Roderick assures Auguste Dupin that the noises in the basement are Madeline. But the last episode makes clear Roderick didn't realize Madeline was still alive. The first episode also shows that Roderick, at least initially, thought Dupin would be able to see the same ghosts he does (he tells Dupin to turn around because Roderick's mother is behind him), even though Dupin never acknowledges the ghosts Roderick sees right in front of him. Roderick thought the noises they were hearing from the basement were Madeline's ghost, and didn't make the connection even after realizing Dupin couldn't see the ghosts that Dupin shouldn't be hearing Madeline if she's dead.
Verna tells Roderick that it's better for his children to live "forty, fifty years" in extreme luxury than to live longer but struggle. In 1980, when the deal was made, Frederick was about four years old and Tamerlane was a baby. By their deaths in 2023, Frederick was around 47 and Tamerlane 43 or 44. Precisely how long Verna said they would live.
The Usher children die in reverse order of age. Or, perhaps, in order according to how much damage they've done throughout their lives (the younger ones simply not having lived long enough to build up a debt like their older siblings) and how many "consequences" they have earned.
So why did Verna not kill the youngest and most innocent Usher first? It's because Lenore was the youngest and the most innocent. Verna was giving her as much time as she possibly could.
Prospero's death is abysmally different from all those of his siblings in terms of collateral damage, with almost 80 people dying horribly alongside him. This seems incongruent with Verna's behavior and implementation of her collecting of the Ushers' debt as shown in the rest of the show (the combined deaths of the entire rest of the family netted a grand total of one additional collateral damage fatality), until one takes into account the fact that the audience is shown every single step in the decision-making process that leads to the orgy debacle, from the moment Prospero had the idea to the moment the sprinklers went off, and at no point in that chain was Verna shown to have influenced Perry in any way. Every decision and cut corner was his own. On the contrary, the only active use Verna made of her supernatural powers was to lessen the death toll, by evacuating the waitstaff before the sprinklers went off. This means that Prospero's death was not the result of Verna actively working towards his downfall, but of her withdrawing the supernatural protection from the consequences for their own actions that she had been granting the Ushers under the terms of the deal. Which aligns perfectly with the speech she gives him right before his death about every action having consequences: for the first time in his life, he is about to experience the full consequences of his choices and actions without temporal or supernatural power to shield him from them.
Despite Verna's words, Morella did not choose to leave the rave, despite the fact the wait staff seemed to do so. If one thinks about it, Verna wasn't trying to really control anyone there, but place a thought in their mind to give them a feeling of authority to leave before the accident. The wait staff were more willing to follow this suggestion as they were there to cater to the highly rich and privileged, not partake of the activities. Morrie, on the other hand, was a guest, who wanted to be there, to experience some excitement. So when she was given the opportunity and will to leave, she ignored it.
She also wasn't an Usher by birth but had been part of the family for at least thirteen or so years, and was accustomed to a life of power and privilege that meant she didn't have to take orders or instructions from anyone. So a mysterious sense that she had been strongly suggested to leave was less likely to work on her than it was for the event staff, who were there in a service capacity and were expected to follow instructions.
Every time Camille mentions her role in the family, she says that "Dad decided" she should be the spin doctor and be in charge of constantly cleaning up the family's public image. The rest of her siblings either got to (somewhat) choose their direction in life, or were put in charge of something that would someday belong to them (like Frederick, as Roderick's heir). Camille is the only one whose role is strictly to serve the family, and she's the only one who had that role chosen for her. No wonder she hates them all so much—Dad either didn't think she was worth enough to the family on her own, or thought that her Manipulative Bastard talents were too valuable to waste on letting her choose her own path.
And no wonder she hates Vic in particular. As Verna spells out, Camille and Vic are extremely similar as people, but Vic's career as a heart surgeon gives her an easy wall to hide behind, whereas everyone knows Camille's true nature right off the bat. Vic gets to "go places" with her life, and Camille will always be stuck in the same place, which is by her father's side cleaning up the Usher name. Camille looks at Vic and sees the person she was supposed to be, to a degree.
Among the other subtle Poe references, "Grampus" - Lenore's nickname for Roderick - was the name of the first ship used in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
According to Julius, Leo has a very impressive ability to remain functional despite the quantity and intensity of drugs he takes, almost like he has a "magic power." Almost like a supernatural entity is protecting him from the consequences of his hardcore substance abuse. And once that protection is removed, Leo quickly goes into a downward spiral.
