We’ve reached the final curtain call for Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) and, as Verna (Carla Gugino) let him know in the previous episode, getting out isn’t going to be easy — in fact, it’s going to be as painful as possible. There are still a few truths yet to come to light and a few more deaths to witness before Roderick and Madeline (Mary McDonnell) have settled their tab with you-know-who. The end is near, there’s no time to waste — let’s talk about what happens in “The Raven,” the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher.

What did Roderick and Madeline do on New Year’s Eve, 1979?

Perhaps you pieced it together: the jingling bells, the brick wall that Roderick kept visiting, all the times people referred to Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) as a brick wall to ram through; or the moment the Usher twins (the younger versions, played by Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald) hit the Fortunato New Year’s Eve costume party and Rufus is in that clown costume identical to the clown that’s been haunting Roderick: Madeline and Roderick murder Rufus Griswold. They put a paralytic and cyanide in his drink and lead him to the basement, where they bury him alive behind the brick wall, with his clown mask still on. They tell him their plan as they do it, too: With Rufus gone, it will only be a matter of time before they hand the company over to Roderick. “This is a hostile takeover,” Madeline tells Rufus. No one hears his screams.

What deal did Roderick and Madeline make with Verna?

The Ushers head to the nearest bar in order to build up their alibi. When the bar clears out, Madeline, Roderick, and Verna are left chatting. Things go from friendly to downright spooky once Verna begins to reveal she isn’t who she seems to be. She knows all about what they did to Rufus. She knows that they want power and money and would do anything to get it. She tells them she can guarantee that their crime is never discovered, that they can go on to claim their birthright as the king and queen of Fortunato, and never have to worry about being punished for any crimes in their lifetime — they can get away with it all. The price for this guarantee will be “deferred,” she tells them. “Let the next generation foot the bill,” she goes on. “At the end of it all, just before you would’ve died anyway,” she tells Roderick, “your bloodline dies with you.” They don’t know whether to take her seriously or not, and so humor her with a few follow-ups. 

Verna makes it clear that Roderick will live a pretty long life (she does not warn him about the vascular dementia though!), reiterates that the twins have to die together, and assures them that up until the point where everyone dies, they’ll live a life of privilege. It’s up to them to decide what to do with the company; Verna simply wants to watch.

The swiftness with which Roderick agrees to the deal takes even Madeline by surprise. If Roderick says yes, she says yes. The three drink to the agreement. But the moment the twins step out of the bar, they look back to see it was never a bar at all, just a boarded up building. Roderick explains to Dupin that over the years, it began to feel more like a dream and eventually they forgot most of the details. But that was it. That was the moment the Usher twins sentenced every other Usher to their brutal deaths.

What happens to Annabel Lee?

Annabel (Katie Parker) leaves Roderick after the deposition antics, unable to recognize the man she married. After amassing wealth and power, he uses it to win Frederick (Henry Thomas) and Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) over to his side, away from their mother, becoming less and less like her and more like him every day. Roderick tells Dupin (Carl Lumbly) that she “couldn’t live without them.” After the second funeral, Roderick hallucinates Annabel’s ghost in the back of the church. She comes to tell him that this is the second time their children died — the first is when they went to live with him. He killed them. As she walks up toward the caskets, we see what is clearly a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. 

Eike Schroter/Netflix

What happens to Lenore Usher?

In a previous episode, when Dupin comments that Annabel Lee was the only good Usher there ever was, Roderick corrects him: Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) was good, too. “She was the best of us,” he says. And it’s true. She stands up to her father and to Pym (Mark Hamill) and does everything in her power to keep her mother, Morrie (Crystal Balint), safe. She begs her grandfather to try and use his money for good to make up for all the pain the Usher family has caused. Lenore is so kind and good that not even Verna takes any pleasure in having to kill her. But a deal’s a deal, and the Usher twins’ deal with Verna clearly stated that the entire bloodline would be wiped out, not just his own children but all future generations. 

Verna does attempt to pay the young girl some bit of kindness: She makes sure Lenore knows that because of what she did for her mother, Morrie will recover and heal and go on to do tremendous good in the world, creating a nonprofit called the Lenore Foundation, which will do work that ends up saving millions of lives. Lenore is stamped all over those good deeds. It’s her legacy. With those (relatively) comforting words, Verna touches Lenore on the forehead, and the last Usher heir dies. 

