And then there was Freddie (Henry Thomas). After Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) meets her sharp-edged end, you’d think the last Usher child standing would be concerned for his safety, but he’s so busy trying to punish his wife, Morrie (Crystal Balint), that he doesn’t even see his fate staring him in the face. Madeline (Mary McDonnell) and Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) don’t have that problem, though: By the time we arrive at The Fall of the House of Usher Episode 7, the Usher twins seem to have worked out exactly what’s causing these deaths, but they also know they are powerless to stop it. Let’s dive into “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
Well, it’s certainly ramping up. Dupin (Carl Lumbly) grows tired of Roderick dragging this story out, and fears the Fortunato CEO is somehow using him for his own gain (very typical Roddie behavior). But while all of Roderick’s hallucinations or visits from his dead children have been visible only to him, Dupin gets a little taste for the first time: The clock in the house starts ticking, its pendulum swinging (very appropriate, no?) and he sees it, too. Thankfully, he does not see the next bit: Annabel Lee (Katie Parker) and tiny Freddie (William Kosovic) run up to Roderick for a small, joyful moment… until the bottom half of Freddie’s body falls to the floor. Still, Dupin is ready to call it quits on Roderick’s long-winded tale of woe until, that is, he learns that when Roderick is finally finished, he’ll be able to charge the Usher patriarch with at least two murders. It’s a very enticing prospect for the man who has felt duped by this guy for decades.
Poor Auguste Dupin (the younger version, played by Malcolm Goodwin). During his chat with Roderick in the present, he wonders aloud just why he trusted someone like Roderick Usher so much back in 1979 — but he knows the answers. It’s because he trusted Annabel. If someone like her could trust and love this man, he must be OK. But he was not OK, and both Dupin and Annabel paid the price.
The day of the deposition arrives and Dupin feels like he finally will be able to bring Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) and Fortunato to justice, but he is so very wrong. Roderick’s participation in this deposition was all a ruse. He was never going to turn on Fortunato. In the deposition, he says the signatures on those forms were not forged, that he signed them, and there is no wrongdoing on Fortunato’s part. Dupin sits there aghast at the betrayal. Sure, Roderick briefly gets arrested for perjury, but as Madeline cruelly explains to a shocked Annabel, he just made himself the most important Fortunato employee on the planet. He is a hero and a legend, and now he has the company in the palm of his hand. They’ll get him out of jail, and they will owe him everything. Meanwhile, Dupin’s entire career is trashed, and Annabel, heartbroken, leaves Roderick.
After Tamerlane’s death, it’s never been more apparent that the Fortunato board will have the power to oust Roderick as chairman. While to his face Madeline offers her support, behind his back she tells Pym (Mark Hamill) that because of his degenerative disease, Roderick is a liability and she should be made chairwoman of the company. She wants to bring Fortunato into the future by pushing it out of pharmaceuticals and into tech — this will never happen with her brother at the helm.
She decides to head to her childhood home, knowing Verna (Carla Gugino) will be there. And she’s right! Verna, a satanic demon or Death itself, is awaiting Madeline’s arrival. We learn that back on New Year’s Eve, 1979, Madeline and Roderick entered into some sort of deal with Verna, and it is because of this deal that all of these deaths are occuring. It is time to pay the reaper, as it were. But Madeline wants to renegotiate terms. It is impossible… so Madeline breaks Verna’s neck. It’s a cute little power move, but Verna can’t be killed and the deal can’t be changed now. Verna offers “clarity” by way of a poem (Edgar Allen Poe’s “The City in the Sea”) about a city ruled by Death. Madeline knows what she needs to do now.
Sort of? It’s complicated! After her meeting with Verna, Madeline visits her brother who once again is moping in front of that brick wall in the Fortunato basement. She reminds him of the deal they made in 1979 and wants him to stop living in denial. “Into the world together, out of the world together, or there’s no deal” is apparently what Verna said to them at the time. They both believe there is only one way out of this, and that’s with Roderick’s death. Madeline hands her twin a bottle of Ligodone and asks him to be a hero for her — for them. He starts taking fistfuls of the pills while Madeline repeats “that’s a hero, that’s a king, you’re saving us all.” He dies in front of her and she leaves him there, setting the scene to look like suicide, and attempting to ignore the sound of jingling bells she hears from behind the brick wall.
While Madeline Usher may think she just figured a way out of the deal, she really underestimates Verna. Verna appears in the basement, wakes Roderick up with a touch of her finger and tells him, “I can’t let you out that easy.” It appears she has plans for ol’ Roddie. And for Madeline, too.
Oh yes, most definitely. The last living Usher child meets a gruesome end that he mostly brings upon himself. So preoccupied with torturing his wife for what he perceives to be infidelity, he barely even registers his sister’s death. He has taped pictures from his and Morrie’s wedding all over her bedroom walls, and is diligently giving her a paralytic to keep her aware of her surroundings but unable to move. Deciding he’s more of a single “sufficiently brutal” blow type of guy instead of a “consistently cruel” one, he brings out the big guns — that is, a pair of pliers which he uses to pull out Morrie’s teeth.
You’d think that would make for a full day, but no, Freddie has a lot on his to-do list, including proving to his father that he can be an asset to him. First order of business: He needs to finally make that condemned building (where Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) died) disappear. While he’s preparing to leave — “preparing” for Freddie means making sure he has enough cocaine in his pocket — he freezes for a moment, almost as if he’s in a trance. Morrie clocks it, but he doesn’t notice a thing.
At the condemned building, Freddie asks the foreman to give him five minutes inside and then start the demolition once he gives the all-clear. He wants to go looking for Morrie’s wedding ring, which he has promised to weld to her finger. He’s a gem, isn’t he? But after taking a bump of coke and then peeing on the floor as a way to tell Perry to “rest in pee,” something happens to him. He freezes and then collapses. Verna appears to inform that it wasn’t cocaine he ingested, it was the paralytic he’s been giving Morrie. And that moment when Morrie watched him in that trance-like state? That was Verna telling him to shovel the paralytic into his bag. She tells the now paralyzed but very much conscious Freddie that she normally doesn’t “intervene this directly,” but Freddie is so wretched that she couldn’t help herself.
Verna uses Freddie’s voice to give the “all-clear” and the wrecking ball crashes through the building. She sits with Freddie as some of the debris forms a makeshift pendulum with quite the sharp edge. It slowly slips closer and closer to Freddie, unable to do anything but watch as it begins slicing into his gut over and over. If he’s not dead already, he’s on his way just as the entire building comes down on top of him. The final Usher child is dead.
