The Fall of the House of Usher recap guide: All 8 episodes explained

Mike Flanagan is back with his final Netflix series (he’s moving to Amazon), and we’re happy to say it’s one of his best! If you’ve loved his other shows, like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, then The Fall of the House of Usher is can’t-miss television.

Spread across eight episodes, this riveting, sexy, and disturbing limited series allows Flanagan to bring to life some of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short stories and poems. You’ll get a little of “The Raven,” some “Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” and much more. Each episode is stuffed with literary easter eggs and fun references for fans to watch and rewatch over and over again.

The show primarily centers on the Usher family. Patriarch Roderick Usher is the owner of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals who created the notable opioid, Ligodone, basically the show’s version of OxyContin. They’re embroiled in a legal case over alleged mismarketing of their product that has led to the deaths of many. And when members of the Usher family start dropping off one by one, it becomes apparent that something far more sinister is afoot.

We’re breaking down every major moment of the show in our in-depth recap guide of all eight episodes!

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 1 recap: A Midnight Dreary

The Fall of the House of Usher‘s premiere episode is mostly about setting up what we’ll be seeing throughout the rest of the season, as each episode (mostly) focuses on one sibling and how they end up dead.

When we first meet the remnants of the Usher family—patriarch Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), his sister Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell), his young new wife Juno (Ruth Codd), Roderick’s granddaughter Lenore (Kyleigh Curran), and their long-time attorney Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill)—they’re attending a funeral for three of Roderick’s children, Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Frederick (Henry Thomas), and Victorine (T’Nia Miller).

Over the course of two weeks, all six of Roderick’s kids have perished, so Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), Camille (Kate Siegel), and Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) died the week before and now they’re burying the final three. Even though all of the deaths are quite strange, investigations have revealed that none were related, but Roderick believes differently. It all ties back to a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino), who was present at every death.

Two weeks before the funeral, the Usher family was all together one final time, during the opening day in court for a case brought against them by the government, led by Assistant US Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly). Auguste’s opening arguments allege that the Usher family has been using their billion-dollar pharmaceutical company Fortunato to scam consumers for years with their designer drug Ligodone. It’s very Painkiller/Purdue Pharma.

Auguste claims he will soon prove that the Ushers have been using misleading marketing tactics and countless other fraudulent practices to sell their opioid to the masses. But the biggest bombshell of all is Auguste’s reveal that he has a special witness to present, an informant from within the Usher family.

Obviously, Auguste’s claim that one of the Ushers has betrayed the others causes a deep ripple effect throughout the family. We get to meet the various members as they grapple with the allegations.

There’s Roderick’s eldest daughter, Tamerlane Usher, who is on the verge of launching a buzzy new lifestyle brand known as Goldbug with her fitness guru husband Bill; then there’s the eldest illegitimate daughter Victorine LaFourcade, who is working on perfecting a groundbreaking “heart mesh” contraption alongside her surgeon girlfriend Dr. Alessandra “Al” Ruiz (Paola Nuñez). They’re currently testing on chimpanzees but hope to move onto human trials soon.

Napoleon Usher is a drug-addicted gamer who spends his days snorting whatever he has on hand, cheating on his boyfriend Julius (Daniel Jun), and supposedly running a video game company. Camille L’Espanaye is another illegitimate child of Roderick’s and serves as the PR head of Fortunato. She also holds a grudge against Victorine.

Frederick Usher is Roderick’s eldest son and many of his siblings refer to him as “Froderick” because of his obsession with being like their father. He’s married to a woman named Morelle (Crystal Balint) and they have a daughter named Lenore who Roderick is quite fond of. Finally, there’s Prospero Usher, the youngest of Roderick’s illegitimate children who is still trying to find a way to prove himself to his family.

Roderick and Madeline demand every member of the family attend a dinner where they’re forced to sign ironclad NDAs to protect themselves from the informant possibly spilling something that could ruin them. Then Roderick puts a bounty on the mole. He wants the siblings to suss out which one of them has gone to the feds.

The entirety of the episode, and the series at large, uses a framing device of Roderick Usher chatting with Auguste Dupin in a personal, one-by-one where Roderick promises to divulge all of his secrets and confess to the 73 charges brought against him and his family. He tells Auguste that to understand his story, he needs to get the entire picture, going back to the time when he and Madeline were just children.

He also intends to inform Auguste of how each of his children died, assuring Auguste that it was actually his fault despite it appearing that there was no connection between the deaths. Throughout their chat, Roderick starts seeing ghosts of his dead children. Lenore also calls and texts him insistently, but Roderick ignores her to focus on Auguste.

Via flashback, we learn that Roderick (Graham Verchere) and Madeline (Lulu Wilson) adored their mother, Eliza, a secretary working for former Fortunato Pharmaceuticals CEO William Longfellow. Eliza became very sick and the kids went to William in the hopes he would help her with a drug trial, but he refused and tossed them out. It’s implied that William and Eliza were having an affair and that William was Roderick and Madeline’s biological father.

Well, without treatment, Eliza eventually dies, forcing Madeline and Roderick to bury her in the yard. But that night, they discover she’s dug herself out of the grave, seemingly not dead after all–or something worse than dead. In her new zombie-like state, Eliza goes to William’s house and murders him before falling down dead (for real this time) herself.

Roderick tells Auguste the last thing his mother did in her life was murder a powerful man and it made him and his sister love her all the more for it. From there, he jumps ahead to New Years night of 1979, just before the start of a new decade. It’s the night that Roderick (young adult Roderick is played by Zach Gilford) and Madeline (young adult Madeline is played by Willa Fitzgerald) first met Verna, who was then a bartender (or at least masquerading as one) that served them that night.

