The following contains spoilers for American Horror Stories Season 2, Episode 6, "Facelift," which aired Aug. 25, on Hulu.

From the beginning, American Horror Story's anthology format risked lingering narrative problems. The original series famously uses season-wide arcs, then shifts gears with each new season to tell an entirely different story, often with returning cast members playing different characters. American Horror Stories was conceived as a shorter version of that formula: limited to one episode instead of an entire season. It's compounded a prevailing trend in the franchise of blowing the ending for seemingly important subplots that don't get enough screen time to justify it.

Season 2 of American Horror Stories has improved matters, particularly over the first season. Even then, however, the truncated running time of 45 minutes per story -- as opposed to 10+ episodes -- has come back to bite more than once with subplots and storylines rushed out the door. Season 2, Episode 6, "Facelift" is an example of the trend, which has continued despite the new season's far stronger footing.

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Despite its anthology format, the franchise has developed into a sprawling universe all its own. That includes a laundry list of subplots and dramatic twists that don't always wrap up as neatly as they should. It's not necessarily a criticism: the franchise's interconnectedness is often part of the fun, and at its best can lead to wild leaps of creativity. But it can also result in narrative cul-de-sacs that it attempts to wrap up too quickly as the season winds down. For instance, American Horror Story Season 2, "Asylum," featured a subplot involving alien abductions that rarely connected with the rest of the season, even when they constituted the finale to a given episode. The aliens and their purpose on Earth were eventually disclosed in Season 10, "Double Feature," but that did little to justify either their underdeveloped presence in "Asylum" or their use as a lazy, final twist.

The issue has continued on American Horror Stories, and dogged it throughout the first season, particularly the climaxes. Indeed, the show's inaugural storyline became hopelessly entangled in the franchise's "Murder House" storyline: taking up three of its seven episodes without any appreciable development and ending with a baffling coda involving video games and real estate blackmail. Other episodes did better, but they too seemed to pack their plots with unnecessary embellishment. A good example takes place in Season 1, Episode 6, "Feral," which does quite well for itself but used an odd notion of cryptids to muddy its otherwise effective cannibals-hiding-in-national-parks finale.

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Season 2 has improved considerably over Season 1, with stronger hooks and more self-contained stories. And yet it still can't shake the need to gild its narrative lilies. That started with Season 2, Episode 1, "Dollhouse" -- a terrifically creepy little tale that chose to bring AHS's Coven in with only the barest connections to the rest of the story. While it provided narrative benefits -- including a rare happy ending for an AHS protagonist -- the fit was awkward in the extreme. Season 2, Episode 5, "Milkmaids" was dogged by similar problems, as it tried to squeeze in an off-putting notion about early vaccines at the expense of a far more potent central narrative concerning Puritanical villagers consuming the hearts of the dead.

"Facelift" is notable because -- like "Dollhouse" -- it's by and large successful. Its central story combines plastic surgery terrors of the Eyes without a Face variety with trappings of folk horror such as Midsommar. A shallow Beverly Hills widow undergoes a "radical" de-aging procedure that secretly gives her the features of a pig, just in time to be hunted through her surgeon's private compound by a cult as part of a sacrifice to their pagan deity. It's a strong idea with a number of good hooks, and yet it stumbles towards the end by attempting to integrate a subplot involving the widow's stepdaughter. The younger woman is the cult's true goal: her biological mother belonged, and her stepmother's grotesque sacrifice was apparently part of some larger scheme to "bring her home." But the physical logistics work fitfully at best during the final act, as she's dragged forward and pulled away to the apparent indifference of all. The twist also entails a radical change in personality, as her compassion and ethics vanish in the final two minutes for reasons that are never explained.

It's not enough to derail the episode any more than Coven twist in "Dollhouse" undid its own spooky plot, but it does demonstrate the difficulties AHS has had in getting rid of this troubling narrative habit. Improvements have come, and Season 2 is all the better for it. But proper endings remain a stubborn issue for the franchise, one that doesn't look to go away anytime soon.

New episodes of American Horror Stories stream every Thursday on Hulu.