The Fall of the House of Usher – The Pit and the Pendulum

By: Kelly Kearney

Named after another Edgar Allan Poe short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is about hope born out of despair and finding the will to survive against insurmountable odds. In this case, the hope we’re talking about is Frederick Usher’s incapacitated wife whom we last saw undergoing unbelievable torture at the hands of her jealous husband. With five of his six siblings dead, Frederick is the last Usher kid standing, so we know his time is running out. For Morelle, that end couldn’t come soon enough.

M.U. E. Madeline Usher Enterprises?

We begin with young Freddy (William Kosovic)) sitting in the living room playing with his toys and watching a cat clock ticking on the wall while his father (Zach Gilford) and Auguste Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin) go over questions for the trial against Griswold (Michael Trucco). Pulling Auguste aside to speak with him alone, Annabel (Katie Parker) wants the man to give her his word that he will keep her husband safe– win or lose. She is risking a lot if this plan of theirs doesn’t work out and she needs guarantees from the man who dragged their family into this. He makes that promise to her; even if Dupin loses his job he will make sure he takes care of them.  Cut to the older Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) telling Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) that he believes there are no good Ushers–Annabel was the best of the bunch. Roderick corrects him, Lenore is the best of all of them. His young granddaughter has all of the best traits of her grandmother besides the woman’s broken heart. From the way Roderick talks about his first wife, it sounds like she has been gone for many years.

Next, we see him meeting with Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) about Tamerlane’s (Samantha Sloyan) death. He still is not ready to believe his sister about Verna (Carla Gugino), even if Mads managed to grab a hold of the woman before she disappeared. The evidence is the soot on Madeline’s hands Verna left behind. Roderick refuses to even entertain the thought, he is more concerned about the board votes that are scheduled to happen soon, knowing the unhinged Frederick (Henry Thomas) Is the key vote to ensure that they don’t lose the company. He just won’t meet his sister halfway and it pushes her to call a meeting with Pym to discuss whether or not Roderick is mentally fit to continue leading the company. His health is declining, and a CEO  seeing visions and talking to walls would probably do more to frighten off the board than any trial or family death. She sees this as an opening to take over the company and turn this pill-pushing business into a tech company with her as the new CEO. After all, she did tell Verna forty years ago that she never wanted a man to hold power over her. She played the long game and now her time has come. Not that she doesn’t love her brother, they have been inseparable since the moment of conception, but she was always the brains behind Roderick’s decisions. It’s why it is tough for her to plot behind the man’s back but the company comes first, followed by her ambition and her love of money.

Vengeance is Freddy’s

It’s like Stephen King’s Chez Misery over at Freddy’s house as he does his best Kathy Bates impression as the jilted husband obsessed with making his wife pay a price for something she didn’t do.  We see he has been busy wallpapering Morelle’s (Crystal Balint) at-home hospital room with photos of the two of them looking happy and in love. He wants her to remember the good times as he poisons her and leaves her in a comatose state. We also catch a glimpse of what makes Frederick tick and it seems It’s a lack of respect this family has for him. The Froderick nickname and the constant bullying whittled him down to this broken and disturbing man. No one–not even his wife and child respects him or thinks he is capable of making the right decisions for the family and the company. He is a joke to them and that pain is what is driving him to this insanity–or at least that is what he tells himself. We cut to a meeting he has with his father where Roderick tells him he is the last hope to save their family. His vote would solidify Usher’s control of the company so Freddy promises to do whatever it takes to make the man proud.

Over at the Usher Mansion, Juno (Ruth Codd) is meeting with Roderick’s doctor (Paul Jarrett) to talk about walking back on her Ligodone usage. If you remember in an earlier episode, Roderick convinced her to stick with her daily pills regimen because she is living proof the drug is not only harmless but effective. Surprisingly the doctor gives her directions on how to slowly wean herself off of it, which is something that helps her later on in the episode when she is confronted by Roderick.

