‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 7 Recap: The Punisher

What is the relative economy of punishment in the world of The Fall of the House of Usher? That’s just about my only beef with it at this point. I mean, why does Prospero, still just a budding piece of shit as opposed to his older siblings’ more accomplished track records, get the most painful death? Why does Leo, who doesn’t seem to have done anything that terrible beyond living as an Usher heir (though perhaps that’s bad enough), get killed at all? Why does Morrie, who’s only an Usher by marriage, suffer worse than any of them? 

I guess you could argue that this is the Devil we’re dealing with here, as this episode, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” makes abundantly clear. Why should the Devil give much of a hoot about who deserves anything? Isn’t inflicting evil at random kind of Satan’s deal? So you’d think, and I do believe that’s a part of it, but then she makes a point of how she’s drawing out Freddie’s death because of how he tortured Morrie. So are we letting the punishment fit the crimes or what?

It doesn’t really matter in the long run, though. Whatever sins the Usher children may have committed, they are suffering because of what Roderick and Madeline did, because of the deal with the Devil they made. The mystery woman who turns out to be Lucifer even confirms this when she tells Tammy her impending demise really has nothing to do with her in the previous episode. The Ushers inherited their gruesome deaths like a defective gene.

This episode reveals how the defect took root. At some point during his collaboration with Auggie to take down Fortunato, Roderick did a heel turn. At the hearing, he affirms that the fraudulent signatures were in fact his, and accuses Auggie of harassing his family. Madeline was in on it the whole time, of course, though it’s unclear whose idea it was at first, not that it matters. It appears to end Roderick’s relationship with his heartbroken and horrified wife Annabel Lee, who realizes she doesn’t know the man she married.

She’s not alone in that. Getting clocked on the head by that mic stand in the previous episode gave Juno some time to think, and she wants off Ligadone. It’s non-addictive, right? In one of his most morally gruesome monologues yet, which is saying something, Roderick promises her three years of opioid withdrawal hell, and that’s the good option for getting clean; going cold turkey would kill her on the medically freakish dose she’s on. He doesn’t expect her to say “I can handle three years” and split anyway.

But things don’t go as planned for Roderick pretty much across the board. For one thing, he’s about to be removed from the board now that so many of his children have died and shifted the balance; both Madeline and Freddie get in on the act of trying to overthrow him. And when Madeline brings him the news of Freddie’s death, she brings a lethal dose of Ligadone with her, since apparently their deal requires them both to die at once; if he commits suicide, the deal is broken. He makes a dutiful attempt of it, but Satan has other plans, and revives him, leaving him free to have the long conversation with Auggie we’ve been watching all series long. 

Madeline, meanwhile, has a long conversation of her own with the mystery woman in the old Usher home. Madeline tries to renegotiate the terms of the deal; the Devil recites Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea” — it’s his “Ozymandias” — while explaining that Roderick would have been a poet had things gone the other way.

Similarly, the script, by Mike and Jaime Flanagan, reveals that Freddie would have been a dentist in another life, because, ha ha, he tears Morrie’s teeth out with pliers. Once again, major kudos to the dead actor of the episode, Henry Thomas, for finding remarkable depths in his character’s shallowness. There’s no real pathos for Freddie of course, the way there was for the other four kids: There’s just disgust at discovering that someone this ineffectual could also be this cruel. It’s like watching a tree sloth light an orphanage on fire. You wind up relishing every swing of that pendulum as it slices his drugged but conscious and feeling ass in half.

Maybe what makes Usher horror in the end: This Devil wreaks her vengeance on the just and the unjust, the deserving and the undeserving, the Freddies and the Morries alike. 

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.