Headscratchers / The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

• How does the curse affect people, exactly? To follow up on the Fridge Horror of the Bastards being safe if they hadn't gone into the fold, what is the definition of House/offspring according to Verna? It could be inferred she meant "blood of your blood" but that would imply neither Napoleon nor Prospero (one likelier than the other) sired any bastards of their own, which - considering their general lifestyle - would seem unlikely at best . Or does it mean anyone recognized, legally or otherwise, as part of the Usher family? Or anyone corrupted by their dark influence? But that, in turn, opens its own can of worms:
  • If, for example, someone (let's say Tamerlane, she seems like the person to do it) adopted a child for good publicity, raised him/her/them as an Usher and they became as corrupt and decadent as the rest of the lot...would the curse apply to them as well? They are technically heirs, but they are not "blood of Roderick's and Madeline's blood".
  • If it is anyone recognized, to some extent, to be part of the Usher household/empire/whatever, why did the spouses make it? They would be just as affected by the curse as anyone else, yet they were (nearly) all spared - with the exception of Prospero's throuple and Victorine's girlfriend.
    • Verna specifically refers to "the Usher bloodline". Any bastards who never met Roderick, would still be off the Usher bloodline and would die. It would be through no fault of their own, but they'd still die. Verna says she will not enjoy killing Lenore, but she does so because she must. If any of these Usher children turned things around and became a good person, they'd still be an Usher and would still die. Any kids they had would be an Usher and would die. That's what it means for the Usher bloodline to end. The only ones who could possibly live are spouses/sexual partners of the Ushers, most of whom (Juno, Bill, Morella, and Julius) do live. Adopted children might have the name Usher but would not be of the Usher bloodline, and would live.
  • Napoleon and Prospero are both shown to be openly and actively bisexual. Many of their romantic encounters were with men, not women, which cuts the risk of conceiving a child down considerably. It's actually not all that unlikely that they never had a child, even with their reckless and hedonistic lifestyles. Additionally, Madeline specifically mocks Roderick for refusing/forgetting to use condoms, but Leo and Perry are children of an era that has far more expectations of men to use protection (not to mention there are now many birth control options for the other end of the equation). Plus, they could've gotten vasectomies. Modern medicine offers a ton of ways to never have any children even if you're banging half the city.
  • If it is anyone corrupted by the darkness emanating from the Usher's (which, in turn, would honestly explain why the entirety of Prospero's party was doomed by association and why the spouses were spared) then why did Arthur Pym not die in a gruesome way befitting his dark persona? It is clear Verna respects him, to the point of even offering him a deal and talking to him as an equal, but that can hardly be the only reason. If anything, it would give her more incentive to murder him.
    • The guests weren't doomed by their association with Prospero. They were doomed by their own wealth. It's best to regard them as a Villain of Another Story (or Hero of Another Story). Since Verna isn't bound by any laws of time and space, it's assumed that Verna was off making other deals with their families, associates, or ancestors, and that they are either the direct or collateral damage of these, which just so happened to coincide with Prospero's death on the same day, in the same place.
    • And the Ushers weren't doomed for being bad people; they were doomed because of the deal. Pym is rescued on the technicality that he's not an Usher. If he had been, Verna would have made him suffer (probably). Also, Verna is not exactly a moral character. She has a sense of right and wrong but she seems more to approve of people that tried to make their own way in the world, regardless of consequences.
  • And finally, does this mean that if any of the Bastards, or even the two original Usher children (Frederick and Tamerlane) had somehow become good people and (probably) had been excluded from the extravagant living style, the household and even the will of the Usher's as a result they would have been spared? They would be Ushers in name only, and not in anything else, and would have even less of a claim on the fortune than Lenore.
    • No, because the Ushers ultimately weren't punished for being bad people or even for being rich. They were punished because Roderick and Madeline took the deal (which made them rich and bad people, but that wasn't the point), and Roderick and Madeline condemned them to die. For characters that are notably sadistic or unpleasant (Freddie), Verna can arrange especially painful or horrible deaths; for characters that are notably good, like Lenore, they can die painlessly. For those in the middle, they can be given a choice. Even if the bastards or the legitimate Ushers had turned their backs on their fortune or their family, they would still have died. They almost certainly would have died painlessly, because that part was in their control. But they still would have died, because the point was that the deal was to wipe them out.
