The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t waste any time before playing Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest hits. In the first 30 seconds of the series premiere, I counted at least four references to four separate works, some more obscure than others. (No points for noticing the raven, but you admire the audacity of that “Another Brick in the Wall” needle drop, which is destined to send a shiver up the spine of anyone who knows “The Cask of Amontillado.”)
To any viewer weaned on a steady diet of Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination, this opening montage is both a statement of purpose and a challenge as real as spotting the ghosts that popped up in the backgrounds of series creator Mike Flanagan’s previous Netflix shows: Just how well do you know Edgar Allan Poe, anyway?
Flanagan is an old hand at doing this kind of thing. His The Haunting of Hill House modernized a beloved horror-lit classic; his The Haunting of Bly Manor, nominally an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, wove in a few other James stories as well. One episode in, The Fall of the House of Usher feels like a little of both: a series that uses Poe’s classic short story as a jumping-off point for a ripped-from-the-headlines interrogation of Big Pharma greed and its consequences with memorable bits from a bunch of other Poe stories stirred into the mix.
We get all those references before we’re formally introduced to our two main characters (drawn, in a fan fiction–y flourish, from two different Poe stories). The show’s narrator is Roderick Usher, a superrich Big Pharma executive mired in grief after burying all six of his children — yes, six — in the span of two weeks. It’s not totally clear that this miniseries has any heroes, but for now, we have Usher’s courtroom foe, Charles Auguste Dupin, an assistant DA trying to indict the Ushers for the outsize role their drug-pushing has played in the opioid epidemic. (No points for catching the parallels to the Sackler family, either.)
To his surprise, Roderick calls him and vows to confess to all 73 charges, including defrauding the U.S. government, if Dupin will just come to his decrepit childhood home and hear the whole story over a bottle of obscenely expensive cognac. He makes it clear that it’s going to be a long story — enough, even, to fill eight hours of television. It begins in 1953 when the adolescent Roderick and his sister, Madeline, are living with their single mother, Eliza, who is both the secretary to and the other woman of Longfellow, the boorish head of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. Longfellow is the kind of guy who, knowing that Roderick and Madeline are his children by blood, orders Eliza never to bring them onto his property. And by 1962, when Eliza is deathly ill, he refuses to help outright.
To give Longfellow the smallest of outs, it’s worth noting that Eliza might not accept his help anyway. She’s so devoutly religious that she rejects medical treatment altogether, believing that interfering with a body’s natural state is an insult to God. It’s for that same reason that, after she dies, Roderick and Madeline bury her in the backyard, hoping to honor her beliefs by skipping the embalming.
Of course, there’s a reason it’s sometimes a good idea to go straight to a professional. On a dark and stormy night, Roderick and Madeline look at the fresh grave and see it’s now empty. Eliza was buried alive, and while she remains near death, she digs herself out just long enough to throttle her son before stalking over to Longfellow’s fancy house and strangling him to death.
If you’re wondering what this lengthy, morbid backstory has to do with Roderick’s six dead children, you have something in common with Dupin, who arrived looking for concrete answers, not a weird trauma dump. But like him, we’ll need to be patient. As the show jumps back and forth in time, we get quick introductions to each of Roderick’s children — each, except maybe Victorine, clearly horrible in their own special way — but it’s clear from the scope of Roderick’s story that the seeds of their grim fates were planted before they were even born.
What happened? A small hint comes as the story settles into New Year’s Eve 1979. We’ve already been told, almost subliminally, that this date is important; a quick shot of the New Year’s Eve party was included in the show’s opening montage. But as the young Roderick and Madeline sit down at the bar, dressed to the nines, it becomes clear they’ve arrived only to establish a cover story for a hideous crime they’ve committed. They’re greeted by a bartender, Verna — I’ll pause here to note that that’s an anagram of raven — who speaks cryptically about the importance of making a promise to one’s future.
