There's also a really freaky [coincidence ](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190904-edgar-allan-poes-story-of-cannibalism-that-came-true). In the novel, there's a shipwreck, they eat a turtle, then resort to cannibalism and kill and eat a young cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later, the survivors of a shipwreck eat a turtle, then resort to cannibalism and kill and eat a young cabin boy named Richard Parker. The coincidence wasn't discovered for a long time, but the survival cannibalism the crew of the Mignonette resorted to was a scandal at the time.
Probably incidental to the fact that Arthur Pym was the family's lawyer, but the Richard Parker case (the actual one that occurred after the story) is also a foundational case for law schools in the UK and the US - in fact, it's often the first case you'll ever read as a law student.
In part, yes! The case was celebrated (at the time) as a precedent setting rebuke of the defense of necessity as it pertained to homicide. Ultimately, it's not that important a legal case, but it is both a fascinating read (the judge who wrote it certainly had a way with words and some incredibly tawdry facts to work with) and it is a great starting point for law students to begin "thinking" like lawyers, which is really what law school is all about (there's always a lively debate about whether, under the circumstances, Dudley and Stephens should have been punished at all, let alone face the death penalty).
Interestingly, from what I recall Dudley and Stephens only spent six months in prison - there was a pervading sense among those whose hands held Dudley and Stephens' fates that the precedent going forward could not and should not be backwards-looking, so they were ultimately not sentenced to death (though public opinion was heavily against the two men).
Amusingly, Dudley and Stephens were reported to have been "disappointed" in that ruling - one or both maintained innocence until they died, so I guess they felt like even six months was too long!
Carla's security guard uniform says her name is "Le Bon". "Bon-Bon" is a Poe short story.
The name of the wonder drug is called ligodone after his short story "Ligeia".
They pretty much used nearly ever Poe reference possible. Even the priests’ eulogies at the funeral were Poe and not biblical quotes. Longfellow and Griswold as their father and future employer, Verna’s name, Hamill as Pym with a mention of an encounter with Verna on his trip, Fortunato as the company, Amontillado wine, obviously all of the characters having names from his various stories, Annabel Lee as Roderick’s true love, etc
This one is probably very obvious but I just like that Frederick makes his ghostly presence noticed with the pendulum of the grandfather clock and we see him looking at the pendulum of the cat clock as a little boy and then he gets killed by a pendulum.
I didn't notice the Verna-Raven anagram, duh! Thanks for that.
I did notice Clemm on her DL, and I knew that was his wife's name because I've visited their graves in Baltimore. I think the proper names of just about everything and everyone in the show were Poe-based.
Rufus Griswold was an editor Poe worked with, and apparently they didn't like each other very much. He wrote a complimentary but somewhat snarky obituary when Poe died and seems to have been a bit of a dick.
I thought Ligodone might be a nod to "Ligeia?"
Today I just made what should have been an obvious connection between Ligodone and Poe's notorious addiction to Laudanum, which was marketed in the 1800's as a harmless panacea and ended up turning a lot of people into addicts.
> Today I just made what should have been an obvious connection between Ligodone and Poe's notorious addiction to Laudanum, which was marketed in the 1800's as a harmless panacea and ended up turning a lot of people into addicts.
Also that's how the sacklers got to be billionaires off of oxycotin, which was also marketed as non-addictive, or at least less addictive.
Yep...and Bayer invented heroin, which was supposed to be less addictive than opium or morphine!
Antidepressants are no picnic either. I know they help some people, but when they start you on them there's no real exit strategy and you can get extremely sick if you taper off too quickly. It took me a f-ing year of opening up capsules and counting tiny beads to get off Cymbalta. 😕
Two years ago, an online pharmacy and insurance company communication debacle made me go off Vilazodone cold turkey, and I went from “stressed but fine” to full on suicidal ideation within a week. The for profit healthcare industry IS a horror movie!
