‘American Horror Story: Roanoke’ episode 7 debate: Can the real Butcher be stopped?

There’s one element of “American Horror Story: Roanoke” that we find so far to be incredibly interesting, and that is the warning that “Return to Roanoke” gave us during episode 6: There is only one character who is coming out of this alive.

Yet, what the show did not do was necessarily define “alive.” Could someone like the Butcher technically qualify, given that she is still walking the earth? She’s not entirely dead, and so far, she seems to be the character capable of inflicting the most damage.

At the end of Wednesday night’s new episode, we saw her brutally kill Kathy Bates’ Agnes, reducing the total of remaining characters by one. Presuming that Lee is technically still alive, we’ve got Dominic, Shelby, Audrey, and Monet one way or another still out there. Shelby killed Matt, and the producer Sidney behind the show is gone. What we’re saying here is that we don’t necessarily have a whole lot of candidates left for who the sole survivor is.

For the Butcher, what we’ve yet to see is if there is a way to vanquish her from this world completely. She resurfaces every blood moon, but we refuse to believe that this has to be permanent and there is a way to sever her from her land. We know that there are some seasons of this show where the horror cannot be overcome, but if we don’t find a way to end this cycle at Roanoke, the one thing we wonder is what the entire point of all of this really was. Was the entire story just about watching people going somewhere and getting killed? We could see the Butcher being the last one standing, but we absolutely don’t want it.