The partygoers scream and beat at the locked doors, but it’s already too late. But when the sprinklers go off, they’re not spitting water they’re spitting acid.

The centerpiece of the evening is supposed to be a sprinkler shower, which Perry has planned as the signal for the party to become an orgy. Perry is too high and horny to realize what she’s really saying. They have a long conversation, laced with eroticism in doom, in which she drops the occasional grim warning about how there are always consequences. He doesn’t know her at all we know her as Verna.

Perry is entranced by a supremely confident woman who stalks the party in a red cloak and skull mask. If you’re familiar with “The Masque of the Red Death,” the 1842 Poe story that gives the episode its title, you have a foreboding sense of where might be going. (See? Clever and industrious! If only someone had bothered to point him in the right direction.) As a bonus, Perry can take covert videos of the rich and famous indulging in all their decadent fantasies to hold for whenever it might be useful to blackmail somebody - including his brother Freddie’s wife, whom he coaxed into attending. It’s an invitation-only masquerade with booze, drugs, and sex on the menu for anyone who can pony up the $20,000 asking price. Instead, he goes rogue, turning one of his family’s old factories into a test pilot for his ultra-exclusive rave concept. Maybe, with a little encouragement, he could have turned out differently. That pitch was, admittedly, both self-indulgent and terrible - but you can see how Perry lights up when Napoleon tells him he’ll be unstoppable as soon as he figures everything out. He was conceived, sneers Freddie, when Roderick hooked up with a blackjack dealer on a yacht at Cannes, and Perry later remarks that he feels like he’s “extra bastard.” His father brutally dismisses his idea for an ultra-exclusive nightclub. As the first to die, Perry is almost certainly the Usher we’ll get to know the least, but the details of his life are broadly tragic. His first big scene - in which he holds a fork to the neck of the lover whom he believes, wrongly, ate his rare gull eggs - seems to bear that out.īut just when I started to settle in for the indulgent, cathartic revenge fantasy of an awful rich kid getting what he deserves, the episode toyed with my sympathies. Roderick tells Dupin that the first thing he needs to know about Perry is that he was crazy. Wouldn’t you? (Like each of Roderick’s children, Prospero’s baroque given name is pulled directly from a Poe story.) The real star of this episode is Roderick’s youngest son , Prospero, who prefers to go by Perry. Dupin might finally be able to hold him accountable, but that won’t undo the damage he has already caused, and neither man is young enough to start fresh.īut this episode is about youth and not just the ambitions that put Dupin and Roderick on this collision course. Roderick changed the world, but he didn’t make it a better one. Is it too generous to say these two men - one a crusading attorney, one a morally bankrupt billionaire - once had the same dream? More than 40 years later, Dupin and Roderick sit across from each other, and as they pick over their old wounds and the recent losses in the Usher dynasty, you can sense that they understand each other. “In this little pill is a world without pain,” he pitches to a boss who barely knows he exists.

A young mailroom employee - smart, ambitious, painfully aware he was cheated out of his birthright - pitches a drug that he swears could have saved his dying mother from unimaginable pain. “We cheat the dying, we fleece the poor, promote the racist,” he vents to a colleague who openly hates him. A young junior fraud investigator - already a rising star, despite being Black and gay in a world hostile to Black men and gay men - is the only one smart enough to realize that a spate of disinterred corpses can be tied to a shady medical corporation with a lot of incentives to cover up medical malpractice.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix/EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIXĪnd Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

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