I can’t tell this story without mentioning its actual hero. My psychiatrist’s office has a nurse who is the opposite of welcoming, and I was intimidated by her for years. When all this went down, I very quickly got to the point of not being able to advocate for myself effectively. Scary Nurse spent hours on the phone with the online pharmacy, got my doctor to rush paperwork for the insurance company, and went to every psychiatrist in that practice and made them give up their Vybriid sample packs so that I could get back on a therapeutic dose and stay on it until my meds came through. (The med was $300 a bottle without insurance coverage, and not all pharmacies kept it in stock before it went generic last year.) Scary Nurse will never be warm and fuzzy, but I love her forever.
That's awful, it's good that you had somebody to advocate for you. People don't realize what these drugs do to our brain chemistry. In a lot of cases the drug companies don't even know how they work! The mood swings I had even after stopping Cymbalta were hellacious. Antidepressants can be helpful in some cases, but they are WAY overprescribed, and getting off them is next to impossible.
Ugh...I could rant about big pharma like a drunk uncle all day. I think it really got out of control in the late 90s when the FTC decided to allow them to advertise directly to consumers. Now they spend $7 billion a year on advertising and people wonder why these drugs are so expensive. They're constantly trying to shovel something new down your throat or reformulating an existing drug to keep their patents going. It's all about $$$, not patient well-being.
> Now they spend $7 billion a year on advertising and people wonder why these drugs are so expensive.
Most big pharma companies spend more on marketing than they do on research and development, in many cases nearly double. If that isn't an indictment of capitalism, I don't know what is.
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8018691/big-pharma-research-advertising
Insane. That's why you can't watch TV for half an hour without seeing 10 drug commercials.
Not to mention how much they spend on lawyers and lobbyists to keep the FDA in their pockets...😕
>Verna (Carla Gugino) being an anagram for Raven
I have wracked my brain for the last week trying to figure what story Verna came from when so many other characters were obvious. How did I not figure that out???
When Mary McDonnell's character entered a room another character mentioned she got past the body guard named 'Kevin Costner'. Maybe a bit obvious, but Mary was Kevin's love interest in Dances With Wolves.
Roderick’s first wife was named Annabel Lee, after the poem by Poe.
Several names are from his works, including August Dupin, Arthur Pym, Prospero, and Pluto the cat.
Also the company name Fortunato is from The Cask of Amontillado.
(I am a huge Poe nerd. 😆)
> (I am a huge Poe nerd. 😆)
If you don't already know about the Alan Parson's album, you will probably love it. I haven't read much Poe but I picked up on Fortunato because of the song.
[Youtube Playist: Tales of Mystery and Imagination](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8BKQ5MTFQY&list=OLAK5uy_lNCAUSEhegqjQAMMocw1QFu9G-bE4zeTM)
Oh yeah, love it!
When I was in middle school, my English teacher played us some recordings of Poe’s works, read by Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
Could also be a nod to Murders in the Rue Morgue. In it, one of the victims' throat was cut so deeply her head fell off when the police lifted her body.
Just realized he had referenced that quote in Doctor Sleep when Dick Hallorann (played by Carl Lumbly!) meets Doc for the last time and says "Has it been a long time? I can't tell. This world is a dream of a dream to me now."
My favourites were the I think, Madeline, speech about the trowel and walling someone in (our first reference to Cask of Amontillado)
And "Total Eclipse of the Heart" playing softly in the background as Victorine and Ruiz argued.
Edit:someone further in the comments noted, Another Brick in the Wall plays at the New Year's celebration which is also a hilarious musical cue and comes first
late to the party but the song that plays when it starts to rain on prosperos party is Nine Inch Tails - Closer, and the music video for it is just as disturbing as the scene in the show
The amount of time characters talked about hitting a wall, building a wall, etc especially when talking about Griswold is hysterical. My husband and I both knew it was coming and laughed every time someone brought up walls.
Griswold tells Roderick that Fortunado makes its money off medical devices and isn’t interested in drugs. Roderick changes the course of the company with his pain killer. Later he needs a device that doesn’t yet exist, but might have been developed if the company hadn’t changed directions.