• Several times, Verna seems to make a sincere effort to give the Usher children a chance to back out of their final actions: The "red death" telling Prospero there is still time to stop the party, the "security guard" at the RUE Morgue telling Camille she shouldn't be there, and the "pet store owner" trying to get Leo to pick a different cat. What is her reason for doing this? Is she legitimately giving them an opportunity to avoid the gruesome fate that is about to befall them? What would have happened if any of them had actually listened to her? We know that all of them were going to die, but perhaps if they had paid attention they wouldn't have suffered the horrible deaths they did, and instead Verna would have given them a clean peaceful death like she did Lenore.
  • Verna herself seems to answer this: she tells Camille that she could have stayed home that night and died in another accident—"maybe more peaceful, maybe not." It would have depended on what set of circumstances they found themselves in later, when Verna decided that their clock had run out instead of them stumbling into their own fatal mistakes.
  • Word of God confirmed that Leo never actually killed Pluto, and the vision of the first dead cat was a hallucination. Unclear whether that hallucination came from Verna, the amount of drugs Leo was on, early-onset CADASIL inherited from Roderick, stress and fear, or some combination thereof. But it is possible that Verna did prod Leo into his downfall.
  • It's also clear that Verna can control people's actions, if she really wants to (see Frederick). If she really did want them to die differently (especially Prospero and Camille, whose deaths were almost entirely their own faults), she could have taken control of them and made them leave.
  • She was offering them the chance to die with dignity. Basically, had they taken her offer, they would have had peaceful deaths like Lenore's. Prospero could have likely saved a lot of lives had he stopped the party. He would have spared Morella a lot of agony anyway. But he threw the party specifically hoping for revenge porn.
• A bigger question is what Verna would have done if the Usher children had repented for their behavior, especially when faced with death. If Camille had said "you know what, you're right, I'm an awful person and I'm prepared to face the consequences for my actions" while staring down the chimpanzee, would Verna have let her go home and killed her differently later, let her have a quick and painless death like Lenore, or still let the chimpanzee loose?
  • If it were facing the chimpanzee and Verna were sufficiently impressed by the contrition, maybe giving her a heart attack "from fright", or prodded the chimp to make an immediately lethal strike, instead of letting Camille struggle in a futile effort for her life. However, given her delight in meting out poetic punishment while (mostly?) sparing the blameless, even in a world where all of the Usher children were as good as Lenore, Verna would probably have gone for horrific but painless deaths because she still wants to torment Roderick and Madeline as part of their deal.
    • Not necessarily horrific, even. While speaking to Frederick Verna mentions he "could've died of a heart attack in his car" but only the pliers (and the teeth removal) sealed the deal. So yeah, chances are, if Roderick and Madeline had used their fortune to turn Fortunado around and make it into a charity company focused on bettering the world (but still had gotten rich off it) and had let the children grown up to be decent human beings, Verna would've let them all die peacefully in their sleep - like Lenore.
  • I don't think Verna was making the chimp attack her. Chimps, especially ones held in captivity like that, are immensely dangerous. They've been known to rip off limbs, faces, eyes, private parts and more just because a human walked past them or looked at them. And Camille put up a flash on chimps that were experimented on. If anything, Verna was holding that chimp back long enough to speak to Camille through it before allowing it to do its thing. Camille was dead the instant she walked into the clinic, which Verna tried to get her to not do. Verna said this could have been different. That moment outside was her last chance at a less horrific death.
  • Verna still had the option to give her a Lenore-style coup de grace and let her go out peacefully instead of being mauled while alive, even with Camille insisting on going into the lab—she can teleport, after all, she could have beaten the chimp to her.
• What was Camille's startup investment money for? Perry makes a big deal of "all the kids" getting one as part of their Usher birthright, so she must have gotten one too. The other siblings' investments are clear: Leo and Tam got their companies, Vic got her research funded, Frederick probably got some sort of stock options in Fortunato or something similar, and Perry was still working on his and never did receive it. But Camille works directly for the company, not on her own project (or on something that will someday be hers, like Frederick does). So what did Roderick invest in?
  • Probably gotten her a kick-start in the influencing/journalistic field, maybe by way of artificially inflating and funding her blog/youtube channel/whatever (depending on when she began) or buying her a position at a major news company.
