The end was just too much. Joan Crawford never threw a lamp through a damned hospital window, much less would she have fallen to her knees in a hospital hallway screeching. There was no studio protection at that point, if she had it would have been reported by at least the tabloids. Not to mention completely out of character of Joan (at least in public).

Between the last few episodes and what has been said in interviews, it's become really clear that no one making this has any affection for Crawford at all. Her personality seems exclusively based on Christina Crawford's viewpoint of a few year period much earlier in Joan's past, combined with modern pop psychology retroactively reducing her to the caricature of a wounded abused child.

If that's truly their belief, it could have been well-written enough that they didn't need to make her surface a shaking neurotic shrieking and ranting all the time. That simply wasn't the case. Given how one of the most typical things said about Joan by people who knew her (even those that knew her deeper neuroses - that most have) was that she was eerily "serene" - and you certainly wouldn't get that impression here.

As the show goes on, it's clear that they are adjusting the narrative tone to fit the structure to bring it to a conclusion. Unfortunately, that conclusion seems to be not that these were two very complicated women, but that Bette was Ms. Sensibility and Joan was a petulant child-woman. By most accounts, Bette was horrible to Joan on the set of Charlotte - but watching this episode they just portray it as Bette being perfectly reasonable and Joan severely overreacting like a harpy.