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“Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile — an idiot.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum” Display Clock On Screen
The first thing we see in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a cat clock. You know the one: grinning, side-eyed, wagging its tail to remind us that each back-and-forth stroke is moving us one second closer to the grave.
Okay, that’s a little dramatic. But for young Frederick Usher — who stares at the clock in 1979 while Roderick and Dupin hash out the details of the testimony that could take down Fortunato once and for all — it could have been an early warning. By the episode’s end, he’s staring down a much larger pendulum, watching as it ticks away the seconds while slicing him in half, one stroke at a time.
How did he end up there? There’s no simple answer to that question, but if you asked Verna, she might say it started when Roderick decided to turn his back on Dupin in 1979. Betraying and humiliating Dupin in a deposition by accusing him of harassment, Roderick also makes himself indispensable to Fortunato, losing his marriage to Annabel while leaving a very evil pharmaceutical company permanently in his debt. If not for that decision, Verna reveals, Roderick might have been a poet. Freddie would have been a dentist — and a pretty good one, too.
In our present-day narrative, we’ve seen that side of Roderick, who still tends to wax poetic — and occasionally drop some actual poetry — in a way that reveals the inner wordsmith buried deep inside himself. Unfortunately, in this episode we also get to meet Freddie’s inner dentist when he grabs a pair of pliers and rips out his wife’s teeth.
When it comes to the Usher kids, Freddie has been House of Usher’s slowest burn. Roderick’s eldest son and one of the few ties to his pre-robber-baron life, Freddie is also a pathetically ineffectual doormat with no obvious skills besides “bowling in his living room” and “growing a dumb-looking ponytail.” His siblings call him Frauderick for being such a poor imitation of the Usher patriarch. When he replaced a respected Fortunato board member, the New York Times ran with the headline “From Ruthless to Toothless.” When Morrie picked him up, he was standing awkwardly and alone at a photo shoot. She noted, correctly, that he looked like he needed a friend.
Years later, her decision to attend Prospero’s rave turned out to be the thing that pushed Freddie — an r/niceguys candidate if I’ve ever seen one — over the edge. After exploiting the power and influence of the Usher name to drag Morrie back home against the doctor’s orders, he called off the specialists, filled the room with pictures from their wedding, and spent his days berating her between heavy sedation and one very nasty round of involuntary dental surgery.
While Freddie and Morrie’s miserable Misery riff plays out, Madeline is scrambling to ensure that what’s left of the House of Usher remains standing. She goes beyond Roderick’s back on the business side of Fortunato and even goads him into taking a lethal dose of Ligodone (though Verna, unwilling to let him off that easy, pulls Roderick back to reality before he can die in his sleep). Both a negotiator and a survivor, Madeline is clearly willing to do whatever it takes — including getting rid of her brother — to avoid the consequences of the life she’s chosen.
But when she confronts Verna to try to strike a deal, that’s not what Verna wants. Instead, the Usher family’s tormentor is almost wistful. Existing, apparently, out of time, Verna says she can see who Madeline is, who Madeline was, and who she could have been. “And together they break my heart,” she says. She doesn’t elaborate, but “who she could have been” is an interesting question. Maybe she would have found more purpose if she’d come up in a time when a woman would have had an easier time ascending to the top job at Fortunato — though Madeline would be the first to say being underestimated only gave her an edge. As for who she was and is … well, we’ve seen both ends of that story, and how much difference is there? For all Madeline’s bluster, it feels like Annabel had her pegged back in 1979: “You are so small,” she says.
What are the consequences of being so small? Just ask Freddie, whom Verna treats more ruthlessly than any of his late siblings. Puffed up on his own petty tyranny, he terrorizes a construction crew into rushing the destruction of the factory where Prospero’s party was held. He even shows up in person to dishonor his dead brother by pissing on the floor where his corpse laid.
It’s then that Verna springs her trap, freezing Freddie with the paralytic he doesn’t realize he’s been snorting. As he lies on the factory floor during the demolition, Verna tells him it didn’t need to be like this. He could have had a heart attack or been hit by a bus. It seems, for a moment, like she even considered giving him an easy out. Her acknowledgment that Roderick denied love and respect has a genuine pang of sympathy — until she snarls, “And it’s still no fucking excuse” for his sins. After what he did to Morrie, Verna wants to see him suffer, and a swinging pendulum dislodged during the demolition, slicing into him inch by inch, is an especially effective way to do it.
Once the pendulum stops swinging and Freddie is dead, it’s fair to ask: Were there ever any good Ushers? Dupin suggests Annabel, but it’s hard to call her an Usher when she had the integrity to leave Roderick decades earlier. Roderick suggests Lenore, a relative innocent whose intelligence and courage does result in her mother’s rescue even as Freddie dies on that factory floor.
But there’s a third name neither Roderick nor Dupin suggests: Juno. If Roderick’s new wife has sometimes seemed like a background character, that was by design. In this episode, he compares himself to Frankenstein and casts her as the monster he created: singular and beautiful due to the inhuman amounts of Ligodone she can ingest.
It is not hard to imagine her in that big empty mansion long after Roderick dies, subsisting on a steady diet of Ligodone. But that’s not what she chooses. Reflecting on the years of withdrawal ahead of her, “I will take three years of hell over a lifetime with you. Easy,” she says. It’s the latest in a staggering string of losses for Roderick, and Verna wasn’t even there to see it. This time, he did it all to himself.
• Verna says Roderick has been showing up to the old house alone, drinking and crying and bringing boxes into the basement. Any guesses what’s in them?
• Madeline insists that she just needs a little more time to complete the AI algorithm that will make her functionally immortal, which sounds like exactly the kind of thing Verna could twist into a fate worse than death.
• In a nice little twist on House of Usher’s usual brand of jump-scare, Roderick is greeted not by the ghost of his adult son but by Annabel and Freddie, miraculously young again. It’s enough to make the old man smile … until young Freddie’s torso slides off his legs.
• Submitted for your approval, Freddie’s nicknames for himself: Fredzo, Usher Ascendent.
• “I thought, good for her, she found her angle, but this is really you, isn’t it? I thought you only existed in the movies.”
• In case you want to study it for clues before the series finale, here’s “The City in the Sea.” Let it steep a moment. It’ll come to you.
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