On multiple occasions, Verna muses about ancient historical events—the domestication of cats, ancient Greek animal experimentation—that even historians wouldn't know too much about. Her conversation with Pym reveals that she was around to watch humans build the first cities, so she knows about these events because she witnessed them.
When the corpses of the Usher children appear in the church, there's a gap in the middle of the line, as if they're leaving room for one more. Lenore dies that very same evening and when Roderick sees the corpses again in the boardroom, she's right in the middle.
Roderick and Madeline dress as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby for the costume party. One of the central themes of the show is rich people making a mess and other people dealing with the consequences - which is exactly what happens in The Great Gatsby.
Verna's final goodbye to the Usher family at their graves has thematic similarity to the IRL phenomenon of the Poe Toaster, a mysterious figure who held an annual tradition of sipping a glass of alcohol at the grave of Poe, and pouring one out for the writer himself. His drink of choice was typically cognac...the same drink shared in this series by Dupin and Roderick Usher.
We're also reminded of her attitude towards different members of the family. She places most of the objects carefully enough but with no real emotion; however, Frederick gets a plastic bag of drugs tossed dismissively on his headstone, while Lenore gets a raven feather that might come from Verna herself, tenderly set in place.
Why was Morella the sole survivor of the rave despite suffering the same fate as everyone else? In episode 8, Verna shows the power to bring someone Back from the Dead so it's not too far-stretched that she could stop someone from dying no matter how badly hurt they were. Plus, Verna knew that Morella would be inspired from Lenore's death to create a foundation that would go on to save millions of lives. So, it's possible she could have been keeping Morella alive to ensure that future timeline would come true.
Roderick's attempt to send Madeline off "like a queen" actually gave her an Undignified Death because he deprived Madeline of her three greatest assets: her eyes, her intelligence, and her ability to manipulate. She can't spot danger or weakness anymore because her eyes were replaced with sapphires, she can't think anymore because she's in so much pain that all she can do is direct her rage at the one responsible, and she lost her ability to negotiate/threaten because she can't talk anymore.
It might be even worse than that. As he's preparing to "mummify" her and before we see him opening the boxes containing the sapphires and the knife, we also see him opening the box containing the brain-removal hook Madeline showed to Lenore earlier in the series. Assuming he then proceeded to use it, Madeline isn't just unable to think because of the amount of pain she's in, she also can't think because Roderick's effectively lobotomized her.
This is underscored by the fact that he didn't even send her off like Queen Twosret as he claimed. Not only were all his "preparations" to her body only superficially reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian funerary rituals for mummification, as he clearly didn't actually remove her internal organs for mummification—meaning he made Madeline into a gory parody of a queen rather than the real thing—but the eyes, while possibly real sapphires, are very unlikely to be Queen Twosret's artificial eyes. For one, Twosret's remains have never been positively identified, and we know Roderick probably didn't buy some unknown secret discovery the field of Egyptology doesn't know about because Roderick all but outright states he payed off the legitimate authorities overseeing Egyptian antiquities to look the other way while he purchased them. The most widely accepted potential candidate for Twosret's remains is Unknown Woman D from the KV 35 mummy cache—who, according to the Theban Royal Mummy Project, was specifically noted not to have artificial eyes when unwrapped in 1905. Roderick may have a lot of money, but it seems likely it actually didn't let him "reach[] through time and rip[] the eyes out of a goddess." No wonder so many authorities easily looked the other way when he paid them—either this is an alternate timeline where Twosret was positively identified with artificial eyes, or the authorities knew Roderick was getting scammed by whoever he purchased the sapphires from but were still quite happy to take his money. A perfect representation for the fact that Roderick's pocketbook never made him a god, nor Madeline a goddess.
Also, Roderick's attempt to send Madeline off was doomed to fail. Verna's wording was: they came in together, they leave together. The twins are fated to die at the same time. While it's possible that Roderick just didn't check to see if she was dead before mutilating her, it's more possible/likely that Verna intervened like she did for Roderick when he tried pills.
On New Year's 1980, Verna refers to herself as a creature of symmetry. She then insists both Roderick and Madeline participate in the agreement and says both of them will go out together, and serves them a drink from a very specific bottle of cognac, telling them it's the kind of drink you have on the best day of your life, or your last night on Earth. Before the two die together, Verna provides both the same cognac again—Madeline when she tries to renegotiate the deal, and Roderick later that night. For symmetry.
Camille is the second of the Ushers to die, and if it was by Verna's design then it was likely for two reasons: first, it would deeply affect Leo who's already reeling from Perry's death, making him easier to manipulate, and second, without their spin-doctor, the family won't be able to control the narrative around the following violent and scandalous deaths, to say nothing of their indictment.
