Even before FX's Feud premiered, series creator Ryan Murphy teased how the mini-series would end for Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the beleaguered Hollywood legends played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon.
"I have always had a wistful dream that Bette and Joan could have watched this [show] together," Murphy told Vanity Fair of the star-crossed friends. "I think that my favorite line from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is at the end of the film, when Jane tells Blanche, just as she is dying, 'You mean all this time, we could have been friends?' To me, that's what the whole show is about."
Murphy was so serious about the sentiment that he used it for the title of his finale: "You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends?" And, as he hinted he might, Murphy found a way to reimagine a better outcome for his protagonists. Crawford, nearing the end of her days in her high-rise Manhattan apartment, hallucinates a brilliant fantasy sequence in which she walks into her living room to find Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci), Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis), and Davis. Warner and Hopper-the forces who willed the stars' great rivalry into existence, for good publicity and better copy-part, and Crawford sits alone with Davis.