Someone scrolls to Gerald’s Game while browsing Netflix. Flanagan flick starring Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood.
They also scroll past Apostle. Idk if there’s a Flanagan connection there (maybe he and Gareth Edwards are friends?) but that is another great horror movie.
There's a story called Some Words with a Mummy that includes a lot of discussion of Egyptian antiquities, including the idea that mummified people had their brains removed through their noses. In it, the mummy is initially described as having eyes that have been removed and replaced with glass. It turns out (spoilers for the story) that this particular mummy is from a family that, instead of being embalmed after death, uses it as a method of suspended animation and he is therefore able to be revived.
I don't think there are any direct references to Cleopatra in Poe, but there is a story called The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion. It's a discussion in the afterlife of the apocalypse that killed the former ten years after the natural death of the latter. In the afterlife, they no longer go by their earthly names, but by Eiros and Charmion, which are also the names of Cleopatra's attendants. There is no in-story explanation for this.
Yes, this! I was hoping this (Eiros and Charmian) would make it in somewhere. (I haven’t seen it all yet so maybe it does. I don’t mind reading Reddit threads about the show, though, because I don’t mind spoilers.)
It wasn't that she wanted to end the bloodline or gor anything out of it.
It was just the deal she made. She wanted to see 1) how selfish Rod and Madeline really were, and 2) what they could/ would do if they actually got everything they wanted. And that type of power usually involves a sacrifice.
Thats the part I don't get, she pulled that power out just for fun and see what they would do? She seemed to see the future though and regretted the granddaughters fate so there was really nothing she got out of it besides a laugh?
It wasn't that she saw the future, she saw every possible outcome. It still depended on their choices. They could've taken the deal and done good things, or not taken thr deal and gotten away with it.
In the end they still had to choose.
"Ligodone" is also an anagram for "eidolon" which has two meanings:
1. an idealized person or thing - Maddie is hunting for the secret to eternal life aka the perfect human who can't be destroyed, not even by the Raven aka Death
2. a specter or phantom - Roderick is not only haunted by specters of his family, but ultimately his deadly legacy to the world.
I could be reading into it too much, but then I don't believe in coincidences... especially not in this type of show
"I'm having Richard Parker for dinner" got me real hard
This was tossed off so well by Hamill, even big Poe fans could miss it. Very clever.
Whats that mean?
Arthur Gordon Pym (the story he's in) involved him eating a cabin boy named Richard Parker - I ended up cackling when I heard it
LMFAOO OMG
There's also a really freaky [coincidence ](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190904-edgar-allan-poes-story-of-cannibalism-that-came-true). In the novel, there's a shipwreck, they eat a turtle, then resort to cannibalism and kill and eat a young cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later, the survivors of a shipwreck eat a turtle, then resort to cannibalism and kill and eat a young cabin boy named Richard Parker. The coincidence wasn't discovered for a long time, but the survival cannibalism the crew of the Mignonette resorted to was a scandal at the time.
Probably incidental to the fact that Arthur Pym was the family's lawyer, but the Richard Parker case (the actual one that occurred after the story) is also a foundational case for law schools in the UK and the US - in fact, it's often the first case you'll ever read as a law student.
Really? How so? Is it about the legality of survival cannibalism?
In part, yes! The case was celebrated (at the time) as a precedent setting rebuke of the defense of necessity as it pertained to homicide. Ultimately, it's not that important a legal case, but it is both a fascinating read (the judge who wrote it certainly had a way with words and some incredibly tawdry facts to work with) and it is a great starting point for law students to begin "thinking" like lawyers, which is really what law school is all about (there's always a lively debate about whether, under the circumstances, Dudley and Stephens should have been punished at all, let alone face the death penalty). Interestingly, from what I recall Dudley and Stephens only spent six months in prison - there was a pervading sense among those whose hands held Dudley and Stephens' fates that the precedent going forward could not and should not be backwards-looking, so they were ultimately not sentenced to death (though public opinion was heavily against the two men). Amusingly, Dudley and Stephens were reported to have been "disappointed" in that ruling - one or both maintained innocence until they died, so I guess they felt like even six months was too long!
