The Fall of the House of Usher – The Raven

Death warned them all, but none of them listened, that’s the big takeaway from “The Fall of the House of Usher;” how greed, narcissism, and the quest for power, can make us deaf to human suffering–sometimes, even our own. Nobody learned this lesson harder than the man who struck a deal with the devil herself and cursed his bloodline from birth to the grave. Legacy was Roderick Usher’s downfall; his need to recapture his birthright wound up taking more from him than any absentee father could. In the series finale of the Mike Flanagan miniseries, we finally find out what happened on that fateful New Year’s Eve in 1979 and how one toast led to the Usher family’s massacre. The reveals are delivered in three parts: How they gained power, who paid the price, and what good could be mined from its ashes There is a lot to cover in this finale–from who Verna is, to what’s up with that all-seeing raven, so pour yourself a glass of a 100-year-old Cognac, and strap into the final hour of The Fall of the House of Usher, because after this episode, the billionaire family will be, “nevermore,” and you can quote the Raven on that.

A Brief Recap of How The Ushers Fell…

In less than two weeks, billionaire businessman Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) buried all six of his adult children, each dying in an extremely brutal way inspired by each of their, let’s just say, unique personalities. While unraveling why this family of worldwide pill pushers who unleashed an opioid epidemic on mankind–among other deadly horrors, managed to amass such wealth without ever paying a consequence for the lives they destroyed, we meet Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the U.S. Assistant Attorney who’s spent a lifetime trying to make the Usher family pay for their crimes. After Roderick buries the last three kids, he invites Dupin to his childhood house to hear his confession–an unbelievable story about how the House of Usher fell and why all of it is his fault. To understand how these two men got here, we have to go back to 1953, to Roderick’s mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), a secretary for Fortunato Pharmaceuticals and the mistress to the CEO, William Longfellow (Robert Longstreet). Their affair produced twins– Roderick and Madeline (Mary McDonnell), and a fatherless childhood of poverty and loss for years after. With no help from their father, the twins struggled and by their teenage years, were forced to watch their mother die from a painful form of inherited dementia, which later pushed Roderick to pursue a career in medicine. Her son swore to find a way to save others from the pain they saw Eliza go through. So, after their father died, the young Roderick (Zach Gilford) landed a low-level job at his father’s company with the hope that he could find a way to take back what was rightfully his–the company and the power that comes with it. During his time at Fortunato, he meets the despicable CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) a  man who treats Roderick like a scapegoat for all of his crimes, and the brilliant Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) like she is his in-office lapdance. When Roderick comes up with a miracle painkiller that could rake in millions and take the world by storm, Griswold steals his unpatented idea and things get worse from here. He dupes patients into joining his dangerous drug trials and proceeds to forge Roderick’s name on documents claiming the company explained the risks. Griswold even went as far as grave robbing the bodies of the patients who died rather than leaving any evidence that could tie back to Fortunato. Every illegal move he made he forged Roderick’s signature like a cosigner to his crimes. Enter the young Auguste Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin)–a fellow paycheck-to-paycheck worker who is investigating Griswold and Fortunato over the missing bodies and the forgeries. When the two men team up to take Griswold down, Madeline devises a plan to play both sides from the middle so her brother can clear the way for himself to take over as CEO. We find out later what happens after New Year’s Eve, but suffice it to say Roderick becomes an untouchable billionaire whose one weakness is trusting his sister.

He’s Back!

Speaking of Mads, the last time we saw her she had just poisoned Roderick in an attempt to break the curse and save her skin. We saw at the end of the last episode how Verna interfered with Mads’ plan and resurrected Roderick. That death was too easy for him and not what Verna had in mind. When he does wake up he is in the basement next to Griswold’s tomb and he is livid over how, “my sister tried to loophole me!” It is almost as if he forgot who his sister is and how comfortable she is with murder if he fits into her agenda. When Verna vanishes he hears those bells from Griswold’s jester’s hat, and now we know why he kept wandering down to the basement to stare at that brick wall. His guilty conscience is ringing those bells. As soon as he hears them jingle the jester appears and grabs him but then he is gone in a blink of an eye.