Auguste interrupts because this night, in particular, is very special. it’s the start of everything and there have been countless rumors regarding it. We’ll circle back to that later. For now, Roderick just lets Auguste know that he will tell him everything, but he assures Auguste that starting at the beginning is a necessity as every part of his story is important to understanding the whole picture.

The episode ends with us returning to the funeral that took place earlier the same day Roderick contacts Auguste. Upon leaving, Roderick goes to get into his car and sees a sinister jester-like apparition waiting in the back of his car. seeing it causes Roderick to have a stroke of some kind. His nose starts bleeding and he passes out, looking up to see a raven looking down at him as he murmurs, “It’s time.”

Written by Maddy Lennon

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 2 recap: The Masque of Red Death

The focus of The Fall of the House of Usher episode 2 is Prospero Usher and his ultimate downfall. Desperate to prove himself to his family, Prospero comes up with a plan to throw a crazy party/orgy/rave in one of the old Fortunato drug manufacturing factories. They have several of these deserted properties waiting for demolition and Prospero decides to take advantage of these vast empty buildings just sitting there to throw the party to end all parties.

He plans to charge his elite and exclusive guest list millions of dollars just to attend. There, they’ll be served all sorts of drugs, alcohol, and anything else they desire. And, of course, it’ll be a masquerade. On Prospero’s guest list is Frederick’s wife, Morelle. Frederick lays into Prospero particularly hard at a meeting with lawyers about the old properties, so it seems like extending an invite to his wife is Prospero’s way of exacting revenge. The real surprise is that Morelle is interested and actually shows up at the party.

Prospero’s party pièce de résistance will be connected to the old tanks on the roof to soak the entire gathering in water from the overhead sprinklers when the time comes. His goal is to get everyone soaked and writhing together on the dance floor, and Prospero does get his wish—just not in the way he’d think. Vera shows up in disguise and temporarily seduces Prospero before tipping off the wait staff to leave ASAP. When the sprinklers are finally activated they spit a toxic concoction of chemicals, including acid, that literally melts the skin off of everyone there.

They do end up writhing together as over 70 people perish in the disaster. It turns out that Prospero did not test the actual liquid in the tanks and only assumed they were fresh water because his family wouldn’t have wanted to connect to the main sewer lines and would have preferred to keep their plumbing private since they were up to illegal schemes.

The stuff in the tanks was toxic runoff and residue from the drug testing. The episode ends with the grisly sight of Prospero dying while melted to his attendees. Vera pays him one last visit, giving him her mask and a final kiss, “you beautiful boy.”

The other subplots in this episode revolve around another flashback to the time when Madeline and Roderick were young adults. Roderick has started working at Fortunato, but he’s on one of the lowest rungs. He brings his idea for his blockbuster painkiller pill to the current CEO, Rufus Wilmot Griswold (Michael Trucco), the man leading the company before Roderick eventually takes over. Rufus doesn’t seem interested in Roderick’s pitch.

When Roderick returns to his apartment, we get to see how he, Madeline, and his wife at the time, Annabel, were living together. They had barely any money and we can see how Madeline has always been the one really pulling the strings and scheming for them to get ahead. She assures Roderick that they’re going to get ahead of Rufus and later leave him in pieces.

Elsewhere, a young Auguste is starting to build a case against Fortunato as he detects a trail of bodies all leading back to the pharmaceutical company.

This episode also gives us some more background on Roderick’s new wife Juno. During a scene with Lenore, she tells Roderick’s granddaughter how she got into a really bad accident that resulted in her losing one of her legs and other extensive injuries.

While in the ICU, Roderick happened to be visiting the hospital on business and decides she’d be a great person to take the Ligodone and show that it’s not addictive (even though it totally is). Also, my personal theory is that Roderick might have been driving the car that hit Juno.

Written by Maddy Lennon

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 3 recap: Murder in the Rue Morgue

It’s all about Camille in this episode, as we find out how she meets her grisly death, but first let’s catch up with the fall out from Prospero Usher’s death. As Arthur Pym arrives at the crime scene to assess the situation, we skip back to the present where Roderick explains what happened to Auguste. The tanks that Prospero and his friends tapped into held old materials from when the building was a Fortunato lab.

They kept it there to avoid the EPA fines, intending to return and dump it later. Obviously, that didn’t happen and the sprinklers ended up spraying the crowd with corrosive chemicals. That said, somehow, Frederick’s wife Morelle survives, albeit barely. She’s in ICU with horrific burns covering her entire body head to toe.

The rest of the family regroups to discuss how they’re going to spin this latest disaster. Seeing as Camille is the family’s go-to PR person, she explains the approach they’re going to take to pain Prospero as a charitable Usher family prince and help gain sympathy for the family amid the ongoing trial.

Camille’s assistants, Tina and Toby, succeed in digging up something damning on Victorine. They’ve learned that she’s allegedly swapping out dead chimpanzees for live ones, meaning when one of the test chimps dies on the table, she makes it seem like they survived so her trials appear more successful than they really are. After hours, Victorine goes in and cuts up the dead monkey into pieces and retrieves the hardware to sneak it out and hide the evidence of what she’s been doing.

Speaking of Victorine, we check in with her and her business partner/girlfriend Dr. Ruiz. They’re doing their best to get to human trials ASAP and Victorine might have just met the perfect candidate. Carla Gugino, or Verna, is back, this time playing a sweet, addled southern woman named “Pamela Clemm.”