  • To add on to the explanation, Camile's is clearly the most important part of Fortunado because of her control of image and propaganda, which has been important to states/empires/dynasties from the pyramids of the Pharaohs to the Parthenon to art on the Sistine Chapel to the Reich's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (there was a reason Goebbels was so close to Hitler) to twitter bots today. In his life handing you lemons speech, Roderick speaks much more of the importance of marketing, public perception, and endorsement than the physical manufacturing side. Roderick probably sees it, rightly, as the most important part of holding his dynasty together. Even with their billions the US government has trillions at their disposal, millions of trained bureaucrats and soldiers. What has kept the Ushers going is everything being covered up or bribed away, not sheer force.
  • It is very likely that Camile doesn't actually work directly for the company, at least on paper. The startup money was probably to set up a PR consulting firm, one that just so happens to have Fortunato as its main client. This not only provides a layer of legally plausible deniability for any shady shit Camile does in pursuit of defending the family's image, it would also allow her to run the PR for her siblings' businesses as well, which would be legally iffier if she was a Fortunato employee.
• What was the point of Prospero's orgy party culminating by turning on the sprinklers? Maybe I'm not going to the right orgy parties, but when I'm drunk, high, engaged in anonymous debauchery with celebrities and influencers about to get my freak on, being sprayed with cold, dirty water from a building's fire suppression system would be a turn off more than anything else.
  • It's probable the building has no Air-Conditioning (it barely has electricity and explicitly has no running water) so the sprinklers idea may have been intended to cool attendees off from the mounting heat.
  • Prospero wanted to collect blackmail footage of his attendees, so he wanted there to be a clear signal for the orgy portion of the evening to start and allow him to make sure he caught every second on video. There were probably better ways to do that, but he went for the sprinklers.
  • TBF from what we know from Prospero himself, he (usually) uses other sources of water than rooftop tanks. This just happened to be an occasion where he did this, due to him wanting to keep it as anonymous and self-contained as humanly possible. It could just as well be that usually the water is warm, nice to the touch, and mostly just further pushes people to take their clothes off. In an orgy, being naked is kinda the priority.
  • Possibly he also wanted to go for the Sexy Soaked Shirt vibe.
  • Possibly he hoped that getting everyone wet would at least encourage them to take their clothes off, meaning even if they didn't take part in the orgy, he'd still have footage of them naked and therefore ammo for his revenge porn scheme.
• Why did Verna kill all of the other attendees of Prospero's orgy instead of just targeting Prospero himself? In the deal she made with Madeline and Roderick, she stated she would come for their children/grandchildren in exchange for granting them wealth, but she never said anything about involving innocent univolved persons in her crusade to collect her end of the deal. Although we don't know the names or personalities of the other people who attended the orgy, Verna decided she would only influence the staff and security to leave but allowed all of the guests to die gruesomly and viciously, and quite frankly I find it very hard to believe that every single attendant of that event deserved such a horrific and awful death. The odds of all of those people being horrible human beings, especially when they themselves would have unknowingly been blackmailed by Prospero had they survived, seems very unlikely, and it actually just makes Verna seem evil instead of a supernatural figure whose goal was to punish those who were actually guilty, in this case being Madeline and Roderick. It just seems very messed up that 78 people and counting were punished by Verna for something that ultimately didn't involve them at all, especially when for the rest of the children she exclusively targeted them and them only, leaving other innocent people out of it altogether. What could all of these guests have possibly done to warrant such a horrific, scary and painful death? Since the likelihood of every single one of them being guilty of some inhuman atrocity seems very low to me, this just seems like an extreme case of Disproportionate Retribution to me.
  • Keep in mind Prospero directly states to Verna that he knows for a fact she doesn't belong there because he handpicked the guest list and knows everyone on it. With a guy like Prospero the overwhelming odds are that every single person who was invited and later died is also the scion of a rich family. Especially with the fact that all of the wait-staff left and survived points to everyone there being "guilty". This is further reinforced when Pym shows pictures of Verna with famous families running through 3 centuries, from the Gettys back to the Vanderbilts. Thus, it's exceedingly likely every single rich youth there was cursed. The moral question is still apparent in the entire show, though: should the sins and inequities of the father be visited upon their sons?
  • Verna didn't kill anyone at the rave. In fact, she tried to stop Prospero from going through with it. The acid was already in the tanks, and Prospero hired a friend of a friend of a friend (according to Roderick) to hook everything up without actually checking anything. The accident was purely his own stupidity and arrogance, and Verna tried to tell him that there was still an opportunity to not start the orgy and thus not turn the sprinklers on. Prospero killed 78 people, and it was easily avoided at multiple points along the way. Not Verna.