Addictions come in all forms and Freddy’s seems to be jealousy, narcissism, and ego. He is beyond obsessed over his wife and Prospero (Sauriyan Sopkota) plotting behind his back and now he wants to tear down the building where he thought the two hooked up. On the phone with a demolition team, he pretends to be the CEO of R.U.E. to get the wrecking ball rolling. It works and that seems to be only part of his plan to make the woman pay, In what can be only described as one of the most painfully gruesome scenes of the series, Freddy turns to his wife and tells her that his father raised him to be the authority of his house and then he starts ripping her teeth out one by one! His cruelty is beyond reproach, and later Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) confronts him about why the specialist her mother was supposed to see never showed up. She also expresses concern for his bizarre behavior, which angers him so he grounds her. Lenore is not allowed to leave the house or see her mother, and this is where the plot for the title comes in. It’s about enduring pain for your survival so that you can save the ones you love the most and Morelle can use a helping hand from her overly ambitious daughter.

Back to storytime, where Dupin is getting tired of Roderick’s 7-hour tale and feels like his nemesis, it’s just jerking him around. When he gets up to leave he finally sees it; there is something–no, someone, in the mirror! He can see what Roderick has seen the whole series as a very dead Freddy stares back at him. Now the two men are on equal footing and Roderick admits that his children’s spirits have been guiding this meeting from the invite, just to make sure he told their story correctly. If he continues to listen until the end, Dupin can forget about the Ligodone case because he will be able to pin two murder charges on Roderick. In what was probably one of the best jump scares of the series, we see the child version of Freddy and his mother walk into the room behind Auguste. Roderick smiles at his son but when he picks him up Freddy falls into a trance and when he looks up towards the ceiling,  his body is violently torn in half. The vision is an especially gorey moment but very effective considering how badly this viewer wants Freddy to pay the price for what he’s done. We know whatever happened to this child is coming for Freddy, and if any of the Usher kids deserved Verna’s wrath he certainly ranks at the top of the list.

Harnessing Destiny

In a flashback we see young Roderick and his family standing outside the courtroom getting ready for his testimony. From across the hallway, his sister Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) stares at him as if the two have a plan she is reminding him of. Then we cut to the court’s mediation room where Roderick stabs a shocked Dupin in the back and lies under oath claiming those signatures were his and not forged! He also lies and says the investigator has been harassing his family and threatening him to testify. The case swings in a direction Dupin never expected but after he walks out of the courtroom and sees Madeline smirking he must know this was a set-up from the moment Roderick answered the door. Next, we see Roderick getting arrested and a worried Annabel, but Mads is cool, calm, and collected as if getting rid of her brother was part of her plan all along. She ordered Roderick to play both sides of this case from the middle so in the end she could clear the board for herself. Later, she tells Annabel about the plan and how it was always to make Roderick the most important person in the company but from prison, it sure looks like she is lying. Annabel calls her, “a small person” and Madeline devolves the woman to tears over her useless kind-heartedness and purity–it got her brother nowhere.

When we cut back to adult Madeline she is sitting in her car removing her wig to reveal her natural gray. We can assume she masks it with the long blonde wig because she sees her age as a weakness. She wants people to think she is as strong and capable as she was the day Verna called her a queen because she knows how hard it is to be a woman in a man’s world. One can be the fifth smartest person on the planet but unless you’re pretty, nobody takes you seriously. She learned that from Griswold (Michael Trucco) and that life lessons in misogyny and power dynamics in the workforce stuck. Now with her gray hair, we see her wander into her childhood home looking for Verna and of course she is there waiting for her. She tells Mads her brother has been coming to the house for weeks and putting boxes down in the basement. Oh, and he has also been doing a lot of crying. Madeline is as intrigued as she is judgemental about her brother’s behavior, but she is not there to talk about Roderick–she wants to renegotiate their 40-year deal. Finally, we are getting closer to what happened on New Year’s Eve and why the toxic twins needed an alibi from this deadly bartender. Verna easily denies her request but as the two women sort of jockey with each other like equals, Madeline manages to grab the woman and snap her neck! I guess she never learned she can’t kill what’s already dead! Verna reappears in an instant forcing Madeline to apologize for her homicidal misunderstanding. Verna finds the entire package of Madeline so appealing she moves past their murdery moment to tell the woman she has always been one of her favorites, she gets how she operates and always finds her to be impressive and similar to herself.

