Editor's Note: this is @WesleyKushner's review of episodes 4-8 of The Fall of the House of Usher. Before reading this review, we highly recommend reading his review of episodes 1-4 of The Fall of the House of Usher, where he sets up the premise of the show and his insights into some of the hidden messaging left by the show's writer/creator, Mike Flanagan.
So, where did we leave off . . . ohhhh, right.
*Chirp*
Episode 5 begins with only one of Roderick Usher's bastards still living: Victorine.
Victorine has been trying to create the perfect heart monitor mesh. The idea is that it's going to replace EKG and pacemakers. Roderick has dumped $200 million into Victorine's research.
There's just one problem. The device doesn't work and Vic hasn't told her father. All the girl boss magic in the world can't make the impossible happen. So, what does Vic do? She fakes clinical research and signs her lover's name to the fraudulent findings. And what does Vic do when her lover finds out and threatens to go public? Vic kills her.
*Chirp*
Yes, the black lesbian science genius character of the show murders her girlfriend and tries to restart her heart with the heart mesh device. In a nod to Edgar Allan Poe's Telltale Heart, she spends the entire episode hearing the chirping of the cyborg heart and being unable to figure out where it's coming from. When she recovers from her psychosis and discovers what she did, she stabs herself.
A chirping sound, that sounds eerily like a smoke detector low battery alert torments Victorine. This is . . . suggestive. Mike Flanagan. We see you.
*Fifth avenue*
What was that?
Anyway, on to the next episode, where Roderick's legitimate-born daughter, Tammy meets her demise. Tammy is a married girl boss who eats dinner and watches while prostitutes pleasure her husband in front of her. She's a career focused cuck who cannot sleep because she keeps having visions of the latest whore she hired to bang her husband (it's Verna, of course).
This is troubling to Tammy because she and her husband, Bill, agreed that the whores she orders for him must never become more than just the transactional sex they were hired to perform. This confuses Bill, who does not recognize Verna, and it becomes clear that Tammy is just seeing things.
In the midst of Tammy's mania, the Usher family's lawyer, Arthur Pym, has finally tracked down Verna. She apparently has been connected to many high-profile families throughout history, including Mark Zuckerberg and wait a minute ...
*Fifth avenue*
Mitch McConnell. Brett Kavanaugh. Donald Trump. The Bush Family. Rupert Murdoch. Every prominent Republican of the last century.
No no no no no no! Mike!
Come on what is this? This is a test, right?
You're just doing this to signal to the liberals that it's okay that you're doing this, right? Mike, please tell me these photos are just supposed to be a smokescreen.
I mean come on! In the same episode, Tammy's deviancy and her rejection of monogamy and family structure is driving her insane! She fires her husband from her GOOP rip off and has a meltdown!
She gets herself killed by her own deviant ceiling sex mirror! What are these photos of Verna with republicans, Mike?
*Fifth Avenue*
Maybe it's nothing.
It has to be nothing, right? Let's just get to the next episode.
Freddy. The last of Roderick's kids, his eldest, his heir. The one closest to him. His wife has been in something of a coma ever since her skin was burned off by Perry's acid orgy. He's doing coke all the time and torturing his wife by injecting her with a drug to keep her paralyzed as punishment for attempting to cuckold him.
Freddy pulls out her teeth with a pair of pliers. Oh, now we have no choice but to sympathize with a woman who attended an orgy to cheat on her husband.
Mike. What is this? Verna deems Freddy to be the worst of the Usher kids and directly interferes to cause his death, torturing him by slowly cutting him in half by a pendulum of debris.
*Fifth avenue*
What the fuck is that sound?
Okay so the last couple episodes, we kind of lost the plot and it got a little woke. No big deal, right? Lets just start the last episode and see...
Ok, so, Verna is revealed to basically be the devil who offers evil people the opportunity to attain success beyond their imaginations . . . for a price.
Roderick and his sister, Madeline, were offered control of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals and unlimited wealth in exchange for a promise that the Usher bloodline would end with them. All of the children will die before Roderick and his sister but live in luxury and wealth. They act selfishly and accept the offer.
Welp. Verna hints that Donald Trump is a client again by directly quoting his fifth avenue joke. This takes the viewer out of the moment. This is cringe.
Fuck.
Lenore, Roderick's granddaughter dies but Verna spares her any pain and gives a speech about how she's a good one and her tortured mother (that was going to cheat on her husband!) will do great things in her name.
FUCK.
Madeline rants about how the supreme court is taking away women's right to choose to have unprotected sex and then kill the unborn. Madeline then rants about how she and her brother are not guilty of causing the opioid crisis because nobody forced people to take their drug. Madeline says this without a hint of irony or self-reflection.
That doesn't make any sense, Mike! This speech is incoherent but you're filming it like it's a central thesis of the fucking show!
FUCK!
Dammit! DAMN IT!
WHAT THE FUCK, FLANAGAN!?!
I thought... I thought you were one of us.
I thought I found a kindred spirit lurking in your work. But I was wrong. The mixed messages were never intentional, were they? They were muddled because shitlib politics are muddled and incoherent.
It's my fault, really. I couldn't just accept the truth: shitlibs don't know what they're doing.
Oh well.