“The Fall of the House of Usher” proves in episode 6 that not every episode of the Netflix series sticks to Edgar Allan Poe’s template. Netzwelt explains one of Poe’s most unusual stories to you.
The Fall of the House of Usher (Source: Eike Schroter/Netflix)
Our comparisons between the “Fall of the House of Usher” episodes and the works of Edgar Allan Poe occasionally refer to events from future episodes. So don’t read on until you’ve already seen the entire Netflix series!
The templates for the previous stories from “The Fall of the House of Usher” have already shown that Edgar Allan Poe often and happily used the sudden madness of his characters as a catalyst for the gruesome things that happened in his works.
When watching Episode 6, titled “The Gold Beetle,” on Netflix, you might expect Poe’s original text to be about a person driven mad by a gold beetle or, like Tamerlane Usher, losing his connection to lack of sleep Reality loses. However, the truth is completely different.
The gold beetle The Fall of the House of Usher (Source: Eike Schroter/Netflix)
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Beetle”, first published in 1843, is about a man who visits his friend Legrand and his freed slave Jupiter on Sullivan’s Island. Legrand has found a golden scarab, but does not have it with him at the time, which is why the narrator has to make do with a drawing of the beetle on a piece of parchment.
To the narrator, however, the beetle in the picture looks much more like a skull and a few weeks later the narrator receives a visit from Jupiter, who delivers him a letter. Legrand asks for his return and Jupiter reveals to the narrator that Legrand has apparently gone mad, which may be the beetle’s fault.
Back on Sullivan’s Island, Legrand convinces the narrator to go on a treasure hunt. He holds the golden beetle in front of him like a divining rod and throws it through a skull that has been attached to a tree. Where the beetle remains on the ground, they dig, but without success.
Legrand repeats this behavior again and they actually come across treasure. Now it turns out that Legrand was never crazy. Instead, his piece of parchment was a treasure map that was inscribed with special ink, so its message would only be revealed when exposed to heat. So the narrator really saw a skull on the parchment, namely the skull that was used to mark the tree with the treasure.
The golden scarab that gave the story its name was ultimately meaningless. He played no role in the treasure hunt and his importance to Legrand was only an act, he was just making a little joke of it.
So how does this story relate to the episode of the same name from “The Fall of the House of Usher”? Not at all! The only similarity could be that the beetle played no role in either story; in the Netflix series, “Goldbug” is just the name of Tamerlane’s lifestyle collection.
By the way, Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Gold Beetle” mainly because he was enthusiastic about ciphers and cryptanalysis. He used the story as an excuse to explain to his readers how to decipher messages, because that was the only way Legrand could read the treasure map!
All episodes from “The Fall of the House of Usher” and their Poe scripts explained:
| Review The Fall of the House of Usher | |
| genre | drama |
| First broadcast | October 12, 2023 |
| First broadcast in Germany | October 12, 2023 |
| Homepage | netflix.com |
| Other sources | |
| network | Netflix |
production | Intrepid Pictures |
| Squadrons |
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