The Fall of the House of Usher

Episode Reviews

Oct. 12, 2023—S1, Ep1: “A Midnight Dreary”

The story opens at the triple funeral of three of Roderick Usher’s children. But then Roderick sees a strange, but very familiar woman in the church balcony. And after he collapses as he leaves the church itself, Roderick decides to invite his nemesis, C.A. Dupin, to his childhood home. “I called you tonight to give you the only thing you’ve ever wanted,” Roderick tells Dupin. “My confession.”

From there, the story flashes back to both Roderick’s distant past (when he and his sister were raised by their deeply religious, deeply disturbed single mother) and the more recent past—the last time the entire Usher family was together. And that was at a trial that Dupin himself led. There, Dupin brought charges against Roderick and Madeline’s powerful drug company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. And Dupin alleges in court that an Usher has been leaking him information.

In the more present timeline, Madeline says that she will literally kill anyone who leaked the info. When she’s through with the informant, she thunders, “There won’t be enough of you left to sue. I’ll have to sue the bloody puddle of gore in the designer shoes.”

Speaking of which, someone is buried prematurely. The victim ultimately digs out of her grave and, covered in mud, strangles somebody else. We see a chimpanzee on an operating table and a beating heart within the animal’s bloody chest cavity. It’s suggested that a man and woman may have killed someone. Roderick collapses as his nose bleeds. We see pictures of Roderick’s deceased children in Dupin’s office, each with brief glimpses of newspaper clippings that suggest how they died. We’re told that opioids like the one that Fortunato brought to market have been the cause of thousands of deaths. We learn that Roderick’s father once said, “Children are never too tender to be whipped. They’re like beefsteaks: The more you beat them, the more tender they become.” We see a badly injured ankle.

At the funeral, we see stained glass windows with Jesus and hear the preacher offer a rather dark eulogy. And in the flashback to Roderick and Madeline’s childhood, we learn about their very religious mother as she sinks into a painful illness. “Pain and suffering are like the kiss of Jesus,” she tells them. “It just means you’ve come so close that He can kiss you.” (Roderick profanely quips that God kissed the “living f— out of my mother in the years that followed.”) She believes that her faith alone will heal her; and when Madeline suggests getting help from doctors and medicine, her mother snaps, “Where is your faith? Your body is a temple to God, and you’d pollute it?”

But the older woman also seems to conflate her children’s father—Mr. Longfellow, the married head of Fortunato back then—with God himself. She says that Longfellow is “just like God the Father is on high and loves us from far away.” We see a cross above the mother’s bed.

Napoleon Usher, one of Roderick’s children, is bisexual. We see him kiss another man, and he has an explicit sexual encounter with a woman as well. We see another of Roderick’s children, Victorine, with her female significant other. We hear that Dupin (a man) has a husband. Prospero tries to sell Roderick on his nightclub scheme, telling his father, “I’m selling hedonism, privilege. It’s a dark room with few rules, fewer consequences.” He makes a reference to oral sex. Other references are made to sexual anatomy.

Roderick pours out a glass of cognac—the bottle of which cost him 4 million euros. “A single pour probably cost twice your annual salary,” he tells Dupin. We see someone drunk. Victorine uses an illegal paralytic as part of her work. Prospero serves his father some high-shelf whiskey.

We hear more than 25 f-words, a half-dozen s-words and several other profanities (“a–,” “b–tard” and “p-ss”). God’s name is misused four times, twice with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused twice.

Oct. 12, 2023—S1, Ep2: “The Masque of the Red Death”

Roderick continues his narrative to Dupin. And when Roderick sees one of his dead children in the room, he explains that he’s suffering from vascular dementia—a disease that generally kills you in five years and includes, as one of its many side effects, hallucinations.

In the distant past, a young Roderick proposes the concept of Ligodone (the drug that would later fuel the Usher fortune) to his boss at Fortunato, alleging the drug has “no side effects” and is “non-addictive.” In the recent past, Prospero plots to go into the party business—charging $10,000 for a “membership fee,” another $5,000 at the door. The first party will take place at a deserted Fortunato factory. “Sex and drugs are the theme,” he tells his friends/lovers. “The orgy starts at midnight.”

Prospero’s piece of the story begins in his bedroom, where he’s lying down with several naked revelers. (Full-frontal male nudity is seen in the shadows.) Of his two primary friends/lovers, one is a woman, the other appears to be genetically male but who would identify as nonbinary (wearing makeup and women’s clothing). His expensive “orgy” is filled with revelers in various stages of undress (including full-frontal female nudity and several topless dancers), writhing about on the dance floor and engaged in what would seem to be foreplay. The locale is also equipped with bedrooms: In surveillance footage, Prospero and others watch some of his guests engaged in sex. Incidentally, he lured his brother’s wife to the party with false promises of a consequence-free night and total anonymity.

Prospero meets a strange woman in red, thong-style lingerie during the party. She tells Prospero that there’s still time to stop what’s coming. “Things like this—all things, in fact—have consequences,” she says. She alludes to Roderick’s encounter with Prospero’s mother. “You are consequence, Perry,” she tells him.

