‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 6 Recap: Glass Houses

One of the most memorable scenes in It occurs when the characters leaf through a collection of photographs, illustrations, and etchings depicting their idyllic town of Derry throughout the decades. In each one, though most who see them cannot or will not see, is a clown — the same clown, existing impossibly across the span of time as preys upon the people of Derry, a haunted town.

What The Fall of the House of Usher suggests in “Goldbug,” its stellar sixth episode, is that we live in a haunted country.

When Arthur Pym, the adventurer turned fixer for the Usher family, presents Roderick and Madeline with photos of the mystery woman played by Carla Gugino, those photos show her by the side of virtually every major right-wing figure and plutocrat you can think of, from Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump to Prescott Bush and William Randolph Hearst. Now the Ushers are in that elite company, alongside Brett Kavanaugh and the founder of Monsanto. She is the Pennywise of America.

As political commentary, this is hilariously blunt, and honestly, good for Mike Flanagan. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade, and sometimes you have to say “these people couldn’t be more evil if some kind of vampiric gothic entity had stalked them through the very walls of reality itself.” But it’s also an unnerving idea: all the people running, and ruining, the country, linked by a single being with mysterious but sinister motives. It’s like Forrest Gump starring the Mystery Man from Lost Highway, or if Twin Peaks took place in Washington, D.C.

It’s an idea with real bite, and it’s not alone. Flanagan continues to impress with just how nasty he’s willing to get in this episode, especially in the Freddie/Morrie/Lenore storyline. It quickly becomes apparent, if it wasn’t already last episode, that Freddie brought Morrie home to torment her, and there’s something extra nauseating about it because of what a pisher he is. This fidgety nothing is going to torture a burn victim? “Christ, let me off this ride” is a good feeling for a horror series to evoke. 

Lenore’s struggle to get anyone in her increasingly off-the-rails family to listen to her fears is nearly as troubling, as this sane and caring kid begs for help from Roderick and “Froderick,” two men who are at this point crazier than shithouse rats. Flanagan understands how troubling it is to be a kid and realize your adult caretaker is…not quite there, and leans on it hard, which seems to be the only way he leans on anything in this show, to his credit.

Before we get to the main storyline, centered on the last days of Tamerlane Usher, I want to point out a clever misdirect. When Tammy’s mangled corpse appears to Roderick, as is custom for his kids at this point, it does so via the window behind him exploding inwards. This preps us to expect her to die from a bomb blast, so when she shows up before her big Goldbug product launch wearing the same dress she was as a corpse and handling a box she’s going to dramatically open, you expect explosions.

Instead, you get an implosion. Hallucinating from sleep deprivation, heartbroken over her impulsive decision to dump BillT and working furiously to pave over that heartbreak, and of course haunted by the mystery woman, Tammy cracks on stage. She swears angrily at the phantom woman, she destroys the monitors behind her when she becomes convinced they’re playing a sex tape of her and BillT with a sex worker, and finally she hurls the heavy mic stand into the crowd, hoping to kill the mystery woman but cracking poor supportive Juno in the head instead.

Tammy’s demise is not unlike Leo’s, as she smashes her vacant apartment apart, looking for something or someone who doesn’t actually exist. Hers involves some seriously nasty glass-shard action and a spectacular accidental-suicide demise, as she leaps off her bed to smash her overhead mirror (naughty till the last!), she and the glass fall in slow motion, and she gets thuddingly impaled by jagged chunks of mirror. 

As was the case with T’Nia Miller last episode, Samantha Sloyan is outstanding as an extraordinarily wealthy and well put-together woman coming apart at the seams. The way she almost physically wills her presentation back on track after stumbling out on stage shouting the f-bomb at a nonexistent person, with the camera never flinching from her high-cheekboned, anxiety-ridden face, is a wonder to behold. She handles the explicit sex stuff in the sex tape with the practiced frankness of a woman confident in asking for what she wants. (As much as her fetishes represent a deeper dysfunction, I don’t think Usher is presenting the fetishes as a dysfunction in and of themselves, any more than Chuck Rhoades being a sub on Billions is supposed to indicate he’s an unethical prosecutor.)

I think this is sensational television, really — angry, horny, mean-spirited horror, almost like Return of the Living Dead or something. Flanagan does some fun things with color and light here too, from the cycling glow of the photocopier young Roderick uses to secretly copy Fortunato’s forged documents to the lurid Argento/Refn green that illuminates Tammy’s demise. Looking at how few episodes remain, I find myself wishing Roderick Usher had a few more kids.

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.