Leo does his best to stay well apart from the family business of pharmaceuticals, preferring to work as a video game publisher. Leaving aside Camille's point that he wouldn't be able to fund and publish his various projects without his family's dirty money, the video game industry has major issues with sexism, rampant exploitation of creative teams, and fuelling the addiction, misogyny or radicalization of players, so in many ways Leo's choice of career is no better or different than that of other family members.
Dupin muses that he's realized why he didn't see what an awful person Roderick was in their youth; since a person like Annabel Lee loved him, Dupin assumed that Roderick was someone who warranted that love, and neither of them realised how he deceived them until it was too late. Roderick deliberately repeats this method decades later, by marrying Juno and using her as a model example of a Ligadone user to convince the public that the drug is "safe". Juno also discovers the truth about the man she married and leaves him, but unlike Annabel Lee she recovers and rises above Roderick's manipulation.
Why do Toby and Beth take a stand against Camille and refuse to sleep with her any more at this precise moment in time? They've genuinely fallen in love while Camille cynically reckons it's because the last of Beth's student loans have been paid off, but it also could be tied into Verna revoking the protections that the Ushers enjoyed for so long; Camille all of a sudden has to face the consequences of workplace harassment, Dubious Consent and the defiance of people who, once she's fired them, don't have to obey her any longer. This also explains her outburst when she insults them, as she's never had to face consequences for anything in recent memory and doesn't know how to cope. Finally, it leads to her death; if she'd treated her assistants better, they would have given her the information on Victorine's animal tests rather than telling her to go to the lab herself as a parting shot.
Roderick's jump-scare visions during his conversation with August are not random. They happen whenever Roderick starts trying to deflect his guilt or justify his actions. Every time he tries to avoid responsibility for his decisions, he's presented with a stark, horrifying reminder of their consequences: the mutilated forms of his dead children.
Roderick's children each die in a manner that calls back to one of Roderick's choices that led to the present circumstances.
Prospero: Died revelling in uncontrolled indulgence. A reoccurring theme of the episode is not only Prospero's unrestrained hedonism against common sense or concern for others, but also pointing out that Roderick made "meaningless" decisions, implicitly lustful in nature, that created Prospero and the other three illegitimate children. Later, we find out that Roderick continued to have these kids despite knowing he was effectively damning them to a premature death by doing so.
Camille: Died seeking proof of the unethical deeds of an opponent for selfish reasons, similar to how her father gathered evidence of Griswold's misdeeds—not to help anyone, but to eventually backstab both Auguste and Griswold to gain control of the company.
Napoleon: Died of uncontrolled drug usage. While he mentions having several drugs in his possession, the one mentioned on screen that he takes right before his hallucinations start is Monty, the recreational derivative of Ligadone—the drug that is, as Verna points out, Roderick's legacy. Napoleon's drug intake goes so far out of control he goes on a violent bender and throws himself off his balcony trying to kill a hallucinated cat.
Victorine: Murder-suicide sparked by her partner discovering her unethical medical practices. Vic's situation with Al is very similar to Roderick's falling out with Annabel Lee, as both partners realise their respective Usher deceived them and that they fell in love with a person they had actually made up.
Tamerlane: Died alone because she'd pushed away love she already had for the sake of validation by way of ensuring the family legacy. Like Roderick, Tamerlane threw away her relationship with her spouse for the sake of success in business and maintaining a perceived owed legacy by way of blood. By the time she admitted this was the wrong choice to herself, she found herself alone.
Frederick: Died trying to assert dominion—enacting a spiteful desire to put people in their place. Like Roderick who walled his boss inside the basement of Fortunato's for a slow and despairing death, Frederick chooses to, in revenge, leave his victim helpless and aware as he slowly makes them endure suffering entirely at his discretion, where, if all goes to plan, no one will be around to hear or to help. His subsequent attempt to literally piss on Prospero's memory goes awry when the paralytic he used on his wife ends up in his cocaine, and he ends up fully aware but helpless as Verna turns his head and makes him watch the building collapse on him.
It seems ironic that most of Roderick's bastards are the ones with exotic and grandiose names like Prospero and Napoleon, given that they were the ones who joined the fantastically rich Usher family later in life rather than being officially born into the family. But they were also Roderick's only kids who were named after he had already become rich, so their mothers apparently knew that they were destined for opulence.
