Mike Flanagan’s new horror flick “The Fall of the House of Usher” is released on Netflix. The new horror show is heavily inspired by the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The show follows the Usher family who own the pharmaceutical giant Fortunato. The new Netflix show has been compared with the Succession but with more death. The Fall of the House of Usher is Mike Flanagan’s last project with the streamer before he moves to Amazon Prime for future projects.
However, the show had a lot of complex characters, one of them being Roderick Usher. In this article, we will explore why Roderick Usher decided to have 6 kids if he knew their fate.
Why did Roderick Usher decide to have more kids?
Roderick and Madeline Usher made a deal with the devilish Raven character inspired by Poe’s work. The Usher ruthlessly sealed the fate of their family to take over Fortunato from morally grey Rufus Griswold.
The cunning Raven with shapeshifting abilities returns every episode to collect each of Usher’s children to fulfill the deal. At the end of the show, no Usher is left alive. According to the deal, all of the Usher children will start to die when Madeline Usher and Roderick Usher are near death.
Roderick Usher is revealed to be suffering from CASADIL and would have died soon. That is why the devil starts collecting the ushers one by one causing them to die in painful ways.
But, one of the most important questions is why Roderick continued to have children if he knew their faith. One of the answers is that he wanted to live longer through his children, if all the Ushers died then Fortunato would have been taken away from the family. He did not like Madeline’s Usher idea of an AI algorithm that would have allowed her to live virtually.
Another explanation he provided to Detective Dupin who tried to take down the Usher family for decades, is a short life filled with opportunities and wealth is way better than a longer life filled with struggles and pain. That is why he never tried to get emotionally attached to his children as deep down he knew that he would lose them. At one point the character reveals;
“I knew. In the witching hour. I knew I would climb to the top of the tower on a pile of corpses. And we told them it was about soothing the world’s pain. That’s the biggest lie we told. You can’t eliminate pain. There’s no such thing as a painkiller. And imagine if we put that on the bottle. I bet I still could have sold it.”
He ruthlessly continued to sell Ligodone, a type of fictional opioid that is highly addictive.
Final Words
Roderick Usher’s character already had two children Tamerlane and Fredrick Usher, but he still continued to make the deal with the devil shocking Madeline who was also cold and calculated, but her character decided not to have children to save herself from the pain or suffering it would have caused. Madeline Usher also revealed in one of the conversations that she got an IUD after the deal. That is why Roderick Usher’s character is heartless and dark as compared to his sister because he agreed to sacrifice his legacy and children for wealth.
