Fall of the house of usher

[SOTTREADER]

I thought the underlying story here was an interesting one and also the execution as well.

Good dialogue in places, a good mystery underpinning the whole show with a sprinkling of the mystical to keep it all interesting. It definitely explores themes of power, greed and all those things that people become if they have money / power, no conscience and a license to do as they please with impunity, at least for a while before the bill comes due. It's not a horror, though the official trailer might make it appear that way.

The only negative is as per usual, they overly sexualise the show (think first season of Game of Thrones) which I suppose makes it a product of the current times. For this reason I don't think it'll interest a lot but it might a few.

Teaser trailer

 

[mkrnhr]

The show incorporates many stories by E. A. Poe into the story of the Usher family. The over-arching theme is choices, entitlement, and consequences. The tone of the series is uneven with interesting dialogues here and there. The scenes between the Usher patriarch and the attorney in particular are well acted. One feels sorry for the fate of the granddaughter though.

 

[Evan]

I did find fascinating the backstory of the attorney Arthur Pimm (Mark Hamill). He was a member of the Transglobal Project, which circumnavigated the world in the late 1970s. According to the story, when he reached the top of the world he found an opening which was called Ultima Thule. There he encountered a woman from the race that lives inside the earth. It is she who makes the deals with people of note, Rockefellers, Doheny, Royalty, and of course Roderick Usher, who traded his lineage for limitless success and fortune. She runs the pop up bar with the Raven as her sigil.

 

[Evan]

Funny thing. I just finished Harrison’s new book, and he has a chapter on the undergrounders and deep-level punctuators, much of which are from older sessions which are in The Wave books, as well as more recent ones.

Now in the Usher series, the character of Verna, who has signed “deals”, in a sort of “devil at the crossroads” way with everyone from Pharaohs to Rockefellers to the Ushers, is revealed in the final episode to be an undergrounder, whom Gordon Arthur Pym had seen at the top of the world during the Transglobal Expedition in 1980. She literally says, “When you lot came sailing by, I just had to come up and take a look.”. As she tells her story, she is in fact what we would describe as a “deep-level punctuator”: one who comes up from the underground to elevate specific people (Moses, Sargon, Rothschild (?)) to important and world-changing positions of influence.

This makes me wonder just where exactly the creator of the series, Mike Flanagan, gets his inspiration. It’s certainly more than just taking the works of Poe and creating a fusion that makes compelling a horror show. Although the story of Ultima Thule, the island at the top of the world is part of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the character of Verna (anagram of Raven), and her actually serving as a DLP does make me wonder.