Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”
I’m not sure you can call any of the Usher kids “likable,” but if you had to rank them, Napoleon probably belongs at the top. There’s a reason he’s named after the hero of one of Poe’s lesser-known comedic stories. Sure, our Napoleon has his flaws: blowing off interviews, cheating on his boyfriend, killing a cat during a drug-induced blackout.
But there’s a reason Napoleon has been pushed, however unwillingly, into the role of family spokesman. He’s the only Usher who seems to feel any kind of warmth toward his fellow siblings; the Usher whose chosen profession (video games) seems to bring the least harm into the world; and the only Usher, so far, who has openly rebelled against Roderick. When Roderick sneers at Napoleon’s genuine grief over Camille and tells him to get in line, it’s Napoleon alone who says he’d rather be cut out of the will than follow another of Roderick’s tyrannical orders.
As it turns out, that brave stand comes at too high a cost. Whether it’s your own money or your daddy’s, you can’t take it with you, and by the end of the episode, Napoleon is the latest Usher to run into the Verna buzz saw. This time, the murder weapon is a black cat he adopts from an animal shelter Verna herself is running, though the headlines reporting his death will call it a suicide.
Much of “The Black Cat” is drawn directly from Poe’s 1843 story of the same name, which is timeless enough that House of Usher doesn’t need to make too many changes to it. Here, as there, a man murders a beloved cat for reasons he himself can barely explain; here, as there, he adopts a nearly identical replacement cat that quickly becomes his tormentor.
For Napoleon — who seems like he’d be more than content to just hang out in his fancy loft, having sex and doing drugs and playing video games forever — bringing this apex predator into his house is a particularly effective form of torture. It leaps at him from dark corners, slashes his arms and faces, and leaves an ever-growing pile of bloody animal corpses for Napoleon to discover. And because it pulls most of these tricks while Napoleon is alone, it also makes his partner, Julius, increasingly concerned that his boyfriend is going off the deep end.
Finally, Napoleon calls Verna, unwittingly inviting an even more dangerous apex predator into his home. When she says the cat has gotten into the walls, he grabs the closest possible weapon — a Thor hammer personally gifted to him by Chris Hemsworth, of course — and starts smashing down the walls. By then, it’s already way too late. As with the “chimpanzee” that beat Camille to death, Verna begins personifying the black cat. When Napoleon squeezes the cat’s eye out, Verna loses an eye, too. When he hears cat noises from behind yet another wall and takes it down, he finds her corpse sitting there. And when he finally spots the cat on his balcony, he chases it down and tumbles right over, falling to his death.
We’ve seen a few versions of this pattern now, and it’s safe to assume we’re bound to see at least a few more, but there’s a larger question we’ve been left to contemplate: What does Verna want, exactly? She seems to be the personification of cosmic justice. Whatever deal she cut with Roderick and Madeline back in 1979, the punishment seems to have fallen to their heirs — though watching each of his children die is a pretty brutal punishment for Roderick as well. And while Verna’s revenge quest has included plenty of collateral damage, there are also people she’s pointedly trying to save. Seventy-seven people died alongside Perry, but they were also, by Perry’s own standards, rich and powerful. Verna only spared the service staff — and, more perplexingly, tried to warn Morrie, who married into the Usher family’s blood money and seems to have benefitted plenty from it.
Even when it comes to the direct heirs of the Usher bloodline, Verna doesn’t always seem to be reveling in her vengeance. She told Perry there was still time to stop what was coming; she told Camille she didn’t need to walk into that room full of chimpanzee cages and could instead just die peacefully in her sleep; she tried, repeatedly, to convince Napoleon not to adopt the cat that led to his death. In all three cases, her targets were too sure of their power and immortality not to barrel right past her warnings with their own promises of sex, retaliation, and money. If the curse on the Ushers can be broken, it probably starts with acknowledging there are forces more powerful than anything Usher money can buy.
Bumps in the Night
• In another moment where the past basically comes into the present, Roderick’s big “I don’t want to hear anything but ‘sir, yes sir’” speech to his children is revealed to have been plagiarized directly from his former boss, Rufus Griswold, who drops the same line on him when Roderick objects to having his signature forged on incriminating documents. Given Roderick’s justified hatred for his boss — and the hints they’ve been dropping that he and Madeline are personally responsible for Rufus’s disappearance — it’s interesting, and faintly tragic, that he more or less became him.
• Solid pitch-black comedy from the Freddie subplot, who spends the episode trying to open Morrie’s burner phone and eventually goes straight into her hospital room while she’s sleeping to try to unlock it with Touch ID or Face ID — failing to realize that those technologies might not work when she no longer has fingerprints or a face.
• Given all the violent deaths, the Ushers have gotten a little sidetracked in figuring out the informant’s identity. If there is an informant, I’m betting on Arthur Pym. He’s by far the main character we know the least about, and in this episode, he has an odd little courtroom exchange with Dupin that indicates more familiarity than you’d expect between two lawyers on opposing sides of a case.
• Roderick’s hallucinations — or are they hallucinations? — conspicuously include the sound of bells jangling from behind a brick wall.
• “I have a soft spot for the short-timers.” “Important with siblings, really, that you keep ‘em together.” I’d say roughly half of Verna’s lines are slick double entendres.
• “Nobody knows they’re the fall guy until they’re falling.”
• “We built this city with work and soul.” Jesus Christ, Bill-T.