Roderick learns that his children are going to die before him when Frederick is at most four years old and Tamerlane is a baby. No wonder his relationship with them is so distant, even though he raised them from infancy—he has known for most of their lives that they will die before him, and he doesn't want to get too close for fear of the pain of losing them.
This also explains ''some'' of Frederick's behavior: he knows Roderick has been pushing him away his whole life, doesn't know why, and thinks he needs to do something differently to earn his father's affection.
Roderick is only shown to be genuinely affectionate with Lenore, and hers is the only death he outwardly grieves over. Keeping in mind Verna's implication that he seemed to think her deal only applied to one generation after him, he may have only allowed himself to get close to her because he believed she was the only relative he would get to "keep."
It's also likely because Lenore was the one Roderick thought would survive to carry on the family legacy. He personally wasn't really going to be able to "keep" her, as he was fated to "bow out together" with his children, but he believed the world would get to keep her, and it's telling that his last conversation with Lenore is him assuming that she'll still take up the company—which he considers their family's legacy—and wondering if she'll make it "good." As he believed she would be the sole surviving Usher and clearly struggles to honestly engage with the truth about the scars his actions have left on the world, he likely comforted (and distracted) himself with the idea that the strong but good Lenore would be his legacy. This adds context to his constant praising of her as "the best of them."
Verna's deal with Roderick and Madeline not only ends their bloodline, by the end of the story it destroys any chance of their family's legacy:
Not only will the Ushers be forever remembered as one of the causes of the opioid crisis, but because of the careers they either chose or had assigned to them by Roderick (resulting in the Creative Sterility that Camille muses upon while high) they have little to show for their lives and no positive legacies to leave behind them. The only exception is Lenore, the White Sheep of the family, due to the charitable foundations that her mother sets up in honour and memory of her.
Verna's Point of No Return moments with each of the Usher children, had she been heeded, would have given them peaceful, easy and dignified deaths. None of them paid heed to her, so Frederick dies in a bizarre accident with drugs in his system and his dick out, Tamerlane totally ruins her reputation by freaking out at her launch party and accidentally assaulting her stepmother, Victorine apparently commits a gruesome murder-suicide with her partner, Leo goes on a drug-fuelled rampage through his apartment and then falls off a balcony, Camille gets torn apart by a chimpanzee and Perry dies in an orgy gone horrendously wrong. Even Roderick and Madeline get in on the act, with Madeline's heavy mutilation and the fact that she was clearly strangling Roderick as they died no doubt giving the tabloids a field day. If the Usher family is ever mentioned after their passing other than in connection with the opioid crisis, this is what they'll be remembered for.
Why does Verna seemingly torment Leo with the cat, especially one he didn't actually kill? The answer is that Verna, and the cat, are representing the consequences of Leo's dishonesty in general and his substance abuse (and his lying about the severity of his substance abuse) in particular. Leo's fate is actually more similar to Tamerlane; like her, he is tormented by hallucinations that highlight his flaws. In Leo's case, that flaw is denial—lying to himself and others. Leo refuses to address the real impact of his vices so he can continue to indulge in them, rather than being honest and having to change. The replacement cat became one way of hiding these issues, and so represents them; Leo's mutual aggression with the cat stands in the place of his actual need to confront his self-destructive lying and drug abuse, which, when combined with grief, help to ruin his relationship and his behavioral stability. When he becomes most aggressive towards the cat, he is the most controlled by his self-destructive flaws, leading him to fling himself off a balcony trying to hurt a cat made of his own lies and drug-fuelled hallucinations. Had he admitted to his boyfriend what he'd believed he'd done to Pluto and, through that, the increasingly severe consequences of his drug abuse, he probably would have gotten help and wouldn't have died in the manner he did.
In his confession to Auguste, Roderick mentions that the material in the rooftop tanks at Prospero's party was so acidic it "started burning through the tanks and the piping" and "was impossible to transport safely." It is very difficult to imagine that whoever Prospero hired to hook up the sprinkler system to the tanks on the roof didn't notice that, since most piping would probably begin to degrade very quickly. And that is not even counting the potential burns those people suffered while opening and closing said tanks. This implies either one of two things:
The people he hired knew and didn't bother to inform him (which would make some sort of sense, Prospero is shown to be a crazy grade-A asshole who likes cutting corners wherever he can). The people he'd hire are probably not the highest-grade industry professionals.
Verna, already preparing the sequence of events for the evening, manipulated the people that Prospero hired: meaning that he was already doomed from the get-go and her spiel around "consequence" was just taunting him, since there wasn't anything he could've done anymore at that particular moment.
