The Fall of the House of Usher is a nasty piece of labor (complimentary). In this episode alone, the memorable moments of brutality, depravity, and amorality stack up like cordwood, or our bodies. Sordid particulars following:
• Roderick Usher leaving the funeral of three of his kids, arm in arm along with his new spouse, pointedly not saying a phrase to any of the lifeless kids’s moms.
• Tammy explaining the presence of Victorine and Roderick’s different bastards within the Usher household to her thusly: “He dove off our mom right into a sea of unusual pussy.”
• Tammy, referring to the bounty on the informant we later discover out doesn’t even exist: “Do you suppose that the fity mil remains to be on the desk?” Freddie, weakly: “Probably not, with all of the deaths and stuff.”
• Freddie bigfooting a surgeon about brining his maimed spouse Morrie dwelling for additional remedy — “Are you mistaking me for a civilian? I’m not a fucking civilian?” — and revealing that for all his manifest unseriousness, he can nonetheless channel Roderick, and Roderick’s horrible inspiration Rufus Griswold earlier than him.
• Willa Fitzgerald’s Madeline sealing her unstated take care of Carla Gugino’s satan with a kiss.
• Victorine justifying her comically unethical habits within the heart-mesh trials to her shocked girlfriend Al with “as a girl” glass-ceiling horseshit.
• Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the form of manifestly inappropriate music that appears to come back on mechanically when your life is unraveling, taking part in within the background as Victorine and Al have it out over Victorine forging Al’s signature on paperwork (once more, identical to Rufus Griswold), Al dumping Victorine, and Victorine killing Al by accident however letting her bleed out on function.
• Griswold chewing out younger Madeline by saying whereas males must crawl up the company ladder of success “on their bellies,” ladies can do it “on their backs, on their knees,” and presenting this as unfair to the boys.
• Victorine repeatedly calling Al’s cellphone and begging her to come back dwelling — to not formulate an alibi, as I’d initially thought, however as a result of she’s in complete denial that she murdered this girl and carried out open-heart surgical procedure on her corpse of their condo.
• Freddie bursting out in a seemingly uncontrolled rant about how Lenore’s mom lied to them the night time she was burned, then saying “We’ve nearly obtained her” as he leaves the in-house hospital room he’s organized, boding very poorly for her future.
• Tammy mercilessly exposing her relationship along with her husband BillT as a enterprise choice relatively than a romantic one, breaking his coronary heart and shattering their enterprise relationship on the eve of her large product launch, as a result of she hasn’t slept in days. BillT throwing in that he hates their sex-worker routine, which, as unsympathetic as Tammy is, is a horrible factor to listen to about your deepest and most fulfilling fetish. Her replying with a snarky “Ya executed?” after he reveals this, simply to show it doesn’t faze her.
• Roderick discovering himself unable to kill himself, though he is aware of it will spare his remaining kids if he did, in some way. This in some way getting translated right into a placing shot of the skyline falling previous his window from the surface as he fantasizes his personal dying.
• Victorine protecting up the sounds of Al convulsing and gasping by yelling on the involved safety guard “Have you by no means heard a girl getting eaten out earlier than?” (Jesus.)
• Roderick’s devastatingly well mannered means of stating to Victorine that she’s murdered Al and gone insane: “She’s fairly lifeless, isn’t she?”
Written by Dani Parker, directed by creator Mike Flanagan, and that includes a gloopy bio-mechanical squishing sound that slowly drives Victorine across the bend, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a kind of “time to simply checklist a bunch of superior shit that occurred” episodes you hit every now and then. It’s a powerful indication that Usher is robust stuff, a mix of ferocious anti-rich and anti-big-pharma agitprop, bizarre little character research of bizarre little characters, and gore, gore, gore.
In this case, it had an additional weapon in its arsenal: the marvelous efficiency of T’Nia Miller as Victorine. With her crisp English diction and regal magnificence, she’s essentially the most naturally aristocratic of the Usher kids; Miller is aware of this and makes use of it to her benefit, portraying Victorine’s breakdown just like the crumbling of a gothic cathedral. She is absolutely convincing as one in all literature’s most well-known victims of a responsible conscience.
True, the episode could lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a spot the place corpses shouldn’t be isn’t sufficient — nevertheless it makes up for that in depth. It’s like an Evil Dead film in that regard: I don’t suppose anybody has a tough time sleeping due to something Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, however none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, as a result of it was clearly made by filmmakers devoted to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face each thirty seconds. From its wealthy assholes’ lengthy Glengarry monologues about their very own awfulness to the intentionally merciless demises of all of the Usher children, that’s clearly The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You may say that’s its beating coronary heart.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that may have him, actually. He and his household dwell on Long Island.
