Yes, the length is a factor there. "Death Valley," the story which begins with Episode 7 of Season 10 (a fact which will undoubtedly confuse future viewers for years to come), starts off with a narrative told in both black-and-white and color, with the desaturated segments focusing on what happens when President Eisenhower (Neal McDonough) makes a deal in the 1950s with a secret alien force that he thinks will save humanity. As time passes, he comes to realize, much like Lando Calrissian once did, that this deal keeps getting worse and worse all the time, with subsequent Presidents Kennedy (Mike Vogel) and Nixon (Craig Sheffer) having to cope with the aftermath. Not helping matters is the fact that Dwight's beloved Mamie (Sarah Paulson) made her own deal with the aliens, all of which ultimately leads to an ominous and tragic ending.

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Again, what works here is the compressed runtime, especially given the broad nature of the characterization involved. An awful lot of "Death Valley" is devoted to a present-day storyline featuring four young college students whose camping trip in the desert leads to their eventual impregnation by the aliens (who, since arriving on Earth, have been developing a hybridization project to ensure their survival). While actors Kaia Gerber, Nico Greetham, Isaac Cole Powell, and Rachel Hilson prove very game for what's to come, they're such obvious victims-in-waiting that one never gets very attached to them, which frankly makes it a lot easier to enjoy the gross-out factor of their eventual gory fates.

With no time to waste, there's no unnecessary melodrama or screen time wasted on dull tangents. Instead, "Death Valley" moves at a breathless pace through a wide swath of 20th century American history, with a skewed lens that doesn't shy away from ridiculous beats like Stanley Kubrick (Jeff Heapy) faking the moon landing on a soundstage or Nixon getting a good ol' fashioned anal probing. The mayhem of the alien conspiracy storyline is a fun riff on familiar tropes, almost verging on parody sometimes, in that singular Ryan Murphy way — must-see viewing for any X-Files fan.

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While the season finale might feel a little incomplete in its ending, there's no denying that it's hard to top the oh-my-god moments of lasering a girl's head off to turn her body into the perfect breeding machine for human-alien hybrids, or just casually exploding Mamie Eisenhower's skull. (Admittedly, Mamie did get to die knowing her legacy would live on in the form of annual birthday, Halloween, and Christmas celebrations — which, y'know, good for her.) Between the blunt brutality of these characters' fates and the promised destruction of the human race, it's an incredibly nihilistic storyline. But it was also entertaining as hell to watch.

Had "Death Valley" been stretched out to encompass a full 10-episode season, I don't think that would have remained the case. Hell, even "Red Tide," the first storyline of Season 10, struggled to stay captivating once the core premise had revealed itself, the fun of watching vampires Evan Peters and Frances Conroy duet at karaoke supplanted by too much time focused on Harry Gardner (Finn Wittrock), the Worst Dad Ever. But sometimes, the most important part of storytelling is knowing exactly how long said story should last, and in the case of "Death Valley," the story lasted just long enough to pack in all of the fun bits without overstaying its welcome.

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Image via FX

Is this experiment something that we might expect to see in future American Horror Story seasons? Certainly, the existence of American Horror Stories, which goes even more anthology-y with single-episode stories, would indicate an ongoing interest in playing with shorter-length narratives. But the defining trait of American Horror Story as a series, to me, has always been the sense that literally anything can happen. Literally anything is possible. Including something as genuinely fun and wild as "Death Valley."

American Horror Story is streaming now on FX on Hulu.

KEEP READING: 'American Horror Story: Death Valley': Cast, Episodes & Everything We Know About What's Next for Season 10's Double Feature