Speaking of impressive females in the Usher family, Lenore manages to break into her mother’s room and what she finds lying in the bed is horrifying.  She cannot believe what her father has done to her mother. Meanwhile, Juno shows up at Roderick’s office to tell him she still wants to get off of Ligodone. He warns her of all the horrible side effects that will last an estimated and agonizing three years before she is clean of the drug. He reminds her how she was his creation from the moment they met and she became his walking and talking proof this drug is a miracle. He is Frankenstein and she is his perfect creation and getting off the drugs will ruin that for him. He equates himself to water and his wife the flower that helps her grow and goes on to say that he married her because he saw her as a project. Juno is no project–in fact, she has a mind of her own and decides to take three years in Hell rather than spend another second with him. Out of all the Ushers who had a choice, Juno chose what was right for her and it might have saved her life.

The City in the Sea

In another Poe shout-out, we head back to Madeline and Verna discussing pain and how the bartender is the master of it but also its witness. Considering how all of the Usher kids died she also seems to enjoy it. Maybe that’s why she finds Madeline so appealing and offers her clarity with nothing expected in return. They speak on truth and poetry and Verna even mentions a realm she has discovered, and then recites the poem, “The City in the Sea.” The theme shares one with this episode, about a treacherous King ruling a doomed city whose only light shines down from the city his subjects can never reach. The whole scene is a foreshadow of what’s to come and she tells Madeline as much when she hints that her moment of clarity will make sense soon.

At the end of the episode, we see Lenore vowing to help her mother while her father is meeting with construction workers at the site of Perry’s party. He is ready to tear that love shack down but before it’s turned to rubble he goes inside hoping to find his wife’s missing wedding ring. He was convinced she wore it to the club and Pym must have missed it when he collected her belongings at the crime scene. Once inside he urinates on the floor as if he’s desecrating the memory of his brother Perry. Then, all of a sudden, Freddy falls to the ground and passes out. The man has been living on Leo’s drug supply and it finally caught up to him…or did it? We hear footsteps approaching and they belong to Verna; this is the death we viewers have been waiting for! She tells him she put poisonous nightshade into that powder he has been sniffing after she watched him torture his wife. The nightshade and her influence chirping in his ear is why he quickly turned from a pathetic man into a psychopath. In a flashback to the scene where he is playing amateur dentist with his terrified wife, we see Nurse Verna standing behind him giving him the option to choose a kinder approach. Just like his siblings he chose wrong and sealed his fate. Back in the building, Freddy is still lying on the floor listening to Verna as she mimics her voice to sound like his and calls the construction crew to fire up those wrecking balls. They have no idea the owner of the building is immobile on the floor and they’re about to rain Havoc down on top of him. Before he dies she tells him that his father in another life could have been a poet and he could have been a good dentist since he has a knack for taking out teeth. He sees the wrecking ball approaching and it reminds him of that cat clock ticking from the opening minutes. As the building starts falling we see the pendulum swing above him and Frederick with Verna beside him preparing for his slow death. Verna admits it didn’t have to be this way but as the pendulum swipes the air closer and closer it eventually chops Frederick in half.

Next, we see Madeline in the basement of Fortunato’s telling her brother how Freddy died. She reminds him of the deal they made all those years ago, both knowing there is only one way out of it. She needs him to be the hero of the family, it’s the only way. She hands him a handful of Ligodone and watches as he swallows them down. As Roderick dies we see Madeline telling him he’s a legend–a veritable King for saving them all. Taking his final breaths Madeline gets distracted by that same noise he heard behind that brick basement wall but instead of falling into its trap, she chooses to walk away. That is when we see a disembodied hand reach down and touch Roderick’s head and all of a sudden his eyes open! The hand belongs to Verna, standing above him with a smile; his death is not meant to be that easy. With only one episode left and two Usher’s to go, the season finale should be one bloody good time!