The Fall of the House of Usher creator and showrunner Mike Flanagan has addressed a subtle detail that some viewers may have overlooked, resolving confusion over the series’ fourth episode.
Released on 12 October, the eight-episode drama, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name, follows Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company, who must face his murky past when each of his children begin to die in mysterious and brutal fashion.
*Warning, spoilers ahead for The Fall of the House of Usher*
In the show’s fourth instalment – titled “The Black Cat” – the storyline focuses on the death of Leo Usher, Roderick’s third child to die.
After it’s shown in the previous episode that Leo gutted and killed his boyfriend’s cat Pluto with a knife, Leo rushes to an animal shelter to replace the black cat with a similar-looking feline.
It’s there that Leo meets the series’ shape-shifting antagonist Verna (Carla Gugino), who helps him find a sufficient replacement. Only, this cat isn’t wearing the Gucci collar Pluto originally wore. Leo brushes this off by saying that someone must have “nicked the Gucci collar”.
Later in the episode, the newly adopted cat begins hunting rats and pigeons, leaving Leo the bloody remains. Soon enough, the amount of dead prey left behind begins to drive Leo mad. He eventually calls the shelter to take the cat back. However, when Verna shows up, she plays with Leo’s head, telling him the cat must be hiding in the walls.
Rahul Kohli in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’— (EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIX)
He then goes on an angry rampage hammering through every wall in his apartment. Finally, he sees the cat perched on top of his balcony, and in his last attempt to kill the cat, he swings the hammer too hard and throws himself over the edge of his balcony, falling to his death.
In response to the gruesome and brutal depiction of Pluto’s death in the episode, Flanagan was asked on X/Twitter: “What did cats ever do to you???”
“Okay. So... ‘The Black Cat’ was written by Edgar allan Poe [sic]. In HIS version, a cat is killed. In MY version, the cat is.... (spoilers)”, the filmmaker tweeted back.
“... in MY version, the killing of the cat is revealed to be a hallucination. In MY version, the cat is alive and well. so who hates cats?”
A second user replied in astonishment to Flanagan’s post, writing: “Wait. When does it get revealed it was a hallucination?!?! I know the evil cat was a hallucination but Pluto didn’t die?”
“That’s why we made such a big deal about the fact that Pluto was wearing a Gucci collar, and the new cat was not,” the Haunting of Hill House creator responded. “Look at the cat in the final shot of the episode, who is wearing the collar... and the empty bathtub, which means ALL of the animal violence was imagined.”
The Fall of the House of Usher is out now on Netflix.