Roderick and Auguste discuss Prospero’s death a little more. Prospero had a street drug known as “Monty” in his system when he died. Monty is a derivative of Ligodone and the fact it was in Prospero’s system was redacted from the coroner’s report for at least a week, on Arthur Pym’s behest. Roderick isn’t all that phased by this as he says it happens all the time. Sometimes he even wishes he never stumbled upon this little pill, revealing another flashback to his time as a young adult on the up and up at Fortunato.

We learn that even though Roderick brought Griswold the pitch about Ligodone, he didn’t accept it from him but instead went and bought Landor Pharma, the company with the chemist who made the drug. But Griswold does promote Roderick and give him a raise, intimating that he’ll keep helping him climb the ladder if Roderick keeps coming up with these good ideas.

Madeline tells Roderick that it’s beneficial to them for Roderick to stay there, to get beside Griswold and later stab him in the back. Annabel overhears Madeline’s disturbing speech to Roderick and later tells him she really does not like his sister.

At Napoleon’s place, he wakes up in the aftermath of an intense drug coma and discovers that someone (probably him) has brutally stabbed and killed Julius’s cat, Pluto. Yikes. He asks Julius if he did anything weird the night before, because he doesn’t remember anything. Julius says no, but he is worried because he hasn’t seen Pluto in a while and fears she got out into the night. Napoleon pretends he doesn’t know anything.

Lenore visits her mom at the hospital and finds Morelle freaking out and ripping off all of her bandages despite Lenore’s pleas for her to stop.

At Camille’s apartment, things go south with her and her assistants. Tina and Toby are apparently in love (apparently Tina’s name is actually Beth but Camille called her Tina because she thought “Tina and Toby” was funny. Kate Siegel killed it as this character and in this particular tirade I must say. Hilarious.),  and no longer want to be sexually involved with Camille. They also say that they’ve been uncomfortable for a while with the situation, so Camille fires them on the spot.

Tamerlane and Bill get a new prostitute that night and guess who! Yep, it’s Verna. She’s fully infiltrating the life of every member of the Usher family it seems. Verna claims she’s the new hire, Candy, replacing the previous girl to partake in Tamerlane’s little sex game.

And speaking of Verna, she’s also the one who is in charge as the security guard that night at Victorine’s lab. Camille comes face-to-face with Verna for the first time that night as she sneaks in to take pictures and expose Victorine for what she’s been doing.

Of course, Camille doesn’t get the chance to do that, because Verna viciously murders Camille and makes it look like one of the chimps attacked her. It’s also suggested Verna might have turned into a monkey herself, or at least possessed one, I guess if she’s a demon or something she can do that. Before killing Camille, Verna tells her “it’s not personal, it wasn’t with your brother either.”

The next morning, Victorine’s staff are the ones to find Camille’s body with a bloody chimp hanging over her. Another Usher bites the dust.

Written by Maddy Lennon

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 4 recap: The Black Cat

Since he literally killed his boyfriend’s cat, Napoleon is out to find a replacement Pluto before Julius can find out what he did. For Napoleon, Verna masquerades as a worker at a cat shelter where Napoleon finds a cat eerily similar to Pluto. The only difference is that this cat is mean and it does not like Napoleon. Within minutes of meeting the cat and bringing it home, it scratches him and never wastes an opportunity to bite, scratch, or generally startle Napoleon whenever possible.

The replacement Pluto also has a habit of bringing in bloody animal carcasses and leaving them all over the place. Interestingly, Julius never sees the cat, it’s always just run out of the room or hiding whenever he’s around. Things come to a head between the couple and the new possibly-ghost cat in bed one night when Napoleon finds a bloody rat under his pillow and accidentally knees Julius in the face. Things only get worse from there.

The next day, Julius asks Napoleon to take it easy on the drugs as he’s been acting increasingly erratic. And speaking of drugs, since his family knows him as their supplier, Frederick comes by in the hopes of getting something to take the edge off amid everything happening with Morelle and the rest of the family. Frederick has been desperately trying to break into the burner phone that Prospero gave Morelle, to the point of taking off her bandages to get a facial ID.

Napoleon offers some cocaine and “Pluto” leaps out and scratches him in the eye. It’s all downhill from there as Napoleon goes crazy trying to catch the damn cat and throttle it. He calls the shelter worker to take it back and Verna is delighted to see Napoleon’s downfall. He starts tearing apart the whole apartment using Thor’s hammer (“I can get Hemsworth to send me another!”) to bust down the walls after Verna tells him she can hear the cat inside.

Napoleon and fake-Pluto get into a full-on brawl at one point and Napoleon squeezes him so hard the cat’s eye pops out. I have to say often animal cruelty really bothers me but the stuff with the cat is so campy and silly and the cat looks so deliberately fake (and acts so evil) that it really comes across more darkly humorous, which works perfectly for the tone of the entire episode.

It’s a mixture of revulsion and hilarity as we watch Julius return home to see the entire place torn to shreds and his boyfriend on a rampage. Julius thinks this is the drugs and ultimately, he’s helpless to do anything as the cat lures Napoleon onto the balcony, where he flies over the edge and plummets to his death. Another Usher down.

One of the other storylines in this episode revolves around Madeline, Roderick, and Arthur digging into the identity of this mysterious woman who keeps popping up everywhere. There’s a hilarious bit where Arthur shows Roderick security footage from the night Camille died and asks if he recognizes the security guard. Roderick wants him to enhance it, but as Arthur points out, that’s really only a thing on television.

