“ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the bottom shall be lifted — nevermore! ” — Edgar Allan Poe, “ The Raven ”
There was noway important riddle in how The Fall of the House of Usher would end, not just because the ending is in the title. From the veritably morning, the show has been laced with fatalism — its horror and tragedy coming from the fact that the fates of people who did n’t indeed live yet were sealed by a deal Roderick and Madeline made decades before the series began.
In the series homestretch, we eventually get the raw details on how that devil’s bargain went down. Sitting in the bar on the cataclysmal New Year’s Eve, Verna offers Roderick and Madeline a deal They can have all the plutocrat and power they ’ve ever wanted for the rest of their lives and without the trouble of legal consequences, on one condition — when they die, the Usher bloodline dies with them.
We knew that part, of course; we ’ve just spent the once seven occurrences watching Roderick’s kiddies suffer colorful hilariously horrible deaths.( Madeline, sensibly, got an IUD.) But until Verna actually laid out the terms, I had n’t completely reused the allegorical field The Fall of the House of Usher is playing on. “ Let the coming generation bottom the bill, ” she says. They happily accept, and at that moment, Roderick and Madeline come stand- sways for an entire generation that laid in wealth, extorted environmental and political annihilation on the world, and stuck the coming generation with the consequences. In the end, that’s House of Usher’s real game a shot across the arc of the Boomers( which your millennial recapper set up substantially satisfying).
It’s intriguing that this moment comes after Roderick and Madeline have formerly made their big plays First torturing over Dupin, also — by a power snare that has been heavily, heavily answered — chaining Rufus Griswold to a construction point and erecting a slipup wall over him, in the show’s nod to my particular pick for Poe’s most horrifying story, “ The Cask of Amontillado. ”
It’s enough to make one wonder Did Verna do anything? The path was laid for Roderick and Madeline’s subjection well before she approached them. History is full of stories about fat, important people wriggling out of legal consequences without the aid of a magic raven( though Verna does reveal that she cut a deal with another similar person, covenanting that he could indeed shoot notoriety in the middle of Fifth Avenue without it going him a thing).
Whatever the verity about the precise nature of her intervention, bills do come due. The tragedy of the occasion, for Roderick and Verna, is that the deal also applies to that rare and radiant demoiselle whom the angels named Lenore. When Verna comes to claim her rearmost victim, she’s uncommonly gentle and kind. She indeed gives Lenore the knowledge that her mama will go on to help millions via a charity in her honor — a direct reproach of the life Roderick lived, which redounded in the deaths of millions. And also she kills her with a soft valve to the forepart.
And that brings us back to the present, as Roderick and Dupin play out the end of a drama decades in the timber. The frequent textbooks Roderick has entered from “ Lenore, ” he reveals, were just Madeline’sA.I. model sticking out variations on the word “ nevermore. ” And Madeline herself is alive in the basement however she ’d presumably prefer not to be because Roderick cured her, dipped her eyes out, and replaced them with sapphires.( A burial fit for a queen is only a nice gesture if the queen is, you know, surely dead.) She races up the stairs and strangles Roderick to death, finishing a job their mama started a half- century beforehand, shortly before the factual house of Usher collapses in the storm, ending the family for good.
before in the occasion, Dupin told Roderick he was n’t sure what constituted a befitting consequence for Roderick’s sins but that he ’d know it when he saw it. How can any one consequence fit the crime of bringing so important pain and death into the world? I ’m not sure House of Usher has an answer to that question; Madeline, specially, goes to her grave with no regrets at each, and Roderick’s losses are horrible but a drop in the pail compared with the damage he did to the world.
perhaps, in the end, the stylish vengeance is living well. As House of Usher concludes, Fortunato has been disassembled — its unfathomable resources being voided to help people rather of hurt them — and Dupin is saying good- bye to the Ushers formerly and for all. “ I ’m going home to my hubby, my kiddies, their kiddies, ” he says Roderick’s monument. “ I ’m the richest man in the world, you know that? ” Who could argue with him?
Bumps in the Night
• We do n’t get to see them reunite — and actually, I ca n’t flash back if they indeed participated a single word on- screen — but it’s worth noting that both Morrie and Juno’s recovery times were projected at exactly three times. I like the idea of these two women getting together after all those times and hotting
each other for surviving their horrible Usher men.
• I ’m a little disappointed we noway got a standalone Arthur Pym occasion — at the veritably least, I ’d like a more coherent answer on why he was so singularly devoted to Roderick but I guess that’s what The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is for.
• Another troubling little riddle that I guess will noway be resolved If Verna’s bar was all an vision, who were the other patrons at that New Year’s Eve party?
• In what feels like a sign that Annabel’s review actually entered Madeline’s armor, she borrows Annbel’s parting judgment, “ You're so small, ” for Rufus’s grave.
• Roderick says he’s most like Tamerlane because he outsources closeness, which surely makes it sound like he’s familiar with the specifics of her bedroom penchants. Weird family.
• It’s enough cold that Roderick agrees to the end of his birth when he formerly has two kiddies.
• In its moral quandaries, the show gamely criticizes its own actuality If we stopped product on all film and television shows for just one time and rerouted the plutocrat toward battling starvation, poverty, and complaint, those problems would all be resolved, Verna says.
• What Verna left on the grave of each Usher A mask for Prospero, a smartphone for Camille, that missing Gucci cat collar for Napoleon, the heart device prototype for Victorine, a Goldbug leg for Tamerlane, medicines for Frederick, sapphires for Madeline, a cognac glass for Roderick, and — specially, the only time we ever see Verna bequeath commodity of herself without any strings attached — a raven feather for Lenore.
• Yes, the Pentagon really does spend about$ 84 million a time on Viagra.
• “ Ah- mohn- tihl- ah- do. ” Yeah, Rufus merited what he got.
• Verna concluded this story with one last round of Poe’s “ Spirits of the Dead, ” so I ’ll do the same.
• That’s a serape on The Fall of the House of Usher and on Mike Flanagan’s run of spooky limited series for Netflix since he decamped for Amazon about a time ago. For all my fellow Flanafans Where do you suppose House of Usher heaps up alongside Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and the gone- too- soon Midnight Club? Sound off in the commentary below.