When Roderick shows up unannounced at the office he finds a completely unsurprised Madeline and a clueless Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), discussing her new appointment as CEO of Fortunato. All Roderick can say to the sister who killed him is, “Well, this is awkward.” Madeline tries to smooth over the citation by saying the board was nervous about his illness and inability to lead, but this is about her algorithm project and turning the company’s focus to tech. She has always been obsessed with mortality and defying death–it’s why she gobbles up ancient Egyptian artifacts and built an A.I. prototype in the image of Lenore. She believes humans can live on forever through data mapping human consciousness; Fortunato will be leading the way into the future and leaving their opioid crisis in the past. It’s still world-changing but with a smaller body count.

Cut to Dupin learning about what happened to Annabel after she left her husband. Unlike Longfellow, Roderick was generous with his children–too generous, and after years of love bombing them with money and prestige, the kids chose to live with Roderick and abandon their mother. As time went on, the kind souls they inherited from her were tainted by their father’s wealth. Annabel lost everything–her husband, her kids, and the future she had planned for her family. She wound up taking her own life, and we find this out when she confronts Roderick at Tammy and Freddy’s funeral. Her ghost blames him for manipulating their children away from her. She always thought he was a rich man, “but I see you. The poverty of you,” the emptiness of her heart was on full display, and even her ghost couldn’t stomach looking at it. She disappears and he walks out of the church right into the limo with the jester waiting to knock him to the ground bleeding from the nose and staring into the eyes of the raven.

While all of this is an interesting story, Auguste Dupin is a busy man and he has been sitting in that dank house for hours waiting for a confession that has yet to come. He tells Roderick if he can’t get to the point, he is leaving. So, Roderick gives Auguste what he wants and it all started 40 years ago on New Year’s Eve.

We’ll Drink to That

At an office party filled with Fortunato employees celebrating their big court win over Auguste Dupin, we see Griswold practically roll out the red carpet for the man of the hour, Roderick Usher.  Roderick lied on the stand and threw himself under the bus to protect Griswold frm prosecution. Free from the keen eye of the law means that “truthful” testimony deserves a toast. To Roderick! With gratitude, Griswold tells the young Usher he will want for nothing now that he has proven his loyalty to the CEO and the company. Roderick went from a nobody to Rufus’ right-hand man and a trusted confidant, and for that, he will be paid handsomely. If the old saying goes, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” then Madeline has Rufus right where she wants him and that was exactly what Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), was afraid of when she overheard her plotting with Roderick to take Rufus down. The woman was okay risking it all to do the right thing, but Roderick chose greed over ethics and now she is heartbroken over it. Sometime between the end of the trial and New Year’s Eve, Annabel divorced Roderick and took both of his kids; her final words to him were that she realized he was never the man she thought he was.

Now that Roderick is the company’s hero, he is in striking distance to the man leading his father’s company. The plan to kick him out starts with Madeline who offers Rufus a toast from an expensive bottle of wine she knows the bragger won’t be able to turn down. Once the alcohol kicks in she winds up dragging Griswold down in the basement conveniently under construction for a little makeout session. Their romance lasts all of 2 minutes when Griswold starts to stagger and choke and suddenly falls to the ground. That fool wouldn’t know an expensive bottle of Port if his life depended on it–which it does because Madeline spiked it with cyanide! Part one of her venomous plan is behind them but the second is more labor-intensive and requires a trowel, her brother, and a pair of handcuffs.

Madeline’s Deadly Plan

When Griswold comes to he sees Roderick and Madeline bricking him in behind the basement wall. They chained him to a set of pipes so he couldn’t pound his fists to freedom, not that it would matter, the entire office was on vacation for the holidays and wouldn’t be back in until the following week. With each brick they lay and a homicidal smirk they show him, reality starts to sink in for Rufus; he will rot away in this brick tomb and nobody will hear his final screams. When he doesn’t show up to the office Madeline plans to tell anyone who asks that they hooked up in his car and the last thing she knew, he left the party in search of cocaine. Now that Roderick is known as the man who risked his freedom to save the company, he will do it again and flip on the runaway Griswold–leading the police to all the receipts they would need to make an arrest. Everyone will assume the disgraced CEO is on the run and without someone reading Fortunato, Roderick will naturally offer to take over and keep the ship afloat. Before the last brick goes up Madeline puts the jester mask from Rufus costume over his head–that same jester Roderick saw in his limo the day of the funeral. Usher’s crimes are haunting him but why now? It can’t all be guilt fueling these hallucinations.