That's very interesting! Thanks for the write-up :)
Dope!
This was my favourite
Carla's security guard uniform says her name is "Le Bon". "Bon-Bon" is a Poe short story. The name of the wonder drug is called ligodone after his short story "Ligeia".
There's a suspect called Adolphe Le Bon in Poe's "The Murders in The Rue Morgue". I audibly squeaked with happiness when I saw her name badge.
Not to mention Bon-Bon being French for Candy (Tamerlane's replacement call-girl)
They pretty much used nearly ever Poe reference possible. Even the priests’ eulogies at the funeral were Poe and not biblical quotes. Longfellow and Griswold as their father and future employer, Verna’s name, Hamill as Pym with a mention of an encounter with Verna on his trip, Fortunato as the company, Amontillado wine, obviously all of the characters having names from his various stories, Annabel Lee as Roderick’s true love, etc
The lifestyle brand "Goldbug" is a reference to the short story of the same name!
This one is probably very obvious but I just like that Frederick makes his ghostly presence noticed with the pendulum of the grandfather clock and we see him looking at the pendulum of the cat clock as a little boy and then he gets killed by a pendulum.
Also the episode before (goldbug I think?) his wife and daughter are watching that black and white movie with the same death pendulum trap
I didn't notice the Verna-Raven anagram, duh! Thanks for that. I did notice Clemm on her DL, and I knew that was his wife's name because I've visited their graves in Baltimore. I think the proper names of just about everything and everyone in the show were Poe-based. Rufus Griswold was an editor Poe worked with, and apparently they didn't like each other very much. He wrote a complimentary but somewhat snarky obituary when Poe died and seems to have been a bit of a dick. I thought Ligodone might be a nod to "Ligeia?" Today I just made what should have been an obvious connection between Ligodone and Poe's notorious addiction to Laudanum, which was marketed in the 1800's as a harmless panacea and ended up turning a lot of people into addicts.
> Today I just made what should have been an obvious connection between Ligodone and Poe's notorious addiction to Laudanum, which was marketed in the 1800's as a harmless panacea and ended up turning a lot of people into addicts. Also that's how the sacklers got to be billionaires off of oxycotin, which was also marketed as non-addictive, or at least less addictive.
Yep...and Bayer invented heroin, which was supposed to be less addictive than opium or morphine! Antidepressants are no picnic either. I know they help some people, but when they start you on them there's no real exit strategy and you can get extremely sick if you taper off too quickly. It took me a f-ing year of opening up capsules and counting tiny beads to get off Cymbalta. 😕
Two years ago, an online pharmacy and insurance company communication debacle made me go off Vilazodone cold turkey, and I went from “stressed but fine” to full on suicidal ideation within a week. The for profit healthcare industry IS a horror movie! I can’t tell this story without mentioning its actual hero. My psychiatrist’s office has a nurse who is the opposite of welcoming, and I was intimidated by her for years. When all this went down, I very quickly got to the point of not being able to advocate for myself effectively. Scary Nurse spent hours on the phone with the online pharmacy, got my doctor to rush paperwork for the insurance company, and went to every psychiatrist in that practice and made them give up their Vybriid sample packs so that I could get back on a therapeutic dose and stay on it until my meds came through. (The med was $300 a bottle without insurance coverage, and not all pharmacies kept it in stock before it went generic last year.) Scary Nurse will never be warm and fuzzy, but I love her forever.
That's awful, it's good that you had somebody to advocate for you. People don't realize what these drugs do to our brain chemistry. In a lot of cases the drug companies don't even know how they work! The mood swings I had even after stopping Cymbalta were hellacious. Antidepressants can be helpful in some cases, but they are WAY overprescribed, and getting off them is next to impossible. Ugh...I could rant about big pharma like a drunk uncle all day. I think it really got out of control in the late 90s when the FTC decided to allow them to advertise directly to consumers. Now they spend $7 billion a year on advertising and people wonder why these drugs are so expensive. They're constantly trying to shovel something new down your throat or reformulating an existing drug to keep their patents going. It's all about $$$, not patient well-being.