    • Didn't she though? We know for a fact that the rave had special orgy rooms (with celebrities and actresses probably - Jenny is openly shocked at seeing a particular person on the camera's, implying that whoever it was, her fame level is enough to make Jenny surprised at Prospero knowing that person) but for some reason, all of the attendees were in one location at the same time. If you ever have been to a party, especially one in a building of this size, you'd know that there is no way you can gather everyone together at once. You'd have people going to hidden rooms to do drugs or to have sex outside of the orgy spaces, some folks standing outside to catch their breath or people just generally exploring the building because they can, etc... The fact that somehow all of the 78 people (though it clearly seemed like more) were in one location at the same time implies that Verna probably stacked the deck against their favor. We know she manipulated the wait staff to leave - who says she didn't whisper in the ears of the few people that currently weren't in the main hall to go there?
    • Prospero as a character is very controlling of his party—nobody was allowed to have any kind of sex until the sprinklers came on, for example. He was characterized throughout the episode as very determined to get his way, to the point of forceful anger verging into violent tendencies in the face of the possibility that he won't. He doesn't take no for an answer when planning the party to go exactly his way. The party didn't need the sprinklers to rain on the guests; when Prospero was told there was no water pressure, he could have just not used the mysterious tanks on the roof. It was an illegal party in an illegal building already; what's a few violated fire codes? But Prospero wanted his party his way, so sprinklers of untested mysterious substances it was. Given that the wait staff closed the exits before the sprinklers started and no one seems surprised by this, the logical conclusion is that Prospero wanted every single person he invited to be in that room when the sprinklers started, and nowhere else. The guests were likely all there because Prospero specifically had the staff ensure it.
  • At the end of the day, every guest at that party had signed up to go to an event knowing full well that they would probably be binge-drinking, doing any drug they could get their hands on, and/or having sex with anything that moved. Those activities are risky. Not melted-to-goo-by-acid risky, but drinks can be spiked, drugs can be overdosed, sexually transmitted diseases can be spread, and alcohol poisoning is very real. They knew they were taking risks with their own lives by going to a party like that, and that risk came true in the end in a much bigger way than they might have expected. The event staff signed up to babysit a bunch of drunk rich kids, not to risk their own lives. So they got tipped off to leave. Morella being warned is the only anomaly (that we see directly, anyway).
    • Does wanting to have sex and/or get drunk/do drugs really warrant something as vicious as being melted with acid, though? If anything, that seems more like an act of irresponsibility or self-harm rather than harm to anyone else, so it doesn't cross a Moral Event Horizon. Unless all of the people who died really were as awful as Prospero (or worse), there's no reason their deaths would be any more juistifiable than the staff and security dying. Yes one could argue that the staff and security were just there to get paid, but by that logic, the guests were just there to have fun, and that's not any more evil.
  • If Verna was *really* trying to warn Prospero to stop the party to prevent him from killing innocent people, why would she only warn the staff and security to leave but not anybody else?
    • Verna clearly knows what good some people are destined to do in the world, which is why she warned Morella to get out of there, so we can assume the other guests who died were Asshole Victims and if any of them were good people then they likely would have been saved. It's possible there were others that Verna warned to leave the party and saved ahead of time in addition to the staff and Morella, but we just didn't see them because they weren't important to the plot. It clearly looked like there were far more than just 78 people at the party, so it's possible that many more individuals left along with the staff and security and the 78 guests who did die may have only been those who either refused to leave, were so high that they figured Verna was just a figment of their imagination, or were genuinely deserving of being burned (according to her) for whatever terrible behavior they engaged in during their lifetimes. We also don't know if there were any other guests that survived like Morella did, but we do see ambulances and by the time Prospero dies the sound of others struggling to breathe can be heard, so it's possible there were others who made a recovery.
  • Perry's friend Taraj is the one who hit the switch to turn the sprinklers on. As soon as the acid started burning everyone, why didn't he hit the switch again to turn the sprinklers off? At most people would still be mildly burned but everyone in the nightclub could have been saved and no one would have needed to die.
    • Assuming the acid was really that corrosive, there may be two explanations. One, he was burned in an incapacitating manner, either through pain or getting hit, for instance, in the eyes, or two, less likely, the acid had already eaten through the pipes to the point it could no longer be shut off.
