‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 4 Recap: Cat Scratch Fever

The one thing I’ll say against this episode is that the schadenfreude is a bit less strong. It comes down to the victim after all, and the victim in “The Black Cat,” Napoleon, just isn’t much of a villain compared to almost any of his relatives. He’s got nothing to do with the family business on a direct level. He’s not out there strategizing, treating the family like a military unit. He’s not performing unethical medical experiments or controlling spin for a blood-soaked pharmaceutical empire or secretly compiling blackmail material on his supposed friends. His worst crimes are those of any fuckboy. For god’s sake, he walks away from his inheritance rather than continue to play ball!

Okay, so he slaughtered his pet cat in a drug-induced blackout and tried to pass off a ringer, like they did with the dog in that one episode of The Golden Girls. But even a vegetarian and cat-lover myself doesn’t think blackout cat-killing should be a capital crime. Can you really root for Grim Reaper Carla Gugino in this one?

No, but that doesn’t stop The Fall of the House of Usher from remaining really fun television. Rahul Kohli’s unraveling as Leo is exhibit A here, just a fun little portrait of a burnout pushed over the brink. When Leo smashes his apartment to smithereens searching for the cursed cat of the title, the script, by Mat Johnson and creator Mike Flanagan, assigns the marvelous little detail of having him do this with a prop of Thor’s hammer from the Marvel movies. (He can always have “Hemsworth” send a replacement, he rationalizes.) 

At any rate, the cat symbolizes everything he can’t bring himself to face about himself and his family. No wonder he takes a header off a balcony in a last-ditch attempt to smash it to bits.

Outside Napoleon’s storyline, a pair of monologues dominate the episode, like the Argonath in The Fellowship of the Ring. On one side there’s Malcolm Goodwin as young Auggie Dupin, employing his Edgar Allan Poe namesake’s lauded powers of observation as he pieces together just how poor Roderick and Annabel really are, and why he’s so afraid to rat out his awful, crooked boss. Dupin is really concerned about Roderick at this point in their relationship, that’s the ass-kicker.

On the other there’s said awful, crooked boss, Rufus Griswold, played by Michael Trucco. He absolutely devours yet another “Let me tell you something about how the world works” speech — no, seriously, he actually says “You know what the real world is, Rod?” — that Roderick winds up quoting word for word when he’s barking orders at his family after news of Camille’s death breaks decades later. He has an almost frighteningly callow bit on his Ferrari, and winds calling himself “the candyman,” Rod’s entrance ramp into life in the fast lane. 

But on Madeline’s advice, Roderick — whom she knows is destined to be a whipping boy, not a lieutenant — will continue to eat Rufus’s shit, all for the purposes of better exposing him to Dupin. But the jingling bells Roderick hears behind a brick wall at one point, the jester who appeared in his limo in the pilot, the mysterious terrible thing Roderick and Madeline did the night of a masquerade ball later that year, I sense a cask of Amontillado in Mr. Griswold’s future.

One interesting wrinkle is that spectral Carla Gugino does show up on camera, despite her ability to shape-shift and teleport — first in the footage of the orgy bloodbath, then at the security desk outside the chimpanzee cages. She’s also in BillT’s latest workout livestream, though he doesn’t recall seeing her. Keep in mind she is also Victorine’s human guinea pig and the employee of the cat shelter who sells the evil cat to Leo. The “vascular dementia hallucination” explanation of what’s happening to Roderick only gets you so far even as a red herring when something this obviously and verifiably supernatural is at work.

Ah well, this thing is still a hoot. And it’s got jokes! The bit where Roderick barks “enhance” at security cam footage only for Arthur to sheepishly tell him “you can zoom in, but that doesn’t actually enhance it” made me laugh out loud. So did Leo’s Camille impersonation: “Satin is silk for poor people, and no one should be wearing it to a funeral unless they died in it.” So did Tammy’s note on the statement regarding Camille’s untimely death at 35: “That really is awful. Are we going with 35?” It’s my kind of catty, my kind of blunt, my kind of gross, my kind of show.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.