And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Are the Ushers capable of love? Or has their power and money so poisoned their lives that even their most intimate interactions are too laced with suspicion?
This isn’t just a philosophical question; for the Ushers, and for The Fall of House of Usher, it’s at the root of everything. Roderick and Madeline were born from an affair predicated on lust, not love, and the loss of their mother left them fending for themselves. We still don’t know what happened to Roderick’s happy marriage with Annabel, but his subsequent relationships were one-night stands so frosty that he doesn’t even speak to the mothers of his dead children at the funeral. His current wife, Juno, seems to love the drug he pushes more than she loves him, and he seems to love her mostly because she loves the drug.
And Roderick’s children have hardly fared better. Perry and Camille were in explicitly transactional relationships. Napoleon was happy with Julius as long as he could do as many drugs and sleep with as many other people as he wanted, and Freddie is so tortured by his wife’s lie that he pulls her out of the hospital against her doctor’s advice so he can keep her locked up, Misery-style, at home (and, I’m guessing, so he can interrogate her about that burner phone). “You have to remember you can’t trust people,” he counsels his daughter.
Each of these partners, we’re reminded over and over again, have signed NDAs. And if you were still holding out hope that there might be a little true love for everybody’s favorite influencer couple, Tamerlane and her endlessly accommodating husband Bill-T, you can stop; by the end of the episode, they split up when she reveals she chose him not because she loved him, but because his whole Bill-T persona was good for business.
That leaves us with one Usher: Victorine, played by the great T’Nia Miller (who, not coincidentally, also starred in the best episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor). More than any of her siblings, Victorine is under serious pressure. Her father’s $200 million investment in her heart valve isn’t just a sizable chunk of cash; it’s also, as both Roderick and Madeline basically tell her outright, Roderick’s only shot at outliving his CADASIL prognosis.
It should have been obvious where this episode was going. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is probably Poe’s best-known short story, due in no small part to the effectiveness of its narrator, who cites a series of increasingly deranged thoughts and actions as proof that he’s not insane. Poor, buttoned-up Victorine wants to be famous for a medical breakthrough but skips over the part where she accomplishes the medical breakthrough. She tries to ally with Freddie and Tamerlane but receives only disdain from her surviving siblings. She seeks support from her partner, Alessandra Ruiz, only to end up in a nasty fight over sketchy medical trials and forged documents. You can see Victorine calculating what might keep Alessandra from walking out the door and blowing up their lives together. “I love you,” she starts to say before pivoting to “I will give you anything you want, just name your price.” Rightly or wrongly, she has calculated that Usher money is worth more than Usher love.
Whatever the answer, it isn’t enough. Alessandra walks out, and it’s this breakup, we eventually learn, that leads to a crack-up. In her rage, Victorine throws a bookend at Alessandra as she starts to leave — only for it to hit her square in the back of the head. Faced with the knowledge she just killed the woman she loves, Victorine simply refuses to accept her death at all.
This late-breaking twist is what makes much of the episode retroactively chilling. We’ve seen Victorine repeatedly calling Alessandra, begging her to call back, unaware that her partner’s corpse is collecting flies in a side room at her house. That’s also the horrifying explanation for the episode’s big riff on Poe’s original story: a strange, mechanical throbbing sound that Victorine hears on a loop.
This is the scene Roderick walks into when he shows up at Victorine’s doorstep. It’s a big moment for him, easily the most vulnerable we’ve seen him, as he begs for forgiveness for his misguided parenting strategy: treating the kids as a “pride of lions” who could test their teeth and claws on each other before turning them toward the outside world. Even now, Roderick is selfish; his vow of support is, notably, tied directly to his investment in Victorine’s medical research, which he believes might save his life. But for someone so desperate to believe that she’s making a serious, meaningful contribution to her family and the world, that might still be enough for Victorine to snap back to reality.
And yet: There’s the beating of that hideous heart. And unlike Poe’s story, where the guilty narrator is the only one who can hear the sound, Roderick realizes he can hear it too. It’s not until Victorine flings a door open that the truth becomes clear: Alessandra is dead, and Victorine has sliced her open and attached her prototype to her heart anyway, leaving it beating, indefinitely but uselessly.
After three consecutive episodes that ended with Verna murdering an Usher, House of Usher wisely breaks the pattern while bringing Roderick directly into the action. This time, Verna doesn’t need to, say, rise up from the table during open heart surgery and stab Victorine with a scalpel. Events have already been set in motion; she can let Victorine take care of it this time. And Victorine promptly obliges, reacting to the horror of remembering what she did with a wild-eyed speech before stabbing herself in the heart. It’s exactly what she tried and failed to warn Freddie and Tamerlane about earlier in the episode: With the walls closing in, the house of Usher might just start destroying itself.
Bumps in the Night
• Now that the Ushers have figured out Verna was present at the first three deaths, Madeline throws out a theory: The woman targeting their family is yet another one of Roderick’s illegitimate children, who bears an uncanny resemblance to their mother, the barmaid whom Roderick slept with on New Year’s Eve in 1979. We’ve already seen Verna do way too much supernatural stuff for this to be an actual, plausible answer, but it’s interesting to think about what House of Usher might have looked like if the series had strung us along with non-supernatural red herrings for a little while.
• Roderick, however, believes the killings would stop if he just killed himself. He contemplates a few characteristically dramatic options — a Ligodone overdose, an Egyptian khopesh in the gut, a 70-floor leap off a balcony — before concluding that he’s not yet ready to die.
• The informant mystery has (probably) been solved: Pressed by Roderick, Dupin confesses that he made it up, hoping that the Ushers would turn on each other. It’s a solution that’s logical, with the unfortunate side effect of bringing Dupin down to the Usher family’s level — though with three episodes left, I wouldn’t completely bar the possibility of another twist on this subject.
• It’s hard to miss the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” needle drop, but you might have missed that the song Victorine was blasting when Roderick showed up was “Hard on the Heart,” by Kingsborough.
• Shout-out to the production designer who gave Tamerlane and Bill-T’s bedroom that very kinky mirror headboard.
• “Don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. I mean, I’m not scared of rattlesnakes because they’re smart.”
