Spoilers

Episode One: “A Midnight Dreary”

Episode Two: “The Masque of the Red Death”

I started to watch episode one of The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix with the intention of not continuing after the first one. To be honest, with two rewatches (X-Files, Moonlighting) going on right now, along with multiple series (Loki, Gen V, American Horror Story, Goosebumps, Bonus Action) and the October 13, there is not a ton of time for another series. But I do love Edgar Allan Poe and so I wanted to say that I gave this new limited series on Netflix a chance.

After two episodes, I am totally hooked.

I need to find the time to watch the rest of this because it is a masterpiece.

As I mentioned, I love Edgar Allan Poe and there are so many allusions to Poe’s work that it is nearly impossible to keep up with them. I realized about half way through the second episode that they were doing the Masque of the Red Death and that the character named Prospero was even involved. I see now that the episode title is even based on the short story.

The narration of the series is Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) confessing to C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), sitting in his house, drinking a glass of the best whiskey available. Roderick is telling Dupin (who by the way is the main character in Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue) about the deaths of his six children over the last two weeks.

There are allusions to Poe’s work everywhere, from The Raven to Annabel Lee to The Black Cat to Gold Bug. It feels like a comic book movie with the Easter eggs they drop for the comic readers in the audience, except this is for those who read Poe. It’s just great.

And it is compelling as can be. I want to know what happened to the six kids. We have seen the end of Prospero at the end of the shocking episode two, but there are five more to go.

Then, there was Mark Hamill. He played Arthur Pym, based on the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym is the Usher family lawyer.

These first two episodes are just so good and I have added this to the crowded EYG schedule.