But Madeline starts to suspect that this woman might be the bartender from that fateful New Years Eve. She returns to the bar they visited that night, but it’s been closed down. Though interestingly, there is a big graffiti raven on the brick wall.

In the present, things get tense between Auguste and Roderick as Roderick starts seeing Napoleon’s ghost and it causes him to snap. Auguste mistakenly thinks the man is yelling at him and doesn’t take the sudden outburst kindly. He makes it clear he won’t be talked to like that. Roderick apologizes, though it’s clear the apparitions are only going to get worse.

The ghosts aren’t just showing up with his conversation with Auguste either. We see one particularly nasty incident where a dead Prospero appears during a moment with Juno and causes Roderick to have some kind of partial shock. Is all of this just from his illness? Madeline and Roderick want to push Victorine to move faster to maybe use her new technique to save him.

Young Roderick and young Auguste meet for the first time via flashback. Auguste shows up at Roderick’s door because he found his signature on a bunch of suspicious paperwork regarding human trials. Roderick claims he has no idea what Auguste is talking about, but Auguste can sense that he and his wife are struggling, living hand-to-mouth. At this point, they have Tamerlane and Frederick and are struggling to make ends meet.

He thinks they can help each other, so he leaves his card for Roderick in case he changes his mind. Madeline, as usual, sees this as a potentially huge opportunity to keep in their back pocket and maybe kick Griswold out. Roderick confronts his boss, who, of course, denies everything. But Madeline makes it clear that her brother needs to keep cozying up to Griswold until they can pull the rug out from underneath him.

The episode ends with a glimpse of Napoleon’s dead body as the “fake” Pluto crawls on top of him, now good as new with no injury to speak of. There’s also a peek in the bathtub and none of the creepy critters the cat brought are there. The implication seems to be that Verna put all of it in Napoleon’s head.

And Verna appears in Tamerlane’s orbit again in this episode. Tamerlane notices her in one of her husband’s fitness livestreams and immediately confronts him about inviting one of their “girls” to his work. He swears he has no clue what she’s talking about and would never cheat on her or meet up with one of the escorts outside of their prearranged meet-ups. So was Verna really there, or only to Tamerlane? Will she be the next Usher to die?

Written by Maddy Lennon

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 5 recap: The Tell-Tale Heart

The fifth episode begins with a flashback, bringing the audience back to the bar where Roderick and Madeline celebrated New Year’s 1980. We’ll find out why eventually, but this night is incredibly integral to the story. At this point in the season, we get another glimpse of the party in which Roderick chats with the bartender, who happens to be Verna. When he goes to dance with someone, Madeline confides in Verna, telling her if she could have anything she wanted, she would make sure men could never have power over her again, along with a way to live forever. The two ladies share a New Year’s kiss before we fast forward to years later.

A funeral is held for Perry, Camille, and Leo, and at the church, Roderick has more disturbing visions of his kids’ bodies. The remaining siblings, which include Frederick, Victorine, and Tammy, discuss the current state of their family and where to go next.

Frederick and Lenore go visit Morrie at the hospital and Frederick decides it’s time to take her home. While the doctor says she’s doing better, it’s still not advised for Morrie to be discharged because she has no protection from diseases or infections. But Frederick, being Frederick, figures that’s up to him to decide and goes against the doctor’s wishes.

Victorine’s girlfriend Al confronts her, upset that she scheduled a patient for surgery without telling her. Victorine tries to explain but Al doesn’t want to hear it because they still aren’t ready for human trials. She discovers that Victorine forged her signature on falsified data reports and is incredibly angry about it, but Victorine tells her not to be a child. Al decides she’s out and Victorine begs her not to tell anyone about what’s happened, bringing up the fact that she signed an NDA. But Alessandra assures her she’s going to tell and she doesn’t care if she gets sued.

In just about the worst timing, Madeline goes to see Victorine and wants to know when she’ll be ready for the human trials. Victorine is confused as to why her aunt and her father have such an interest all of a sudden. Of course, we know it’s because of Roderick’s worsened condition, but his daughter has no idea.

At the courthouse, Auguste and Arthur have a conversation in which Auguste questions why he works for the Usher family. Arthur explains that he would be nowhere if it wasn’t for Roderick. After the judge breaks the news that they have to postpone the trial because of the attacks on the family, Arthur says they can continue if Auguste just reveals who the informant is. But, of course, Auguste is determined not to let that information out.

In the present time, Auguste finally comes clean and tells Roderick that there was never actually an informant and that it was just made up as an attempt to turn the Usher family against each other. He explains that if he knew the siblings would start dying, he would’ve never said it. Roderick has a vision of Auguste bleeding, with his heart literally beating out of his chest. He then turns into a dead Victorine who screams at him. The vision ends and Roderick tries to relieve Auguste of his burden, saying no one died because he lied about there being an informant.

In a flashback, we see Madeline approach Roderick’s boss Griswold back in the ’70s with a business proposition, pitching him on technology that can help the company sell drugs better. He doesn’t take her seriously and instead hits on her before humiliating her by saying she and Roderick have been the laughingstock of the office for years because their mom was knocked up by Longfellow. Madeline goes home and tells Roderick, Auguste, and Annabel all about it. Auguste says it’s a good thing Griswold underestimates Roderick because it’ll be easier to take down Fortunato that way.

