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Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the first three episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher.
The Big Picture
- In Episode 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick Usher weaponizes his son’s death to protect the family and their pharmaceutical empire.
- Verna infiltrates the Usher family, becoming a test subject and masquerading as a call girl.
- Camille uncovers Victorine’s falsified scientific experiments and confronts her, leading to a bloody encounter with Verna.
What do you do when life gives you lemons? Lemonade, right? Well, yes, but not before turning lemons into the sexiest, most coveted product on the market. Or, at least, that’s the Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) way of seeing things. That is how he reasons for weaponizing the death of his youngest son, Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), a death that is shrouded in mystery and tied in more ways than one to the misdeeds of the Usher family. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the third episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, we see the aftermath of the events of Episode 2, and learn two extremely important things about the massacre at Perry’s debauchery fest. The first one is that Morelle (Crystal Balint) did not make it out unscathed, but is in fact lying skinless in a hospital, the sole survivor of such a tragic night. The second is that Prospero’s body was full of Monty, a street version of Roderick Usher’s pet drug, Ligodone, when he died.
Both of these things seem like damning evidence capable of crushing the Ushers in the public eye, but with Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill) handling the investigations and Camille (Kate Siegel) taking care of the media, it seems like Perry’s death will prove nothing but beneficial to the Fortunato pharmaceutical empire.
But the universe has other plans for the Usher family. While they spin their tale about Prospero being a golden boy who helped build villages in developing countries, Verna (Carla Gugino) makes her way into the lives of the remaining siblings. As a woman with an irregular heartbeat, she all but offers herself to become the first human test subject in Victorine’s (T’Nia Miller) experiment. Then, she dons the mask — or, rather, the wig — of Crystal, the new call girl in Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) and William’s (Matt Biedel) sexual domesticity games. Finally, there is Camille. Obsessed with finding dirt on Victorine, Camille decides to do some digging at RUE, the laboratory in which her sister does her experiments with chimps. There, she is greeted by Verna, dressed as a security guard. What she doesn’t know is that this seemingly innocuous encounter is also a run-in with her fate.
The Usher Family Closes Ranks to Deal with Prospero’s Death
All of the Usher children, legitimate and illegitimate, have a role to fulfill. Camille herself makes that clear in this episode during her conversation with Leo (Rahul Kohli). Frederick (Henry Thomas), a.k.a. Froderick, is their father’s successor, the one who must learn the family business in depth so that he can take over in the near future. Tamerlane, or Tammy, is the Gwyneth Paltrow-like figure, running her own wellness empire with the help and the face of her husband. Leo is the videogame master, Victorine deals in science and medicine, and Prospero was the young, inconsequential party boy. As for Camille, she’s the closest one to Fortunato after Frederick. She’s the one behind crafting both the family and the company’s public persona. She’s the tale-spinner, the one that makes fancy lemonades out of events such as Prospero’s death.
As she looks for ways to turn brainless Perry into a charitable young genius in the eyes of the media and use his demise as fuel to burn Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) in a public fire — “Are you saying that Prospero Usher’s death is justice?” a Fox News reporter asks him — the rest of the family grieves in their own way. Roderick plays the blame game with Frederick, accusing him of taking too long to demolish the condemned building in which Prospero threw his party, while Leo puts together a rager of his own. Sadly, this is another drug-infused celebration that ends with a body count, as Leo wakes up the next morning to realize that he has murdered his boyfriend’s cat. While watching him clean away the evidence of his crime and lie to poor Julius (Daniel Chae Jun) about leaving the window open, we are left with the certainty that this will definitely come back to haunt him.
Indeed, the Usher family has a funny way of grieving. They can come off as callous, even cruel, but, most importantly, it’s a utilitarian approach. What good is death if they can’t take something off of it, whether that something is a party or a sob story for the press? Much like the lives of all those affected by Ligodone were sacrificed to further the growth of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, so shall Prospero’s sacrifice be used to protect the Usher family. But just as Ligodone-related deaths aren’t exactly accidental, neither was Prospero’s, and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) is well aware of that. While Camille spins her tale, she has the family’s attorney, Arthur Pym, look into what happened at Perry’s impromptu nightclub, specifically why the party’s staff left the scene before the acid shower. What he finds is a picture of an unidentified masked woman who may or may not have saved everyone’s life — a woman that we, on this side of the screen, know to be Verna.
