“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted — nevermore!†— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Ravenâ€
There was never much mystery in how The Fall of the House of Usher would end, not just because the ending is in the title. From the very beginning, the show has been laced with fatalism — its horror and tragedy coming from the fact that the fates of people who didn’t even exist yet were sealed by a deal Roderick and Madeline made decades before the series began.
In the series finale, we finally get the raw details on how that devil’s bargain went down. Sitting in the bar on the fateful New Year’s Eve, Verna offers Roderick and Madeline a deal: They can have all the money and power they’ve ever wanted for the rest of their lives and without the threat 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 past seven episodes watching Roderick’s kids suffer various hilariously gruesome deaths. (Madeline, sensibly, got an IUD.) But until Verna actually laid out the terms, I hadn’t fully processed the allegorical field The Fall of the House of Usher is playing on. “Let the next generation foot the bill,†she says. They happily accept, and at that moment, Roderick and Madeline become stand-ins for an entire generation that hoarded wealth, wreaked environmental and political havoc on the world, and stuck the next generation with the consequences. In the end, that’s House of Usher’s real game: a shot across the bow of the boomers (which your millennial recapper found mostly satisfying).
It’s interesting that this moment comes after Roderick and Madeline have already made their big plays: first screwing over Dupin, then — in a power grab that has been heavily, heavily telegraphed — chaining Rufus Griswold to a construction site and building a brick wall over him, in the show’s nod to my personal pick for Poe’s most horrifying story, “The Cask of Amontillado.â€
It’s enough to make one wonder: Did Verna do anything? The path was laid for Roderick and Madeline’s conquest well before she approached them. History is full of stories about wealthy, powerful people wriggling out of legal consequences without the aid of a magic raven (though Verna does reveal that she cut a deal with another such person, vowing that he could even shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without it costing him a thing).
Whatever the truth about the precise nature of her intervention, bills do come due. The tragedy of the episode, for Roderick and Verna, is that the deal also applies to that rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore. When Verna comes to claim her latest victim, she’s uncommonly gentle and kind. She even gives Lenore the knowledge that her mother will go on to help millions via a charity in her honor — a direct rebuke of the life Roderick lived, which resulted in the deaths of millions. And then she kills her with a soft tap to the forehead.
And that brings us back to the present, as Roderick and Dupin play out the end of a drama decades in the making. The frequent texts Roderick has received from “Lenore,†he reveals, were just Madeline’s A.I. model spitting out variations on the word “nevermore.†And Madeline herself is alive in the basement — though she’d probably prefer not to be because Roderick drugged her, scooped 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, definitely dead.) She races up the stairs and strangles Roderick to death, finishing a job their mother started a half-century early, shortly before the actual house of Usher collapses in the storm, ending the family for good.
Earlier in the episode, Dupin told Roderick he wasn’t sure what constituted a fitting 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 much pain and death into the world? I’m not sure House of Usher has an answer to that question; Madeline, notably, goes to her grave with no regrets at all, and Roderick’s losses are horrible but a drop in the bucket compared with the damage he did to the world.
Maybe, in the end, the best revenge is living well. As House of Usher concludes, Fortunato has been dismantled — its unfathomable coffers being emptied to help people instead of hurt them — and Dupin is saying good-bye to the Ushers once and for all. “I’m going home to my husband, my kids, their kids,†he says Roderick’s gravestone. “I’m the richest man in the world, you know that?†Who could argue with him?
Bumps in the Night
• We don’t get to see them reunite — and honestly, I can’t remember if they even shared a single word onscreen — but it’s worth noting that both Morrie and Juno’s recovery times were pinned at exactly three years. I like the idea of these two women getting together after all those years and toasting each other for surviving their horrible Usher men.
• I’m a little disappointed we never got a standalone Arthur Pym episode — at the very 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 nagging little mystery that I guess will never be resolved: If Verna’s bar was all an illusion, who were the other patrons at that New Year’s Eve party?
• In what feels like a sign that Annabel’s criticism actually penetrated Madeline’s armor, she borrows Annbel’s parting judgment, “You are so small,†for Rufus’s tomb.
• Roderick says he’s most like Tamerlane because he outsources intimacy, which definitely makes it sound like he’s familiar with the specifics of her bedroom proclivities. Weird family.
• It’s pretty cold that Roderick agrees to the end of his bloodline when he already has two kids.
• In its moral quandaries, the show gamely criticizes its own existence: If we stopped production on all film and TV shows for just one year and rerouted the money toward battling starvation, poverty, and disease, 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 pin for Tamerlane, drugs for Frederick, sapphires for Madeline, a cognac glass for Roderick, and — notably, the only time we ever see Verna bequeath something of herself without any strings attached — a raven feather for Lenore.
• Yes, the Pentagon really does spend about $84 million a year on Viagra.
• “Ah-mohn-tihl-ah-do.†Yeah, Rufus deserved what he got.
• Verna concluded this story with one last round of Poe’s “Spirits of the Dead,â€Â so I’ll do the same.
• That’s a wrap 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 year ago. For all my fellow Flanafans: Where do you think House of Usher stacks up alongside Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and the gone-too-soon Midnight Club? Sound off in the comments below.