Arthur collects photos of the mysterious woman, Verna, including one that was found on Leo’s phone. Madeline recognizes her from the New Year’s party in 1980 and tells Roderick he should know her, too. It becomes apparent that the siblings have an unspoken rule to never speak about that night again, and Madeline speculates that maybe Roderick had sex with her all those years ago and she could be back with a child he never knew he had. Arthur says he’s going to find her and try to negotiate with her, to which Madeline says she wants both of her eyes extracted.

Victorine meets with the patient about to go through with the heart trial, who is really Verna, and although she admits to being nervous, she agrees to go through with it if Al says it’s a good idea. Victorine starts to hear a weird, repetitive chirping noise and she can’t figure out where it’s coming from. The noise continues to get really loud before abruptly stopping and then starting back up again.

Frederick starts to look suspicious after deciding to move Morrie back home, telling Lenore that she shouldn’t trust anyone, not even her mom. He’s clearly still very hurt about the fact that Morrie lied the night she went to Perry’s party, and he’s not going to let it go.

Tammy is fed up with Bill, believing he must’ve slept with the mysterious woman who keeps showing up in the background of his livestream videos. She isn’t sleeping anymore amid her siblings’ deaths and other stresses, and she argues with Bill about the business. He calls Goldbug “their” business, but she corrects him and says it’s hers. Bill says that Tammy must be losing it and reminds her that the hookers were her idea before walking away.

Roderick tries to grapple with his family’s new reality, feeling like he might be losing his mind. He might know what’s actually going on, which he thinks sounds crazy, but he also might be crazy enough to put a stop to it. He considers taking his own life by overdosing on Ligodone or jumping out the window, but he’s too scared to do it. He believes that if he kills himself, he might be able to save his family.

Instead, Roderick goes to see Victorine. He shows up at her place unannounced and apologizes for turning the siblings against each other. He believed it would make them stronger, but he admits to being wrong. Though he tries to open up about needing her, there’s something wrong with Victorine. He asks her to turn down the music and when she does, they both hear the clicking noise. We then cut to a flashback of her last conversation with Alessandra. As she was about to walk out of the door, Victorine chucked some type of decorative object at her head and ended up killing her.

Back to Victorine’s scene with her father, Roderick smells something weird and starts to get up to see what it is, and we then get a quick flashback again of Victorine cutting up Al’s body. Roderick discovers Al’s body and it’s revealed that the clicking sound is coming from a device Victorine placed near her heart. Somehow, Victorine doesn’t realize that she’s dead and tells Roderick that Al is not being a team player. Roderick informs her that Alessandra is dead, and when Victorine realizes this, she stabs herself in the heart before falling to the floor.

Roderick is horrified at his daughter lying on the floor with a knife in her heart, all while the clicking noise continues.

Written by Natalie Zamora

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 6 recap: Goldbug

In the fallout of her big fight with Bill, Tammy is going through it. She hits her head on the bathroom mirror while getting ready for bed and doesn’t understand how it happened, and weird occurrences continue to happen. She has to rework her speech for the launch of Goldbug now that Bill is out of the picture, but she gets distracted by disturbing visions and realizes she really does need to get some sleep. She takes sleeping pills but they don’t seem to work as she lays in bed and tries to fall asleep.

At his office, Roderick talks to the visions of his deceased kids while opening up a package that contains Egyptian antiques, including sapphire eyes. Madeline comes to his office and notices that he still has blood all over him following Victorine’s death. He explains that he needed to rush over to the office before the press got to him. Madeline says their family is under attack and they’re now going to be outnumbered at the board now that the siblings keep dying off. Roderick might just lose Fortunato now.

While Roderick wants to go speak with the board, Madeline says they need to prioritize finding the mysterious woman. Meanwhile, Roderick doesn’t give Juno any update and she wonders where he is when he doesn’t come home. She continues to call him while watching the news, where she finds out about Victorine and Alessandra’s deaths.

Frederick and Lenore also watch the news and Frederick tells his daughter that he’s not surprised Victorine died, saying the siblings who are gone weren’t full Ushers anyway.

Bill comes home to see if Tammy is okay but she doesn’t want him there and tells him to leave. He tells her that they shouldn’t be fighting amid all of the deaths and that he loves her, to which Tammy says she does not love him back. He asks what he did that was so bad and she explains how much Goldbug means to her. She wants to create something that’s different than selling pills, but she’s scared. She looks back up and Bill is gone, leaving the viewer to wonder if he was really ever there in the first place.

Arthur goes to check out the crime scene at Victorine’s and finds a patient file, recognizing Verna’s photo in a copy of her ID. He takes it with him as he continues to investigate who this woman is, soon calling up Madeline and telling him that the address on the ID is her and Roderick’s childhood home. He believes they are definitely being targeted for some reason.

Tammy goes to her dad’s house to speak with him but Juno tells her that he’s not there and she doesn’t know where he is. Juno opens up to her and tells her that she never really had a family and when she and Roderick got together, she mistakenly believed she would finally have one. But of course, that’s not how it is as the siblings have never embraced or even accepted her.

In the present timeline, Auguste and Roderick continue to speak when someone crashes through the window, which causes Roderick to fall to the floor. Auguste is alarmed because he can’t see anything, while Roderick sees Tammy’s dead body covered in blood. Auguste helps Roderick and makes sure he’s okay.