    • Maybe Verna wouldn't let him turn the switch off.
    • Also, even if Taraj wasn't able to turn the switch off for whatever reason, there were plenty of other guests that could have, too, and it seems pretty unreasonable in the Willing Suspension of Disbelief camp that in all likelihood no one else would have tried turning the switch off, either. With that many people witnessing Taraj turn the switch on, it seems pretty unlikely no one else would have thought to undo that decision. This is definitely one of those scenes where Real Life skepticism helps to offset the horror, since there definitely would have been at least one Accidental Hero who would have jumped in to save everyone had something like this actually actually happened from a very visible power source with many witnesses.
• Does Verna really make the same deal with everyone she meets? Like, the series explicitly shows she met the Kennedies, the Bushes, the Vanderbilts and John Francis Queeny (the founder of Monsanto), while her Fifth Avenue comment quite clearly refers to the Trump family. Most, if not all, of those families did not have their children die at a specific time in a variety of horrific accidents - and with the exception of Monsanto (and technically Vanderbilt, though their influence is still very present in modern American life) none of them ever went belly-up the way the Usher family did, in-series. Because Arthur Pym refused Verna's deal, we also don't know what the conditions would be for his release either - which openly begs the question: was her wrath (and the deal she made) uniquely targeted towards the Ushers for all the evil she knew they would bring into the world?
  • Very likely she does not make the same deal. As stated, the people in the photographs with her didn't all have spectacular, painful ends which demolished their empires. She seems to be a creature of whim and consequence. Like Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, she liked testing and exploring human behavior; as even though she seems to have near omniscience she very pointedly gets surprised at times and offers people choices. It's probable she offered them specific deals which were either less damaging, or at least less visibly so, and whatever price they paid was private. Something else to consider is a sort of "survivorship bias", what pictures we see are of her with famous people, it's entirely possible that she also makes deals with people who do not become (in)famous enough for them to have pictures / or Pym's team to find those pictures with the facial recognition software. Either from wishing for different things, or somehow escaping the price by rejecting the wealth she offered. If Roderick and Madelyne had spent their lives dismantling Fortunato and donating to charity, then living like ascetics, it might have made their deal with Verna void as she specifically offered wealth, fame and luxury for their lifetimes.
  • Her attempt to lure Pym into a deal shows us what she takes as payment: whatever you love the most. For Madeline and Roderick, that came in the form of legacy. They were obsessed with getting back the legacy they never inherited from their father, and so the payment was to have any legacy they built for themselves be erased (both in the form of the company going up in flames, and their bloodline being wiped out).
• What happened to Roderick and Madeline's relationship? They seem to be best friends in the 1970s, but by the 2020s, they seem actively hostile to each other (even when you ignore the practical reasons for Madeline trying to kill Roderick and vice versa).
  • Their relationship hasn't really changed. They've changed as people. Forty-plus years of running a huge pharma company after having murdered someone have made them harder, sharper and more demanding. But they get pretty sharp with each other in 1979 when tensions are high, and tensions are high throughout the modern segments, so I'm not really seeing any unexplained disparity.
• Arthur is characterized as an extremely resourceful, worldly and connected person. He also has apparently made a fortune as the Ushers' hatchetman. When Verna warns him that evidence of his crimes will soon be uncovered, why doesn't he run? He certainly has the resources and ability to flee to some country without an extradition treaty or simply disappear before the authorities even start looking for him. He has no reason to stay in America without the Ushers to serve, and Verna notes that he never said anything after getting caught, so he has no apparent reason to want to be caught.
  • The confrontation with Verna seemed to shake him up a lot, and understandably so — being confronted with the actual, factual Death (or the Devil, if you prefer that interpretation) will do that to a man. He's a side character, so he doesn't get a spotlight episode to walk through his mental state, but it's very possible that conversation pushed him to realize that it was time to pay the piper and accept his fate. Also, given the nature of the show, I kind of suspect that any attempt to flee or destroy Camille's file would have resulted in some kind of grisly and ironic death, just 'cuz.
  • Also, the show implies that Pym encountered...something in the Arctic when he was a young man (possibly Verna?), and everyone around him died. I took that to suggest that, even without making Verna's deal, he felt he was Living on Borrowed Time. After seeing all the Ushers get freakishly killed one after the other, he was extra-susceptible to absolutely believe what Verna told him and to know that any worldly solution was not going to fix whatever he did.