Finally, we get the answers to the questions we have been waiting for when we see the twins heading into that dive bar for their alibi. There, they meet Verna (Carla Gugino)–which we now can see is an anagram for Raven, a creature she says can bring people great fortune but can also be a harbinger of death. The mysterious and very flirtatious bartender seems to know everything about these two–including the fact they killed Rufus and needed an alibi for the night. Her knowledge shocks them enough to hear her out when she puts the deal of a lifetime on the table. If she could grant them unimaginable wealth and power but a shortened life where their entire bloodline is extinguished together, would they take it? Considering these two were raised in foster care fighting for scraps, and even now, Roderick can’t afford medicine for his kids, the answer to this hypothetical isn’t a hard one. Yes, they would shave off 20 years or so from their lives if it meant they wouldn’t struggle for anything. Roderick lost his wife and she took his two kids from him, and his sister is single without any children of her own; the answer to this little barroom game of “Would you rather” is simple. It’s just too bad Roderick’s kids never got a choice in their births or untimely deaths but the deal is done and the three crack a 100-year bottle of liquor to toast it. When the twins leave the bar that night it almost feels like it was all a dream. Even the bar itself disappears, but what that bartender predicted was impossible to ignore.

Good Fortune

After they agreed to Verna’s offer everything in the Ushers’ lives changed. Griswold’s body is never found,  Roderick is named the CEO,  and the twins spend the next 4 decades amassing a kingdom of wealth by ripping the coins out of their dead customer’s eyes. In his quest to save the world from pain and undo the horrors his father inflicted on their mother, Roderick becomes something worse than Longfellow ever was, worse than even the man they chained behind that brick wall. The good fortune Verna gave him is now the Usher clan’s undoing and maybe that has something to do with the fact she refers to herself as, “a witness for suffering and pain.” She has not only witnessed all six of the painful Usher brood deaths, but she also witnessed millions more at the hands of their creation–a pill created to ironically end the pain.

In Eliza’s house, we see Roderick admit to Dupin that he lied to himself and the masses; he knew a pill couldn’t eradicate the pain of the world, but the money was good and kept coming in faster than he could care about the lives who were lost. The more addicts he made, the more addicted he was to the wealth he gained, and those who were weak enough to be sacrificed for his Kingdom, he convinced himself, asked for their deaths. As he sits in the ruins of his childhood home surrounded by the ghosts of his children, he finally gives Dupin what he always wanted: an admission of guilt. Each of his children died not by his hands, but because those hands shook the hands of Verna–who might just be the devil incarnate. We can assume this is true after she has a run-in with Arthur Pym, who fails to kill her–not for trying, and the two sit down for a discussion where we learn more about who she is and why she is impressed with his work. She first noticed him when he embarked on that Transglobal expedition. The crimes he committed and was witness to–rape, murder, and the cannibalization of an innocent Inuit woman caught her eye. Arthur admits the group was a bit of a virus infecting every place they landed. “But you are so interesting. That’s why I had to come topside,” she said and it explains so much of the paranormal aspects of her presence. She cannot be killed but she can transform herself into a chimpanzee and that raven who seems to haunt Roderick at funerals and bars. She is death, chaos, and suffering, and bears witness to the consequences of human actions. She bore it across time and space, a realm she told the Usher twins she exists outside of. Arthur has seen this realm; he spoke of it when he told the Usher kids about a world he discovered in the North Pole that exists beyond the two. He has faced Verna before, in his imaginary world he named Ultima Thule–a dream he is quickly learning was real. Like his boss, Pym has never paid a price for his crimes because he was protected under the deal she struck with the Ushers. That deal is dead–as are the twins, and we will get to that shortly, but being left behind will ruin him. Camille had a file on everyone–Arthur Pym included. While it only highlights some of his crimes, there is enough there to send him to prison for 20 years. She offers him a deal to cover up those crimes but he will have to lose the thing he loves most. He politely declines because Arthur Pym is completely alone and would rather take his chances with the law than put his fate in her hands.