In Roderick’s retelling, Arthur meets with him and Madeline and tells them that the mysterious woman is messing with them but he just doesn’t understand how or why. He looked into the address of the bar from that night in 1980 but says it was never actually a bar and has been vacant since 1975. Plus, Madeline and Roderick claimed they walked there but Arthur says the address is more than five miles away from the Fortunato office. He also looked into all of the bars in the five-minute radius of the office and none of the bartender descriptions have matched up with Verna’s.

Things then get a bit more complicated. Arthur explains that he found an image of the woman on the internet, which led to the discovery of several more photos. Arthur found photos of Verna taken throughout history, showing up in pictures with famous people like Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch McConnell, the Rockefellers, and others. The photos she’s in date back to 1901.

Roderick doesn’t believe it and says she must have put up edited photos on the internet to try and trick people. Madeline believes Arthur and then brings up the New Year’s party in 1980, but Roderick doesn’t want to talk about it. Arthur says the metadata provided for the photos prove they’ve been on the internet for years, and questions why this is happening.

Lenore watches a movie with her mom and to her surprise, her mom speaks and tells Lenore that she loves her. Lenore goes to see her dad who’s bowling in their house, asking if a doctor is ever coming. Frederick basically blows her off, however, saying that Morrie is doing well and the doctors will come if they need to. Lenore apologizes to her dad for all of the loss he’s experiencing, but he assures her he’s okay. He’s acting very weird, likely because of the drugs, and continues to bowl instead of comforting his daughter.

Frederick then goes to see Morrie when Lenore isn’t in the room and does cocaine in front of her. He tells her there’s no point in her talking if she’s just going to lie, and while she struggles to respond, she’s able to get out a “no.” Frederick then asks how long he’s been sleeping with “him,” presumably Perry, and escalates the situation by drugging her. He mixes chemicals from Fortunato together and adds them to her IV before the scene cuts to black.

Madeline finds Roderick sitting on the floor of the basement of the Fortunato building, drinking, and she tells him they need to go to the Goldbug launch. Roderick doesn’t want to go and starts hearing a weird bell sound, but Madeline tells him he’s got to get himself together. She believes that he knows what’s going on but he’s playing dumb.

Tammy gets ready for the launch event but before she’s able to walk up on the stage, she hears someone else’s voice introduce herself as Tammy. She looks out and sees that it’s Verna, so she doesn’t hesitate walking out behind her and asking her what she’s doing there. But when she looks again, Verna is not there after all. It’s just the host of the event introducing Tammy.

Embarrassed, Tammy begins her presentation about Goldbug and tells the audience that everyone has specially curated health boxes under their chairs. She’s doing a great job, but her speech comes to a halt when she notices the mysterious woman again, this time sitting in the audience. She yells out at her and everyone else is confused. When she looks back at her presentation, she sees Verna’s photos have replaced her own.

The slides then cut from the presentation to a sex tape of Tammy, Bill, and one of their hookers. She tries to get it turned off and panics, grabbing the microphone stand and hitting the projector with it repeatedly until she breaks the screen and the video stops. She turns around and sees Verna in the crowd again and throws the mic stand at her, but she accidentally hits Juno right in the head. Madeline spots Verna and chases after her, but all of a sudden, she vanishes.

Tammy rushes home and ignores calls from Bill before having a vision of Verna dressed up as her and talking to Bill on the phone. Tammy picks up a fire poker and tries to hit Verna but misses, following her voice through her house. She hits a mirror with the fire poker and a shard of glass gets stuck in her face, but she’s too distracted by the woman’s voice. She keeps trying to find her and then gets a piece of glass stuck in her foot before she continues swinging the fire poker all around. Verna disappears, and Tammy jumps on her bed and hits the ceiling mirror with the fire poker, falling back onto the bed and getting stabbed with huge shards of glass in the process. The glass from the mirror then falls on top of her, killing her.

Written by Natalie Zamora

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 7 recap: The Pit and the Pendulum

Back to the ’70s, the seventh episode of The Fall of the House of Usher begins with a flashback scene of a younger Roderick and Auguste rehearsing how it’ll go when Roderick goes on the record to speak out against Fortunato. In the present day, Auguste tells Roderick that he really only trusted him because Annabel was such a good person. She was the only good Usher, he says, but Roderick chased her away.

Following Tammy’s death, Frederick is now the swing vote for the company. Madeline tells Arthur that she’s the one who should be the new CEO; they can use her algorithm and rebrand Fortunato as a tech company. But it looks like Frederick might actually have a chance.

Over at his house, Frederick continues to do drugs in front of Morrie and terrorizes her in her hospital bed. He talks about the first day they met and asks her where she put her wedding ring. Before he can scare her anymore, he gets a phone call and he has to leave. He meets with Roderick and gets yelled at for not cleaning up the site of Perry’s party yet. Roderick needs him to have the building bulldozed down, but Frederick hasn’t done it yet. Roderick also informs him that he’s now the swing vote.

Juno meets with her doctor, making the decision that she wants to get off of Ligodone. She’s on 2,000 milligrams a day, and she no longer wants to be dependent on it.

Frederick delivers the news to Morrie about him being the swing vote, clearly very excited about this new development. He continues to drug her and tells her that he doesn’t want to be a cruel person but he must do something that asserts his dominance over her. This, he decides, is pulling out her teeth with pliers.

Frederick is in a rush to leave his house after that but Lenore stops him, wanting to talk. She tells her father that she’s found a facility they could bring Morrie to that specializes in burns. They have a spot open, but Frederick says no. He lies and tells Lenore that the doctors come when she’s at school, which she doesn’t believe. When Frederick leaves, Lenore goes to see her mom but finds her door locked.

