Warning: This put up incorporates spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.

From the begin of the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, we all know that each one of Roderick Usher’s youngsters are lifeless. It’s the how and the why of their deaths that performs out over the course of Mike Flanagan’s new horror anthology sequence, now streaming on Netflix.

Inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, House of Usher traces the downfall of the uber-wealthy Usher household and their corrupt drug firm, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. The story facilities on Usher household patriarch and Fortunato CEO Roderick (Bruce Greenwood), who, as the present begins, calls up his longtime rival, assistant U.S. legal professional C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), to come back hear his confession following the deaths of all six of his grownup youngsters (by 5 totally different moms)—Frederick (Henry Thomas), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), Camille (Kate Siegel), and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota)—in the span of per week.

The overarching narrative of The Fall of the House of Usher loosely follows Poe’s 1839 quick story of the similar title, with Roderick recounting his decades-spanning story to Auggie inside his decrepit childhood house. Throughout the night, Roderick is tortured by visions of his lifeless youngsters—who seem to him as he relays the grotesque methods through which every of them met their finish—whereas banging sounds that he says are coming from his twin sister, Fortunato COO Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell), will be heard emanating from the house’s basement.

As Roderick nears the conclusion of his story, which jumps backwards and forwards between his early years working at Fortunato and the occasions that led as much as every of his youngsters’s deaths, he lastly arrives at the fateful evening that modified every part, New Year’s Eve of 1979. Rodrick reveals that after plotting to betray a younger Auggie (Malcolm Goodwin), then a Medicare fraud investigator, by mendacity about Fortunato’s unlawful enterprise practices, younger Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) carried out the closing part of their plan to take over the firm by drugging and subsequently burying then-Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) alive inside the basement wall of Fortunato headquarters—a nod to Poe’s 1846 quick story “The Cask of Amontillado.”

The siblings then made their approach to an area bar to determine an alibi. It was there that they met a bartender named Verna (Carla Gugino), the supernatural entity liable for killing off the Usher clan, and made a deal that modified the course of their lives endlessly.

Read extra: How The Fall of the House of Usher Reimagines the Gothic Horror of Edgar Allan Poe

What deal did the Ushers make with Verna?

Once Roderick and Madeline had been the solely ones left in the bar after a protracted evening of consuming, Verna revealed to the twins that she knew what they’d carried out. But, in the event that they agreed to her phrases, she may assure that they might not solely get away with Rufus’ homicide but additionally rise to regulate Fortunato’s billion-dollar painkiller empire and by no means be convicted of a single crime.

In trade for this safety, each Roderick and Madeline needed to consent to the discount that at the finish of Roderick’s life, simply earlier than he was fated to die anyway, his complete bloodline would die with him. Roderick and Madeline would additionally need to die at the similar time, leaving this world the similar means they got here into it. The siblings agreed to the deal, left the bar, and shortly after grew to become satisfied that the complete factor had been a shared delusion.

“Early in his life, [Roderick] had a conversation with somebody who promised him an effortless life in return for something that he didn’t quite believe could happen,” Greenwood advised Netflix of is character’s story arc. “And now that’s coming home to roost.”

How does The Fall of the House of Usher finish?

Decades later, as soon as it grew to become clear that Verna was the one killing off the Usher youngsters, Madeline tried to sidestep the deal by convincing Roderick to kill himself. But Verna wasn’t keen to let him get off that simple and introduced him again to face the full extent of his reckoning, the demise of his granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), the solely morally good Usher.

Roderick then invited Madeline over to their childhood house, the place he poisoned her drink and set to work mummifying her. It was shortly after this that Auggie arrived at the home to listen to Roderick’s confession. Only, as evidenced by the noises coming from the basement, Madeline wasn’t fairly lifeless.

As Roderick finishes his story, an eyeless and bloodied Madeline all of a sudden bursts out of the basement and assaults Roderick as the home begins to crumble round them. In a closing burst of energy, Madeline strangles Roderick to demise as Auggie flees collapsing house—a sequence that mirrors the ending of Poe’s “House of Usher.”

In the closing minutes of the episode, it is revealed that Roderick’s second spouse, Juno (Ruth Codd), inherited Fortunato and went on to repurpose the firm into the Phoenix Foundation to fund rehabilitation packages, whereas the Usher household’s fixer, lawyer Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), grew to become the solely particular person to face a conviction from the Fortunato case—having denied Verna’s supply of immunity in trade for the sacrifice of a invaluable asset—and would spend the relaxation of his life in jail.

As the sequence attracts to an in depth, Verna—whose title is an anagram of the titular hen in Poe’s basic 1845 poem “The Raven”—is proven putting an merchandise on every of the Usher’s graves that represents their respective downfalls, closing the loop of her karmic retribution.