And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”
The year is 1979. A young junior fraud investigator — already a rising star, despite being Black and gay in a world hostile to Black men and gay men — is the only one smart enough to realize that a spate of disinterred corpses can be tied to a shady medical corporation with a lot of incentives to cover up medical malpractice. “We cheat the dying, we fleece the poor, promote the racist,” he vents to a colleague who openly hates him. “This world needs changing.”
The year is 1979. A young mailroom employee — smart, ambitious, painfully aware he was cheated out of his birthright — pitches a drug that he swears could have saved his dying mother from unimaginable pain. “In this little pill is a world without pain,” he pitches to a boss who barely knows he exists. “This world needs changing.”
Is it too generous to say these two men — one a crusading attorney, one a morally bankrupt billionaire — once had the same dream? More than 40 years later, Dupin and Roderick sit across from each other, and as they pick over their old wounds and the recent losses in the Usher dynasty, you can sense that they understand each other. Roderick changed the world, but he didn’t make it a better one. Dupin might finally be able to hold him accountable, but that won’t undo the damage he has already caused, and neither man is young enough to start fresh.
But this episode is about youth and not just the ambitions that put Dupin and Roderick on this collision course. The real star of this episode is Roderick’s youngest son, Prospero, who prefers to go by Perry. Wouldn’t you? (Like each of Roderick’s children, Prospero’s baroque given name is pulled directly from a Poe story.)
Roderick tells Dupin that the first thing he needs to know about Perry is that he was crazy. His first big scene — in which he holds a fork to the neck of the lover whom he believes, wrongly, ate his rare gull eggs — seems to bear that out.
But just when I started to settle in for the indulgent, cathartic revenge fantasy of an awful rich kid getting what he deserves, the episode toyed with my sympathies. As the first to die, Perry is almost certainly the Usher we’ll get to know the least, but the details of his life are broadly tragic. He was conceived, sneers Freddie, when Roderick hooked up with a blackjack dealer on a yacht at Cannes, and Perry later remarks that he feels like he’s “extra bastard.” His father brutally dismisses his idea for an ultra-exclusive nightclub. That pitch was, admittedly, both self-indulgent and terrible — but you can see how Perry lights up when Napoleon tells him he’ll be unstoppable as soon as he figures everything out. Maybe, with a little encouragement, he could have turned out differently.
Instead, he goes rogue, turning one of his family’s old factories into a test pilot for his ultra-exclusive rave concept. It’s an invitation-only masquerade with booze, drugs, and sex on the menu for anyone who can pony up the $20,000 asking price. As a bonus, Perry can take covert videos of the rich and famous indulging in all their decadent fantasies to hold for whenever it might be useful to blackmail somebody — including his brother Freddie’s wife, whom he coaxed into attending. (See? Clever and industrious! If only someone had bothered to point him in the right direction.)
If you’re familiar with “The Masque of the Red Death,” the 1842 Poe story that gives the episode its title, you have a foreboding sense of where might be going. Perry is entranced by a supremely confident woman who stalks the party in a red cloak and skull mask. He doesn’t know her at all; we know her as Verna. They have a long conversation, laced with eroticism in doom, in which she drops the occasional grim warning about how there are always consequences. Perry is too high and horny to realize what she’s really saying. After all, he’s young. He’s going to live forever.
The centerpiece of the evening is supposed to be a sprinkler shower, which Perry has planned as the signal for the party to become an orgy. But when the sprinklers go off, they’re not spitting water; they’re spitting acid. The partygoers scream and beat at the locked doors, but it’s already too late. They’re melting, they’re melting, what a world, what a world. Perry, at the center of the dance floor, lives just long enough to get a kiss from Verna, who leaves her mask and wanders off into the night. Consider the Usher family on notice.
Bumps in the Night
• Back in the past: Roderick pitches his miracle drug to Fortunato head Rufus Griswold (named after the spiteful writer/editor responsible for the popular stereotype, almost certainly inaccurate, that Poe was a drug and booze-addled madman). We know Ligodone will eventually change the world, but Rufus isn’t convinced, and I suspect that difference of opinions will lead us right into the mysterious events of New Year’s Eve 1979.
• In a subplot that seems poised to pop off in episode three, Victorine’s radical, morally indefensible medical experiment results in one dead monkey. Despite her failure, she’s lying to Roderick about the results of his $200 million investment, though Camille is sniffing around, correctly intuiting that something has gone wrong.
• One mystery answered: Whether the ghosts of the dead are real or hallucinatory, only Roderick can see them. When Perry’s charred ghost steps directly between Dupin and Roderick to stare into his father’s eyes, Dupin doesn’t even blink. There’s a reason for that: Roderick has been diagnosed with CADASIL, a hereditary form of cognitive impairment whose symptoms include hallucinations. (Of course, there’s always the possibility that Roderick is hallucinating and the ghosts are real.)
• I’m impressed by how many Poe references they’ve already managed to cram into this series, but “RUE Morgue” was a real groaner.
• The same goes for Roderick’s heart-eyed recitation of “Annabel Lee” for his wife Annabel — which in Flanagan-verse was written by Roderick, not Edgar Allan Poe.
• “How much money would make you say, ‘We did it’? Does that number even exist?” “That’s an idiot question. Of course not.”
• “I’m more of a Calvin & Hobbes guy.” Right there with you, Dupin.