But wait, hasn’t Lenore been texting Roderick all this time?

Look at you, you’re a regular Auguste Dupin. He asks Roderick the same question. Roderick informs him that the sentient AI bot Madeline had made of Lenore was activated, and that’s who’s been texting him all night. To make it worse, the Lenore bot has a glitch; it’s been sending him one word over and over again: nevermore. 

Eike Schroter/Netflix

What does Roderick do after Lenore dies?

Roderick is devastated and he knows the end is nigh. The raven has come for him. No, really, it’s in his house. Watching him, mocking him. Eventually, he heads over to the Fortunato offices, as if to say goodbye to what he built. There, sitting in the chairs facing him, are all the dead Ushers, bloodied and broken and haunted. Verna shows up, of course, to reveal to Roderick what his real monument, his real legacy, what he really built is: piles and piles of corpses. They begin raining down from the sky –– the millions of people Roderick has killed with his drugs and his greed and his thirst for power. After he’s taken in the horrific sight, Verna tells him to call Dupin and meet him at his childhood home, bringing us back full circle to where this story all began.

Do Roderick and Madeline have one last twin chat?

Oh boy, do they. Madeline arrives at the Usher house and finds her brother in the basement, which he has begun to arrange like an Egyptian tomb, full of their most precious possessions. With Lenore dead, they’re the last two Ushers remaining, and they know the deal is that they came into the world together and they’ll go out of it together. They share a drink. Madeline launches into an epic monologue about how they shouldn’t be hiding in a basement before they die; they should be proud of who they are. She talks about how people want to blame them for death and destruction, but that they’re not the only guilty party here — the government, the Supreme Court, even the consumers themselves should all share the blame. She can’t admit to any wrongdoing, even at the very end. She tells Roderick that if Verna — or Death — is coming for them, she’ll have to stare her right in the eyes because she’s “Madeline f**king Usher.” And that’s when she feels it. Roderick poisoned her drink. He’s killing her.

Maybe it’s because he’s fully deranged, maybe it’s to put Madeline out of her misery, or maybe it’s because, like he says, he wants to honor his sister. He wants to send her off into immortal life. So, he cuts out her eyes and replaces them with Queen Twosret’s sapphires. “You’re Madeline f**king Usher. You’re a queen,” he tells her. There may have been other ways to express that sentiment, but too late now! 

What happens at the end of The Fall of the House of Usher?

You’d think that a guy who had one “dead” woman in his family come back to life would double- or triple-check the next female family member he decided to declare “dead” for any signs of life — but no, Roderick is a little too preoccupied for that. That’s a shame, because you know that thumping sound that Dupin’s been asking about throughout the series? That’s Madeline, still sort of alive, adjusting to the two sapphires in her eye sockets. She comes thumping up the stairs. Dupin makes a run for it as the house begins to crumble all around him. Madeline hears Roderick say “nevermore” and she finds him and then finds his neck and strangles him to death as the house falls down on top of them, burying them in their tomb. The House of Usher has finally fallen both literally and metaphorically. 

Outside, Dupin looks at the rubble before him and sees Verna standing on top of it, and then, just as suddenly, he sees the raven.

We learn that in the aftermath, Dupin closed his case on Fortunato and retired. Pym, who refused to strike a deal with Verna, was arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. Juno (Ruth Codd) inherited Fortunato and the Usher fortune and, after weaning herself off Ligodone, dissolved the entire company and used the money to fund addiction recovery services. 

Dupin visits the graves of the nine dead Ushers and finally bids Roderick farewell for good. He leaves his recorder behind with the whole confession, because it doesn’t much matter why Roderick says he did any of it — no reason makes it any better, no reason fixes any of it. 

A raven sits atop the tombstones watching. Verna visits each grave and leaves each Usher one last trinket: A mask, a cell phone, a cat collar, the heart mesh device, a gold scarab, a bag of coke, a feather and flower, Twosret’s sapphires, and a drinking glass. One last toast to the fallen Usher family.

Eike Schroter/Netflix

Did you figure out what Verna is an anagram of?

Raven, you guys. Verna is also Raven.