The fact that Prospero first sees her on the roof of the building may have been a tactic of hers, to draw his eye to the roof (and therefore the tanks), and plant in his mind the use of the tanks for his party.
In the aftermath of the rave disaster Pym mentions that the wait staff all left before the sprinklers were turned on, and he, Roderick and Madeleine immediately jump to the conclusion that they knew what was going to happen ahead of time. There's talk of putting more pressure on them to find out what they know, and since we've already seen how ruthless the Ushers can be, Verna might have saved a number of innocent people only for them to be intimidated or even tortured for information they have no knowledge of.
There's a chance that the Usher sons, especially Napoleon and Prospero, have fathered children that they don't know about. Lenore counts as part of the Usher bloodline, so those kids would count too (if they existed), and their lives would also be forfeit.
Lenore counts because she's recognized as part of the House. It's possible that whatever illegitimate children Roderick's sons have would be safe so long as they are not brought into the family affairs. Which kind of adds to the horror, since there was a chance Roderick's bastards could've lived through the whole mess if he hadn't brought them into the fold and corrupted them.
Lenore counts because she's related to Roderick. Verna said that Roderick's blood line would die with him. That's everyone who is descended from him, plus Madeline (for "symmetry"). The Bastards wouldn't have been safe, even if Roderick had left them alone, nor would any of their own illegitimate children. Because they are genetically descended from Roderick.
What are the chances Roderick himself didn't have a few more kids he didn't know about yet?
All of Roderick's children were drawn into the family business by Roderick's promises of money, power, and lack of consequences. He knows full well that he drove his beloved Annabel Lee to her death by corrupting her children and turning them into bad people, and he feels incredibly guilty over it. But he did it again, four more times, and the mothers of Perry, Camille and Leo probably had to watch as their children fell sway to the lifestyle granted by being an Usher, which eventually cost them their lives.
All the worse: Verna's deal never actually promised there would be no consequences for the entire Usher lot, just none for Roderick and Madeline. In fact, she specifically made the next generation part of her "buy now, pay later" scheme. Roderick lured in his kids and enabled them to lead lives as though they would never experience consequences, knowing full well that someday they would pay for their own actions as well as his.
What could twenty-year-old Camille possibly have been up to for Roderick to decide that she was talented (manipulative and conniving) enough to be responsible for the entire family's public image?
According to this interview with Kate Siegel, Camille came from a Romany family and was a bit of a con artist as a kid. Basically, she stole and manipulated from a very early age.
Pym at one point tells an aide that he'll be tied up in the evening - "I'm having Richard Parker for dinner". In Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Parker was the former mutineer who drew the short straw and was chosen to be devoured by his crewmates. A macabre enough reference - but even more so since it's well known that, 50 years later, the story came true.
Auguste chooses not to do anything with Roderick's confession, instead placing the tape on the grave. When he wraps up everything that happened after the deaths of Roderick and Madeline, he doesn't say anything about Griswold. Presumably, this means nobody ever found Griswold's body and he's still behind the wall.
Because everything between Leo and Pluto is Through the Eyes of Madness, this brings to question what was actually going on in many scenes and how distorted Leo's perspective actually became. We get terrifying confirmation of this distortion when we see the photo Leo took of Verna. In Leo's version of events, which we see in "The Black Cat," he went to an ordinary-looking animal shelter filled with cats that needed good homes; when Leo pushes to adopt the replacement Pluto in the animal shelter, he asks Verna to pose for a picture while holding the cat, and she does so smiling against a backdrop of the brightly lit and cleanly painted beige shelter room while standing in front of an unremarkable office door. Later, during the "The Tell-Tale Heart," Pym shows the picture Leo took to Roderick, but it's of Verna holding a rat, illuminated only by the flash of Leo's phone, scowling in a dark, crumbling, filthy room with exposed brick under broken and discolored wall plaster, a visibly filthy and aged door behind her. Which brings to mind two questions, an intriguing one and a disturbing one: How much of what we see of Leo's story is real? And where was Leo really when he thought he was at an animal shelter?
Extending the implications further—given the photo of Verna with the cat actually shows her posing with an alarmingly large rat, the cats Leo sees at the shelter were probably all, in reality, the very large rats that lived in the ruined building.
, a mysterious figure who held an annual tradition of sipping a glass of alcohol at the grave of Poe, and pouring one out for the writer himself. His drink of choice was typically cognac...the same drink shared in this series by Dupin and Roderick Usher.