An ending planned from the beginning
Max Winkler, who directed six of the eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, says he knew how the season would conclude before filming began. The finale, titled Carnival, ends with Aileen Wuornos, played by Sarah Paulson, being welcomed in the afterlife by the ghosts of Lizzie Borden, played by Ella Beatty, and Borden's housemaid and lover Maggie, also known as Bridget, played by Vicky Krieps. Wuornos was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 1992. The imagined scene follows a hopeful ending given to Lizzie and Maggie, before the series cuts to the flat line of Wuornos's death and the people around her discussing lunch, as Winkler describes it.[S1]
Winkler tells The Hollywood Reporter that the season wove Wuornos's story together with Borden's to show how little has changed in how society treats women who kill, and how women are put in cages. He describes the contrast between the romance of Paulson's character and the peace of the afterlife, and the antiseptic blue curtain of the execution chamber set against the ornate red velvet curtain of the theater seen at the beginning. He says that if he could start where the season starts and end where it ends while keeping an emotional involvement for those characters, the finale had a good chance to resonate.[S1]
Liberties, tone and the case's gaps
The season differs from earlier installments of Netflix's Monster franchise because less is known about the case, which allowed creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan to fill in unanswered questions. Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted in 1892, at the age of 32, for the axe murders of her father Andrew and stepmother Abby in Massachusetts. The series presents a version in which Borden killed them. Winkler says the season was challenging to make because much of it is comedic, given the expectations placed on women in the 1890s and the fact that some of those attitudes still surface today. He compares the previous season, with Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein largely alone in a barn or a cold house, to this one's many people and many words, and describes the aim of creating something beautiful laced with arsenic.[S1]
Winkler says he does not read reviews or follow social media reaction, explaining that the good responses never feel sufficient and the bad ones are too painful to enjoy. He notes that a camera test took place exactly a year earlier, that he is in a text chat with the actors where Nance O'Nell memes circulate, and that he expects a large reaction whenever Murphy makes something. He says many viewers have finished the season quickly, some in one sitting, and that the show debuted at number one on Netflix's Top TV list. He also says he cried while Paulson performed her final meal scene.[S1]