Camille (another of Roderick’s illegitimate children) prepares to have sex with both of her young assistants (one male, one female). The assistants strip down to their underwear, while Camille wears a brassiere that doesn’t quite cover one of her breasts. Tamerlane’s husband, Bill, engages in roleplay with a hired actress. The two have dinner as Tamerlane watches and appears to start masturbating. We hear a lot of references to sexual acts, bodily fluids and body parts. Someone calls Roderick’s new wife, Juno, a “child bride.” (She’s of age, but certainly much younger than Roderick.) We see a picture of a woman’s nipple as the wallpaper on someone’s phone. There’s a reference to necrophilia.

Prospero asks his half-brother, Napoleon, for Viagra and other drugs for his party. Prospero snorts what appears to be cocaine with his friends/lovers. Adrenaline is injected into a chimpanzee. We hear a great deal about the drug Ligodone. When it appears that there won’t be any water available to drink at Prospero’s party, he says it doesn’t matter: “Everybody’s drinking Dom anyway,” referring to champagne. We also hear that party drugs such as Ecstasy and MDMA are readily available. People drink heavily at the party. Others drink and smoke at dinner. Characters say nearly 65 f-words, five s-words and other profanities (“a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “god–n,” “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ss.”) Jesus’ name is abused four times.

[Spoiler warning] Prospero’s party would begin in earnest when the sprinklers would go off and “rain” would come down. But what came down wasn’t rain: It appeared to be acid. We see those mostly naked revelers have their skin crackle and burn, and the dance floor is soon a mass of the dead and dying—looking for all the world as if they’ve all started to melt. The mysterious woman places a skull mask on Prospero’s dying form after kissing him on the mouth. Later, Prospero’s charred, deformed visage haunts Roderick.

Oct. 12, 2023—S1, Ep3: “Murders in the RUE Morgue”

The Ushers “grieve” Prospero’s death—deemed by all to be a tragic accident—and Camille schemes with how to spin it to the family’s advantage. She plans to lie about whose party it was and to reveal that Prospero quietly and generously gave to several charities. It’s a lie, but she knows that it’ll increase public sympathy. She also plans to pick into her half-sister Victorine’s suspicious medical experiments. But her investigation takes a dark turn.

Camille is told several rumors about what goes on in Victorine’s facility: She obscures the fact that her chimpanzee subjects have died by cutting them up and carrying them out of the facility in a specially lined bag. We don’t see this allegation play out, but we do see several chimps—and one human—with gruesome scars on their chests.

We also learn the aftermath of Prospero’s ill-fated party: Seventy-eight people dead (“so far,” the family lawyer says). That lawyer, Arthur Pym, goes into the taped-off site, takes Prospero’s phone and finds a woman still alive. One survivor, Morelle Usher (the wife of eldest Usher son, Frederick) is wrapped in bandages that she frenetically tries to take off. (When she successfully unwraps her head, Morelle’s daughter, who looks on, screams.) The substance that caused all that destruction was apparently byproducts from Fortunato’s drug-making operations. Roderick admits to Dupin that he’d planned to store the gunk in tanks, then dispose of them secretly to avoid EPA fines.

Victorine and her female partner, Al, kiss. Camille begins to disrobe in preparation to have sex with her underlings, Toby and Tami. (They refuse, telling her they’re in love with each other. We see Camille in a black bra.) Tamerlane and her husband engage in another round of roleplay with an apparent actress (actually the same mysterious woman who appeared to Roderick in the church and to Prospero at his party). Tamerlane reaches between her legs as she watches a dinner scene, apparently preparing to masturbate.

In a monologue about what the Usher family does when it’s given lemons, he includes references to genetically designing lemons to look a bit more like breasts and getting a “Kardashian to suck a lemon in a leaked sex tape.” Someone looks at a pornographic magazine. (The cover features the bikini-clad chest of a woman.)

Napoleon and Camille eat edibles, and Napoleon snorts cocaine to counteract those edibles. When Camille tells Napoleon’s male partner that Napoleon wants to marry him, the partner says, “Did he mean it? Or is it just the edibles and the pot and the speed and the wine and the coke and the pills talking?” Napoleon also is throwing a party that evening, and he tells Camille that he’s aiming for a “total blackout.”

We hear about people losing loved ones to opioids. It’s alleged that 50,000 people have died using Fortunato painkillers. Roderick drinks his cognac.

One of Victorine’s test chimpanzees gets loose and kills a young woman. The body is found the next day, brutalized and disfigured, in a lab painted with blood and grime. The body of a black cat—stabbed to death, apparently—is discovered, and the apartment in which it was found is slick with blood. (Someone tries to cover up the act and tells the owner that the cat likely just walked off.) We hear that a hundred million animals are used each year in everything from medical research to cosmetic testing. “Human beings doing this to so many other species,” someone says.

We hear about people lying, cheating and manipulating various systems. The f-word is uttered at least 30 times, the s-word several more times and the c-word is used once. A bevy of other profanities are spoken as well.