Auguste continues to be disturbed by the noises in the basement in the present-day timeline, telling Roderick he wants to go see if it’s actually Madeline down there. Roderick is dragging out his confession, and Auguste tries to leave. But Roderick pulls him back in by telling him that if he stays, he’ll have him for murder. Auguste knows he’s playing a game, but he chooses to stay. The grandfather clock in the room begins ticking and Roderick says he suspects it’s Frederick, making sure his dad is getting the story straight.

Roderick sees a vision of Annabel and Frederick as a child, though Auguste doesn’t see them. Frederick’s body splits in half in front of Roderick, horrifying him.

In a flashback scene, it’s Roderick and Auguste’s big day — they’re going to go on the record to take down Fortunato. However, Roderick decides to go against the plan they formed and lies under oath. He defends Griswold and Fortunato, saying Auguste just has a vendetta against the company and that’s why he’s doing this. Auguste is shocked, understandably, and Roderick is arrested for perjury.

At home, Madeline tells Annabel that it was the plan all along because now Roderick is the most important employee at Fortunato. He’ll get out of legal trouble right away and will start reaping the benefits at work. Annabel is deeply upset, not realizing what was actually going on. She thought Roderick would be a hero, but Madeline shuts her down and shames her for thinking that way.

Fast forward to the main timeline, and Madeline goes to her and Roderick’s childhood home. She finds Verna there, sitting in a chair, who tells her that Roderick comes there a lot. Madeline asks Verna to stop doing whatever she’s doing and asks for new terms. But it’s not going to be that easy.

Lenore is able to bust into her mom’s room and discovers the state she’s in, quickly calling the cops for help.

After meeting with her doctor, Juno tells Roderick she wants to get off Ligodone. He tells her that while it’s not addictive, she will have really heavy symptoms if she tries to get off of it. He says it’ll take her three years to do so, and she agrees to do it. She calls him a monster and says she’ll take three years of misery getting off of Ligodone over a lifetime being married to him.

Frederick heads to the building where Perry hosted the party with a crew of guys who are going to tear it down. He asks them to give him a minute while he goes to take care of something inside, and when he walks in he starts doing more cocaine. All of a sudden, he falls to the floor and Verna shows up. She tells him that he’s actually snorted the nightshade paralytic that he’s been giving Morrie. She previously made him mix up the two substances without him knowing. As he’s on the floor and unable to get up, Morrie takes out a walkie-talkie, puts on Frederick’s voice, and tells the crew they’re good to bulldoze the building.

The wrecking ball comes in and Frederick and Verna lay on the floor together as the building comes down. Of course, Verna won’t actually die from this, but Frederick will. The wreckage falls on top of him and kills him, marking the final Usher sibling’s death.

In the final scene of the episode, Madeline goes to see Roderick who is sitting in the Fortunato basement again. She tells him that Frederick is dead and reminds him of what they agreed to. “Into the world together, out of the world together, or there’s no deal,” Madeline says. She asks Roderick to be a hero again, handing him 80 milligrams of Ligodone. They believe Roderick has to kill himself to put a stop to what’s happening. He takes handfuls of pills and begins crying before passing out on the floor. Madeline places the bottle of Ligodone in his hand and hears that strange bell noise from the wall before walking away.

However, once Madeline leaves, Verna appears. She wakes Roderick up and tells him he can’t get out of the deal that easy.

Written by Natalie Zamora

The Fall of the House of Usher episode 8 recap: The Raven

We’ve finally made it to the end of The Fall of the House of Usher, and if you’re desperate for answers at this point, don’t worry. We get to understand the big mystery right here in the finale. As we see in the final moments of the penultimate episode, Roderick is not able to take his own life; Verna stops that from happening. She speaks to him at the Fortunato office when he wakes up, bringing up the fact that millions of people have died because of him. She’s not going to let him and Madeline change the terms, which is why he isn’t able to kill himself. She leaves and Roderick sees a quick vision of a jester attacking him before disappearing.

The cops leave Frederick’s house after assisting Lenore with her mother, and when Arthur arrives he’s angry that Lenore gave a statement before he could get there. Lenore tells him that her father was abusing and mutilating her mother and that she needs to tell the truth. Roderick is proud of Lenore for speaking up, while Madeline is now on her way to becoming the new CEO.

In the present time, which we are quickly approaching with Roderick’s story, Auguste tells Roderick that once he heard he had lost Fortunato, he was told to give up the case. But Auguste still wants justice. Lenore continues to send text messages to Roderick but he ignores her, which confuses Auguste.

At the funeral for Tammy, Victorine, and Frederick, Roderick has a vision of Annabel confronting him for taking the kids away from her. Because Roderick had money and a glamorous life, their children wanted to be with him, despite not actually being a good father. We get a flashback to the ’70s when Annabel decides she’s going to leave Roderick after he lies on the record.

When Roderick leaves the church, he opens the car door to see that jester person again. This shocks him and he falls back onto the cement sidewalk, and his nose begins to bleed. He sees a raven and he realizes it’s time.

Finally, Roderick comes clean to Auguste in the present timeline about what happened that night in 1980 and how it changed his and Madeline’s entire lives.

We cut back to that New Year’s Eve party where Roderick and Madeline celebrated 1980. In the flashback, they start at the Fortunato holiday costume party that night, which is hosted at the office. Griswold is wearing that jester costume we see earlier in the episode, and he’s being celebrated for his work. Griswold tells Roderick he’s his right-hand man and that he’s already told investors that he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the company. Madeline distracts Griswold, getting flirty with him and luring him into the basement.