How did Roderick and Madeline end up assuming control of a pharmaceutical company to which they were, at best, illegitimate and unacknowledged heirs? I’m guessing it had something to do with Verna, who has popped up in a series of otherwise unexplained jump scares throughout the episode, along with Roderick’s dead kids and one terrifying jester.
Roderick can’t say he wasn’t warned. “Buy now, pay later — that’s what I say,” says Verna at that fateful New Year’s Eve meeting. It must sound like an appealing offer to those young siblings, so close to a fortune they must feel was their birthright all along. But “pay later” is its own kind of Devil’s bargain, and it looks as though the Usher family’s bill has finally come due.
Bumps in the Night
• One big mystery left to be answered: Who is the informant from inside the Usher family (assuming Dupin wasn’t lying about that, hoping they’d turn on one another)? We don’t have a lot of evidence for anybody yet, but feel free to drop your best guesses in the comments below.
• There’s also the question about Roderick’s “condition,” which can only be treated by one very specific and trusted doctor. Introducing doubts about his sanity is a clever way for Flanagan to riff on his old hidden-ghosts trick; at one point, we can see Eliza stalking around behind Dupin, but it’s not clear if she’s actually there or if we’re just seeing things from Roderick’s haunted perspective.
• Roderick and Madeline have a strange and fascinating dynamic (and not just because they sleep in the same bed long after two kids should be doing that). It’s not as if Madeline doesn’t have any power — she’s the COO to Roderick’s CEO — but while Roderick is apparently the public face of the company, she seems like the one who’s truly visionary and decisive behind the scenes.
• That said, Roderick telling Dupin that Madeline is currently in the basement is, uh, a cause for concern.
• Roderick is very conspicuously receiving and ignoring text messages he says are from his granddaughter, Lenore. I’m guessing we’ll see what she has to say — assuming the messages are from her at all — before the series ends.
• Kudos to Bruce Greenwood, who is absolutely nailing the role of Roderick Usher despite being cast halfway through production to replace Frank Langella, the show’s original star, who was fired after a misconduct investigation. This isn’t Greenwood’s first time in a Flanagan production; he co-starred with Carla Gugino in Gerald’s Game and played a supporting role in Doctor Sleep, Flanagan’s sequel to The Shining.
• And while we’re on the subject: You’d have an easier time making a list of House of Usher actors who haven’t previously appeared in a Flanagan production. Returning collaborators who have appeared in at least one other Flanagan movie or series include [deep breath] Gugino, Henry Thomas, Samantha Sloyan, Kate Siegel, T’Nia Miller, Rahul Kohli, Sauriyan Sapkota, Crystal Balint, Katie Parker, Ruth Codd, Zach Gilford, Kyliegh Curran, Annabeth Gish, Matt Biedel, Michael Trucco, Robert Longstreet, Aya Furukawa, and Igby Rigney.
• Lines from no fewer than three of Poe’s works: the poem “For Annie,” the poem “Spirits of the Dead,” and the essay “The Imp of the Perverse.”
• The character names are all loaded with allusions — don’t miss Mark Hamill’s dour lawyer, Arthur Pym, or Napoleon’s cat, Pluto, or even Lenore’s habit of calling Roderick “Grampus” — but it would be easy to overlook that fitness guru Bill-T’s actual name is William Wilson, a nod to Poe’s creepy doppelgänger story.
• And Eliza shares her name with Edgar Allan Poe’s actual mother, who also had a macabre and premature death.
• The headline describing Napoleon’s death refers to him as “the gaming prince.” (That’s not a Poe reference or anything; I just think it’s funny.)
• Mike Flanagan hasn’t been especially subtle about his frustrations with Netflix, so I’d like to think Morrie’s weird “secret cake” hobby is a dig at one of the streaming service’s dumber game shows, which received a second-season order just months before Flanagan’s own The Midnight Club ended up on the chopping block. (It’s not for nothing that Flanagan has since set up shop at Amazon.)
