Has ‘Curtain Call’ Already Given Us The Plot For Season 5 Of ‘American Horror Story’?

It’s become something of a tradition for American Horror Story fans to look back on the previous season for clues to the plot of the season to come, and this year is no different. Well, perhaps it is different in one way. This year leaves American Horror Story fans with two burning questions: What will Jessica Lange’s role be in next season, if she returns at all, and what will the plot of Season 5 bring us?

Although that first question had once seemed cut and dry at one time, there are now theories floating about that Jessica Lange may not retire at all. According to Christian Today, gossip has Ms. Lange returning to American Horror Story next season in a limited capacity, if not in her usual full-time starring role. It all may be wishful thinking, however. Ryan Murphy, American Horror Story creator, has already thanked the actress “for everything” on Twitter, implying that Jessica may have already made up her mind to pursue her retirement, as she had planned. Fans and critics alike worry that Ms. Lange’s departure from American Horror Story will cause the show to dwindle into mediocrity.

As it is still early, there seems to be time for Jessica to make up her mind one way or the other, if she hasn’t already.

Speaking of Jessica Lange’s apparent “Curtain Call,” International Business Times suspects that final episode of Season 4 may already have given us the plot for American Horror Story‘s fifth season. The most obvious clue came from Massimo, when he broke Elsa’s heart by declining to run away with her, confessing that he would be dead within a month’s time. What would be the cause of his untimely death? He claimed to suffer from a bone and lung disease and, if the rumors are true, that disease was caused by radioactive bombs dropped at the Nevada Test Site.

Specifically, fans have grown to believe that the next season of American Horror Story will focus on Operation Top Hat, which was classified as a “local field exercise,” negating the necessary to submit the project for approval from the Secretary of the Army. The operation was designed to test decontamination methods for nerve gases, radiation, and other forms of chemical warfare. Specifically, Chemical Corps personnel were unwittingly exposed to these chemicals for the purposes of testing the effectiveness of the Army’s decontamination procedures.

FX Networks CEO John Landgraf added to the rumors when he teased that next season of American Horror Story would take place in the present day, which may suggest that the season will visit survivors of these tests to see how the exposure to chemicals has affected them.

“One of the things I love so much about that is that it can be radically, radically reinvented in terms of tone, setting, period, characters, cast,” Landgraf said at the 2015 Television Critics Association winter press tour.

“I think there’s going to be an unusually large reinvention in between Book 4 and Book 5 relative to, say, between Book 3 [‘Coven’] and 4 [‘Freak Show’].”

There would undoubtedly be flashbacks throughout the season, which any American Horror Story fan knows are an integral part of the show’s makeup. Perhaps such flashbacks would open the door for long dead characters that were favorites of viewers from past seasons, like Naomi Grossman’s Pepper.

Whether Naomi Grossman returns for another season of American Horror Story or not, she has certainly enjoyed the experience of becoming Pepper, as Inquisitr recently reported.