Under the guise that she might have sex with him, Madeline gets Griswold in a vulnerable situation and drugs him with something that makes him unable to walk, leaving him passed out on the floor. When Griswold wakes up, he’s chained up to the wall and sees Madeline and Roderick placing bricks in front of him to trap him inside. Their true plan is finally revealed! Because they despise Griswold and what he’s done, they’re going to leave him for dead inside the wall and secure themselves high positions at Fortunato. They’re taking back their birthright.

Griswold tries to bribe them to get them to stop, but Roderick and Madeline don’t listen. They say that no one will hear him if he screams because the Fortunato employees are off for a week for the holidays. Before they finish, Madeline puts the jester costume mask back on Griswold, revealing what’s been making that metallic noise all those years later. It’s the bells from Griswold’s costume.

After committing their crime, Madeline and Roderick realize they should lay low and hit another location, walking to a bar nearby. We cut to them hanging out with Verna the bartender after everyone’s left, and she offers them a proposition: What would they give for all of the power in the world? Madeline and Roderick are confused, but they start to take her seriously when she says she knows about Griswold.

Verna tells the siblings that she can guarantee they’ll be running Fortunato, their family will want for nothing, and they’ll never face legal trouble if they take her deal. The catch? The Usher bloodline will have to end with Roderick. Madeline would have to die with him as well, as they came into the world together so they have to go out the same. Though they’re skeptical, Roderick and Madeline agree.

Roderick tells Auguste in the present-day timeline that the details of that night faded away and eventually it just felt like a dream, never to come up again until decades later when his children started dying.

Earlier that night, Arthur finds Verna in Roderick and Madeline’s childhood home and injects her with something before wrapping her up in a plastic sheet. But, of course, Verna gets out of it. She appears on the couch and starts laughing, to Arthur’s surprise, and tries to offer him a deal. She tells him that Camille had a file on him and after Fortunato goes down, he could be facing prison time. She could help him out, but he doesn’t want to get involved in her games. He denies the offer and leaves.

Roderick comes home from the hospital after falling outside of the funeral and Lenore is there to look after him. She has nowhere else to go right now, and she sweetly tucks in her grandfather before heading to a guest bed to sleep. When she opens the door, Verna is there waiting for her. Roderick doesn’t realize that the bloodline ending with him means his granddaughter has to die, too.

Verna tells Lenore that Morrie will survive Frederick’s abuse and will end up okay. She’ll get a large fortune when the company goes down, and she’ll eventually give most of that money away to charity. The money she will keep will be used to start her own non-profit organization called the Lenore Foundation. She’ll use her business to save millions of lives. Verna tells Lenore that it’s really her who will save all of the lives because she made the choice to call the police and save her mom from her dad.

At the childhood home in the present timeline, Auguste is confused because he doesn’t think Lenore is dead. Roderick keeps getting texts from her, after all. But Roderick explains that Madeline used Lenore as a beta test for an AI project, creating a “Lenore bot.” That’s who must be texting him, he believes. He shows Auguste his phone and the repeated texts say “NEVERMORE” along with misspelled variations of the word.

After Lenore’s death, Roderick goes to his office and realizes the time has come. He turns around and sees a vision of his dead children and grandchild all sitting in chairs. Verna appears, telling him that he has a large body count. It starts raining outside and when Roderick looks, it turns out to be bodies falling from the sky, not actual rain. Verna says those are all of his victims who died at the hands of Fortunato’s drugs. She instructs Roderick to go back to his childhood home and call Auguste to come meet him.

Before Auguste arrives at the Usher home, Madeline comes to see Roderick and sits with him in the basement. They share a drink and talk about whether or not they actually believed Verna all those years ago. Madeline gets up but starts to feel woozy before realizing that Roderick must have spiked her drink with something. She falls to the floor and he places her body up on a table, realizing he wants to preserve her as best as possible. He brings out those sapphire eyes, presumably in an effort to mummify her like the Egyptians did. But as we see Roderick point his knife at her, the scene cuts to Auguste asking what he did to her. “I sent her off like a queen, Queen Twosret, as a matter of fact,” Roderick replies, referring to an Egyptian queen who was believed to be mummified.

But as they continue to hear noise from the basement, Auguste isn’t certain that Madeline is actually dead. Roderick confesses that the biggest lie he’s told is that Fortunato could cure people of pain. He says there is no such thing as a painkiller. But before their conversation continues, Madeline runs up from the basement covered in blood with the sapphire eyes in her eye sockets. She jumps on Roderick and strangles him. Frightened, Auguste runs out of the house and watches it completely collapse behind him. Roderick and Madeline are caught under the wreckage, which kills them.

We get narration as the episode comes to an end of Auguste reading “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and we learn that he puts in his retirement now that his case is over. Juno inherits everything and completely dissolves Fortunato, using her money for rehab centers and recovery research. She successfully weans herself off of Ligodone, while Arthur is arrested.

Auguste goes to visit Roderick’s grave and places his recorder on the ground in front of him, saying he doesn’t want his confession. Though that’s all he wanted for a time, he’s got other priorities now. He has his family at home to keep him happy. A raven begins squawking nearby and Verna’s voice begins to narrate “Spirits of the Dead.” She watches Auguste leave the cemetery and places objects on each of the Usher family member’s tombstones.

In the end, everyone got their side of the deal, whether they actually wanted it or not.

Written by Natalie Zamora

All eight episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher are now streaming on Netflix.