Verna Makes Camille Her Second Usher Target
Little by little, Verna is slithering into the lives of all the Usher kids. She pops up at Dr. Ruiz’s (Paola Núñez) clinic complaining about her irregular heart, and Victorine sees this as an opportunity to make her the first human test subject on her heart mesh experiment — which has been killing one monkey after the other. Back at Tamerlane’s, she replaces the usual woman who tends to Tammy and Bill’s extremely complicated fetish, which involves someone else pretending to be Tammy during dinner while the real Tammy watches from the other side of the room. She is biding her time, of course. Waiting for the right moment to strike, to bring down the fall of each of the Usher siblings. But “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not Victorine’s episode, nor Tamerlane’s. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is all Camille’s.
As shown in both Episodes 1 and 2, Camille has her own suspicions about who is the informant hiding inside the family’s ranks. While most of her brothers and sisters suspect either Prospero or Roderick’s young wife, Juno (Ruth Codd), she is certain that Victorine is the one talking to the feds. So, she has her assistants, Toby (Igby Rigney) and Tina (Aya Furukawa), look into the animal trials going on at RUE Morgue. What the duo finds is that there is a discrepancy in the number of chimps that go into the building and the number that leave. Victorine has been falsifying her test results, doing away with the bodies of the dead monkeys and stitching up living, healthy ones, subsequently pumping them full of adrenaline to make it seem like her heart mesh is working.
Camille is ecstatic to find such dirt on her sister. She is less ecstatic when Toby and Tina tell her that they are now an item and will no longer be partaking in the sexual part of their professional relationship. After berating them for believing in ridiculous things such as love, Camille fires them both, not anticipating that she will now have to deal with the Victorine investigation all by herself.
Still, it’s a job that needs doing. So, she goes up to Victorine’s lab, where a security guard wearing Verna’s face tries to warn her not to go in. Much like she did with Prospero, she tries to give Camille a way out of such a horrible death. Alas, much like Prospero, Camille does not listen, instead opting to go into the room in which Victorine keeps her adrenaline-high monkeys.
What happens next is a bit confusing. As Camille is taking pictures of the stitched-up, highly excitable chimps, Verna comes in and strikes up a one-way conversation about animal testing. She then jumps on the surgery table in the middle of the room and reveals to Camille her own stitched-up chest. Shocked, Camille points her phone to Verna and snaps a picture. As soon as the flash goes off, however, Verna is turned into an enraged ape who immediately jumps on Camille. All we see next is the lab, on the following morning, covered in blood. In the corner of the room is Camille’s mangled body, a chimp sitting in front of it.
In the Past, Roderick Rises Through the Ranks of Fortunato
Like we’ve said before, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is Camille’s episode through and through. However, this wouldn’t be an episode of The Fall of the House of Usher if we didn’t get to see a bit of the rise too. In the past, the episode gives us another glimpse at how Roderick Usher rose to the top of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals.
After his meeting with Mr. Griswold (Michael Trucco) in Episode 2, young Roderick (Zach Gilford) is incensed to find out that Fortunato Pharmaceuticals has bought Landor, the company for which his associate that actually invented Ligodone works, which means that Fortunato has bought Ligodone without including him in the equation. He confronts Mr. Griswold about that, but the current top dog at Fortunato buys his silence by promoting him and offering him money for other business ideas that he might have. Annabel (Katie Parker) is just excited to have a little more money coming into the household, but Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) sees the promotion for what it truly is: an opportunity for Roderick to become closer to Mr. Griswold and then destroy him when the time is right. Where all of this scheming will lead to is still anyone’s guess, but each episode seems to take us closer and closer to that fateful day in Episode 1 in which Roderick and Madeline walked into a bar on New Year’s Eve — the day in which they first let Verna into their lives.
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