In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’ —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
It would be nice for everyone if Perry’s death could be written off as a horrible accident. There’s certainly evidence for it: The tanks at the factory, Roderick reveals, were loaded not with water but with highly acidic medical waste. In the sketchy, ad hoc way Perry’s rave came together, no one bothered to check.
But as Roderick himself has clearly come to understand, what would be nice for everyone isn’t always true. “A horrible accident” can’t account for the woman in the red cloak no one can identify, the skull mask she left on Perry’s melted face, or the bartenders and security guards who left just before the acid started pouring down but can’t recall why. Even ignoring the supernatural leaves some troubling questions: Someone, as Camille grimly notes, is eventually going to notice that Frederick Usher’s wife suddenly doesn’t have any skin.
From the very beginning of the series, we know the story will end in six fresh graves, but this episode is especially rich in dramatic irony. There’s comedy and tragedy in watching the petty dramas of people who don’t realize they’re doomed. Granted special access to the factory, Arthur Pym strolls through the melted corpses, single-mindedly focused on collecting anything that might affect the Ushers. Roderick, instead of comforting Freddie in his shock and grief, browbeats him about failing to demolish the factory sooner. Hearing that 78 people died in the incident, Madeline is horrified … about what the tragedy might do to Fortunato’s stock price. In 2023, the vices of the ridiculously rich are an extremely fat target, but The Fall of the House of Usher can still land some bull’s-eyes.
And then there’s Camille, who sees this tragedy as a rare opportunity for the Ushers to score some sympathetic PR. Perry’s body is barely cold before she’s spinning a fiction that casts him as the family’s “fallen prince,” à la JFK Jr., complete with a bogus story about Perry’s tireless private charity work and a busy schedule of soft-focus glossy-magazine profiles for his bereaved siblings. This is the service Camille provides for her family. If the Usher dynasty exists in a world of smoke and mirrors, she says, she can at least be the ceiling fan pushing all that smoke around.
The downside of living a life built around spinning bullshit is that you can become completely detached from actual human emotion. When her assistants reveal that they’ve fallen in love with each other, Camille snarks about how foolish they are to throw their lives away for a dopamine hit when they could, you know, be like her and pay less powerful people who don’t like them to get them off whenever they demand it.
But Camille does seem to have one true feeling she can’t suppress: her hatred for her sister Victorine, which has her obsessed with finding a way to take her down a peg. This time, Camille’s nose for dirt is right on the money; Victorine really has been committing medical fraud and killing a lot of chimpanzees in the process.
Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is often cited as the first-ever piece of detective fiction, which makes it especially funny that the solution to the double homicide at its center is so insane. The killer is — 182-year-old spoiler alert — a pet chimpanzee who escapes from its owner.
You see where this is going. When Camille arrives at the RUE Morgue research facility, she’s greeted by Verna, this time in the guise of a security guard who patiently warns her that she doesn’t need to go any further.
But since when has Camille let anyone tell her what to do? As she collects photo evidence of Victorine’s misdeeds, Verna walks in again, delivering a monologue about all the suffering humans inflict on animals. “I love how deliciously, pointlessly mean you lot can be,” she says. And while Camille is initially defiant — first threatening to fire Verna, then to kill her — she is, as Verna says, “the clever one.” When this menacing woman advances on her, with the caged chimpanzees howling, Camille realizes it’s over. She holds up her camera for one last picture, revealing that Verna has become the chimpanzee that will beat her to death in the second bizarre Usher killing in the same number of days. It’s not Nope, but given the silliness of the source material The Fall of the House of Usher is drawing from here, it’s impressive that the show pulled off a chimpanzee murder that lands closer to horrifying than hilarious.
Two Usher children down, four to go. It will be harder for the surviving Ushers to hand-wave this one off as a second horrifying accident. To paraphrase another famous writer of genre fiction, if once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three is enemy action.
Bumps in the Night
• They don’t know it yet, but two more Usher children have met Verna while taking the first steps toward their graves. Victorine encounters Verna as Pamela, an anxiety-ridden heart patient, and loops her into a sketchy medical trial; Tamerlane encounters Verna as Candy, an escort hired to fulfill her extremely specific fantasy of watching her husband have a nice dinner with someone pretending to be her. I’m sure these new relationships will work out great for everybody.
• In yet another subplot that should be troublingly familiar to Poe fans, Napoleon blacks out; wakes up in the morning to discover his cat, Pluto, has been killed; and covers it up before his partner figures out what happened.
• It’s not quite as effective as the Midnight Mass episode that scored an entire credits sequence to a character’s screams, but there’s something both funny and eerie about rolling the credits over a soundtrack of chimpanzee noises.
• I’m not totally sure what to make of Victorine’s brief sobbing spell when she’s alone in the doctor’s office. Is she the only Usher who feels actual, sincere grief over Perry’s death? Especially when taken in tandem with Napoleon’s affectionate exchange with Perry, Roderick’s non-white children seem to have developed closer bonds — though Camille, as Verna notes, could have bonded with Victorine over their being Roderick’s only illegitimate daughters.
• It’s also interesting to learn that so many of Roderick’s children came into the Usher fold so late in life. When they first met Roderick, Perry was 16, Camille was 18, and Napoleon was 20. I guess having that much money can corrupt you that quickly.
• Clemm, the false last name Verna uses on the medical form she gives to Victorine, is the maiden name of Poe’s wife. Verna’s address is listed as 1849 Reynolds Street — the year of Poe’s death and the name he reportedly shouted the night before he died.
• This one is a little more of a stretch, but I’m sticking a flag in it now: Monty, the street name for recreational Ligodone, sounds suspiciously like a riff on Amontillado.
• The 1970s flashback is set to Karen Black and Cass McCombs’s “I Wish I Knew the Man I Thought You Were” — a sentiment that seems just then like something Madeline and Annabel might say about Roderick.
• Congrats and good luck to “Toby” and “Tina,” the young lovebirds who escape Camille’s horrible orbit just in time to get their severance via Venmo.
• I thought I liked “Gucci Caligula,” but “Xbox Gatsby” tops it.
