American Horror Story: 1984 Star Angelica Ross on Donna’s Journey

American Horror Story: 1984 has taken fans on quite a journey this season. The 1980s horror/slasher inspired season has moved backwards and forwards in time to tell the blood soaked tale of Camp Redwood and the multiple massacres that have turned the summer camp into a prison for the spirits of its victims. But it’s not just the audience who has gone on this journey. The series’ characters have as well and the character who has seen perhaps the biggest evolution across the season is Angelica Ross’ Donna Chambers.

First introduced to viewers as Nurse Rita, it soon becomes clear that Camp Redwood’s medical professional isn’t who she claims to be and it’s revealed that she’s really Donna Chambers, a psychologist determined to study and understand serial killers after discovering that her father is one. She sets into motion the escape of Benjamin Richer, aka “Mr. Jingles” and, in a real way, the 1984 Camp Redwood massacre. But along the way, Donna is told by Richard Ramirez (Zach Villa) that she’s inherited her father’s evil and, according to Ross, it changed Donna’s journey.

“When Donna saw Ramirez starting to float and get brought back to life, that pretty much changed the game for her,” Ross told TV Guide. “Because all the research, all the other things that she thought before, she’s now, like she says in one of the episodes, ‘I kind of know what’s waiting for us on the other side and I don’t want to go there.’ And so she’s realizing — and I feel like, as a Buddhist, I realized as well — is that the reality is that there’s Mara or evil or bad in all of us, and that it really comes down to what you choose to do with that energy. It really does come down to that.”

“So Donna really realized that she just didn’t want to hurt anyone else,” Ross continued. “And that’s why she tells Brooke, she says, if we can come here and kill this bitch Margaret without hurting anyone else in the process, then it will wash away every sh***y thing that we’ve ever done. That’s her intention.”

That intention has put Donna in the position to potentially end up 1984’s final girl, the lone survivor of all of Camp Redwood’s horrors and while Ross didn’t give anything away, she did say that the ending would be a bit unexpected — and not everyone may be happy with who survives in the end.

“I can’t really say because I never expected any of this,” she said. “I never expected all of the twists and turns, I didn’t even know where this season was going at all. So once we finally filmed the final thing, the final scenes and everything, it just was not what any of us expected. I think that everybody is going to be just on the edge of their seats. And some people are going to be happy and I think some people are not going to be happy and, you know, that’s storytelling, right? We can’t all survive.”

American Horror Story: 1984 airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FX.