One Last Painful Goodbye

The second story Roderick tells is the saddest of the series and it has to do with the reason why Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) keeps calling him throughout his confession to Dupin. After she managed to rescue her mother from her father, who then later died in that building demolition, Lenore heads to her grandfather’s house to check on the ailing man. He has always said she was the best of them and he would protect her, but his blood flows through her veins just like the rest of the cursed Ushers. So, after she tucks her grandfather in for the night she wonders if they can turn all this death into something positive. This family has committed unspeakable things but they can choose better now. Verna overhears her which makes it harder to do what she has to do. She says she takes no joy in it but before she takes Verna’s life she tells her that her mother will inherit a fortune and use it to save millions of lives in her daughter’s memory. With that, Verna touches Lenore’s forehead and the girl dies.

Lastly, the final admission of guilt comes after Roderick finds Lenore dead in her bed. Barefoot and still in his pajamas, Roerick runs to the office where he rants at the ghosts of his dead family who are all quietly sitting around the board table. Verna is also there and points to the storm in the sky that is raining down the bodies of Roderick’s Ligodone victims in front of the windows of his skyscraper. He watches as they pile up below–drowning the streets and rooftops in the dead. This is when Verna tells him to call Auguste and invite him to the house for a night of confessions. It’s a part of that uneasy death he was promised.

Before he meets with Dupin he calls Madeline to meet him in the basement of their childhood home where the two prepare to die over a stiff drink. In the best monologue of the hour, Madeline sums up the monsters they became, and in her opinion, they had a lot of help from those dead bodies raining down on them. She talks of consumerism being this hungry beast that demands to be fed, and how the ones feeding them are no worse than the ones begging to eat. It is a man-eat-man world, and the masses are always foaming at the mouth for seconds. Roderick watches her rant with a beaming smile on his face, so when she stands to leave and staggers to catch her balance he calmly tells her he poisoned her drink. Payback can be so sweet, and in this case, it was loving as he tells Dupin he gave her a Queen’s send-off. We see what he means when he takes his final moments on earth to cut out his sister’s eyes and replace them with Queen Twisuret’s. If Madeline is dead then why does Auguste keep hearing her bang around downstairs? Even Roderick can’t answer that but he does end his statement with his last and final confession: he always knew his pursuit of a pain-free world would mean “would climb to the top of a tower on a pile of corpses.” As he goes on to explain why pain cannot be eradicated from the world, a screaming stone-eyes and bloodied Madeline comes tearing up from the basement wailing and thrashing around the room. Roderick says, “Nevermore” just as Madeline attacks and chokes the life out of him with the two dying together in their childhood home. What started with Eliza stranging her father to death, ended with their daughter killing their son–a fitting ending for these twins.

As the storm outside rages the house starts to shake sending Auguste fleeing into the streets before the whole structure collapses onto itself. Like a house of cards, the fall of the house of Usher happened in an instant–or maybe it was slow cracks in the foundation forming for 40 years, but when Dupin looks at the wreckage he sees a woman hovering above it and she quickly turns into a raven and flies away.

Epilogue

After Dupin got his confession he narrates what was to come of the House of Usher after the patriarch met his maker. We learn the recently clean Juno (Ruth Codd) inherits her husband’s entire fortune and dissolves the company to create the Phoenix Foundation–a nonprofit to help people get off of drugs and invest in their recovery. As for Arthur Pym, he is arrested weeks after his boss’ death when Camille’s (Kate Siegel) assistants take the evidence she collected on the man to the police. We see Verna in the crowd of reporters as the handcuffed man is escorted into court where he will be found guilty and eventually die in prison. Finally, we see Auguste Dupin place the recorded confession on Roderick Usher’s grave. His case is over and he can finally go home to his husband and family who are waiting for him. As he walks away from the multiple stone headstones each carved out for another cursed Usher, he says to them all that it “makes  me the richest man in the world.” As he walks away we see Verna dressed in black and placing tokens in each of the Usher’s graves. She was a reminder of how Edgar Allan Poe described death: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” Today the House of Usher Fell but others will rebuild in their absence and Verna will always be there to swoop in and take them home…bottom side.