‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 5 Recap: Total Eclipse of the Heart

The Fall of the House of Usher is a nasty piece of work (complimentary). In this episode alone, the memorable moments of brutality, depravity, and amorality stack up like cordwood, or bodies. Sordid details following:

• Roderick Usher leaving the funeral of three of his children, arm in arm with his new wife, pointedly not saying a word to any of the dead children’s mothers.

• Tammy explaining the presence of Victorine and Roderick’s other bastards in the Usher family to her thusly: “He dove off our mother into a sea of strange pussy.”

• Tammy, referring to the bounty on the informant we later find out doesn’t even exist: “Do you think that the fity mil is still on the table?” Freddie, weakly: “Probably not, with all the deaths and stuff.”

• Freddie bigfooting a surgeon about brining his maimed wife Morrie home for further treatment — “Are you mistaking me for a civilian? I’m not a fucking civilian?” — and revealing that for all his manifest unseriousness, he can still channel Roderick, and Roderick’s horrible inspiration Rufus Griswold before him.

• Willa Fitzgerald’s Madeline sealing her unspoken deal with Carla Gugino’s devil with a kiss.

• Victorine justifying her comically unethical behavior in the heart-mesh trials to her stunned girlfriend Al with “as a woman” glass-ceiling horseshit. 

• Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the kind of manifestly inappropriate music that seems to come on automatically when your life is unraveling, playing in the background as Victorine and Al have it out over Victorine forging Al’s signature on documents (again, just like Rufus Griswold), Al dumping Victorine, and Victorine killing Al accidentally but letting her bleed out on purpose.

• Griswold chewing out young Madeline by saying while men have to crawl up the corporate ladder of success “on their bellies,” women can do it “on their backs, on their knees,” and presenting this as unfair to the men.

• Victorine repeatedly calling Al’s cellphone and begging her to come home — not to formulate an alibi, as I’d initially thought, but because she’s in total denial that she murdered this woman and performed open-heart surgery on her corpse in their apartment.

• Freddie bursting out in a seemingly uncontrolled rant about how Lenore’s mother lied to them the night she was burned, then saying “We’ve almost got her” as he leaves the in-house hospital room he’s arranged, boding very poorly for her future.

• Tammy mercilessly exposing her relationship with her husband BillT as a business decision rather than a romantic one, breaking his heart and shattering their business relationship on the eve of her big product launch, because 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 thing to hear about your deepest and most fulfilling fetish. Her replying with a snarky “Ya done?” after he reveals this, just to prove it doesn’t faze her.

• Roderick finding himself unable to kill himself, even though he knows it would spare his remaining children if he did, somehow. This somehow getting translated into a striking shot of the skyline falling past his window from the outside as he fantasizes his own death.

• Victorine covering up the sounds of Al convulsing and gasping by yelling at the concerned security guard “Have you never heard a woman getting eaten out before?” (Jesus.)

• Roderick’s devastatingly polite way of pointing out to Victorine that she’s murdered Al and gone insane: “She’s quite dead, isn’t she?”

Written by Dani Parker, directed by creator Mike Flanagan, and featuring a gloopy bio-mechanical squishing sound that slowly drives Victorine around the bend, “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of those “time to just list a bunch of awesome shit that happened” episodes you hit now and then. It’s a strong indication that Usher is strong stuff, a blend of ferocious anti-rich and anti-big-pharma agitprop, weird little character studies of weird little characters, and gore, gore, gore. 

In this case, it had an extra weapon in its arsenal: the marvelous performance of T’Nia Miller as Victorine. With her crisp English diction and regal beauty, she’s the most naturally aristocratic of the Usher children; Miller knows this and uses it to her advantage, portraying Victorine’s breakdown like the crumbling of a gothic cathedral. She is fully convincing as one of literature’s most famous sufferers of a guilty conscience.

True, the episode may lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a place where corpses shouldn’t be isn’t enough — but it makes up for that in intensity. It’s like an Evil Dead movie in that regard: I don’t think anyone has a hard time sleeping because of anything Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, but none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, because it was clearly made by filmmakers dedicated to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face every thirty seconds. From its rich assholes’ long Glengarry monologues about their own awfulness to the deliberately cruel demises of all the Usher kids, that’s obviously The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You could say that’s its beating heart.

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.