  • But he's also supposed to be a Mirror Character to Roderick - who built an enormous fortune at his children's expense. Pym is extremely wealthy and powerful, but after all his experiences, he Knew When To Fold Em and took the punishment himself. It's not that he felt he deserved punishment, but that, like Camille said, "fuck it. I got mine."
  • Arthur is never shown to indulge in any of the wealth and power he accumulated. He has no family and only thing he seems to care about is working for the Ushers. Over the decades he worked for Roderick, Arthur has never lost a case as a side effect of the Usher deal. For better or for worse, that is going to be his legacy even if he ends his life in prison. If he runs, he will lose that and probably dies undignified in some third world country.
  • There is also the possibility that Arthur has pissed off some very powerful people over the years and now has lost the protection of the Ushers. If he runs, his enemies might decide to find him and take revenge on him. If he goes to prison, they might deem any further action unnecessary.
• There seems to be conflicting information about how Camille entered the family. She tells Leo that she didn't meet Roderick until she was 20. But she also tells her assistants that "when we were kids" they made jokes about the RUE Morgue. That's usually a phrase that refers to childhood, and she mentions that the name of the lab was changed many years ago so she would have had to be very young at the time. Did Camille know the other Usher kids as a child? If so, how had she not yet met Roderick by age 20?
  • Following up on the WMG of Camille and Victorine probably coming from rich families themselves - it could just be that her family was very closely acquainted with the Ushers but only had contact with f.e Madeline and not Roderick. Alternatively, she could just be referring to how she already lived in New York by that point, and that's the nickname she and her half-siblings gave to the laboratory. Rumors spread like wildfire, after all.
  • After her death, their statement names her age as 35, to which one of the others (Tamerlane?) snorts "that's what we're going with?" so maybe Camille is in the habit of lying about her age, and says that to her assistants to make herself seem younger and more in the realm of the 'official' family.
• If Auguste didn't do anything with Roderick's "confession", does that mean nobody ever found Rufus Griswold's body?
  • It's possible Dupin called in an anonymous tip after Fortunato was dismantled — hey, new owners of the building, you might want to check behind the wall in the basement, that kind of thing. It's also possible he just shrugged and decided that it was a 50-year-old crime and both killers were already dead, so I'll just let it go and enjoy my retirement.
• When making his nightclub proposal, why did Perry not lead with the blackmail aspect? It's pretty clear with the warehouse that he can have cameras set up on short notice and have them concealed, and Roderick and Madeline would probably jump at the idea of having blackmail on the only people with enough money/power to mess with them as leverage.
  • The, uh, unfortunate implication is he wanted blackmail material on Roderick and Madeline via having them participate in the orgy. A less squicky possibility is he was trying to protect them by giving them plausible deniability in case his blackmail scheme were exposed, while becoming a power broker in the family that could coerce whoever they needed and not revealing how he was doing it. Lastly, he was still a kid, he might have gotten flustered with their questioning on the base fundamentals of his business (and them dismissing it as him not having outgrown the party lifestyle) and either forgotten to bring up the blackmail, or more likely felt vindictive and decided not to tell them and do it on his own.
• Considering Verna keeps trying to steer the Ushers away from a more painful death, and even engages in quite thoughtful conversations with them. Why did she not do so with Leo? He was one of the least malicious members of the family, a victim of substance abuse issues, and going through a lot of grief. Going by Verna's moral compass, shouldn't he have been someone she really tried to give a peaceful death to? Instead, she seems far fonder of Madeline and Tammy, who are both crueller than Leo is ever depicted as. Verna seemed to go full-on evil with him without extending him the same compassion as the others.
  • She does, but it's a very brief interaction. When Leo goes for the replacement cat, she tries, twice iirc, to try and convince him to take one or two different cats, and later saying the identical one was promised for another person. It is pretty horrible in that per word of god, she made him think he killed Pluto in a drug haze, so she in a real sense created a test and loaded the dice against him by putting his guilt and Usher worldview that money solves everything against honesty, responsibility and in a way, honest love.
  • The thing with Verna is that she's not some kind of avenging angel or force for good, for as much as she uses moralizing language to mock the Ushers. We don't know exactly what she is (Death, the Devil, something else), but it's pretty clear she's not exactly Lady Justice — she killed a perfectly innocent teenage girl for no other reason than she technically had the right to under the agreement she made with the Ushers. She's not really operating with the intention of balancing out the universe's moral scales.