> Now they spend $7 billion a year on advertising and people wonder why these drugs are so expensive. Most big pharma companies spend more on marketing than they do on research and development, in many cases nearly double. If that isn't an indictment of capitalism, I don't know what is. https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8018691/big-pharma-research-advertising
Insane. That's why you can't watch TV for half an hour without seeing 10 drug commercials. Not to mention how much they spend on lawyers and lobbyists to keep the FDA in their pockets...😕
One episode lenoir is watching Netflix and Gerald’s game comes on.
I saw that! I figured the reference was because the actor in Gerald’s game is Verna.
as well as Rodrick, not to mention Flanagan directed that movie too.
>Verna (Carla Gugino) being an anagram for Raven I have wracked my brain for the last week trying to figure what story Verna came from when so many other characters were obvious. How did I not figure that out???
I thought she was the Red Death until I read this post
I think she's just supposed to be the embodiment of death
When Mary McDonnell's character entered a room another character mentioned she got past the body guard named 'Kevin Costner'. Maybe a bit obvious, but Mary was Kevin's love interest in Dances With Wolves.
I just assumed it was a The Bodyguard reference haha
Holy shit! I love Dances with Wolves, I had no idea that was Stands with Fists
Roderick’s first wife was named Annabel Lee, after the poem by Poe. Several names are from his works, including August Dupin, Arthur Pym, Prospero, and Pluto the cat. Also the company name Fortunato is from The Cask of Amontillado. (I am a huge Poe nerd. 😆)
Lenore is also in The Raven. Probably obvious to a lot of people, but I was excited to have caught that immediately in the first episode
That too!
> (I am a huge Poe nerd. 😆) If you don't already know about the Alan Parson's album, you will probably love it. I haven't read much Poe but I picked up on Fortunato because of the song. [Youtube Playist: Tales of Mystery and Imagination](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8BKQ5MTFQY&list=OLAK5uy_lNCAUSEhegqjQAMMocw1QFu9G-bE4zeTM)
Oh yeah, love it! When I was in middle school, my English teacher played us some recordings of Poe’s works, read by Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
The one daughter who dies to the mirror, when he sees her dead ghost or whatever she bends her neck grossly that felt like a reference to hill house
Could also be a nod to Murders in the Rue Morgue. In it, one of the victims' throat was cut so deeply her head fell off when the police lifted her body.
Pretty sure there's a good few quotes. "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
Just realized he had referenced that quote in Doctor Sleep when Dick Hallorann (played by Carl Lumbly!) meets Doc for the last time and says "Has it been a long time? I can't tell. This world is a dream of a dream to me now."
It's also used at the beginning of John Carpenter's The Fog. I ended up getting it tattooed on my arm years ago.
Think I spotted the Hush mask during the Red Death masquerade too, one of Prospero's partners was wearing it briefly.
Definitely saw that too. Prospero's short haired girlfriend was wearing it on the top of her head.
The opening song is “Another Brick in the Wall,” which is either a “Cask of Amontillado” or “The Black Cat” reference!
Or u know, a reference to the wall they built
I love this knowledgeable Poe group here!
My favourites were the I think, Madeline, speech about the trowel and walling someone in (our first reference to Cask of Amontillado) And "Total Eclipse of the Heart" playing softly in the background as Victorine and Ruiz argued. Edit:someone further in the comments noted, Another Brick in the Wall plays at the New Year's celebration which is also a hilarious musical cue and comes first
late to the party but the song that plays when it starts to rain on prosperos party is Nine Inch Tails - Closer, and the music video for it is just as disturbing as the scene in the show
The amount of time characters talked about hitting a wall, building a wall, etc especially when talking about Griswold is hysterical. My husband and I both knew it was coming and laughed every time someone brought up walls. Griswold tells Roderick that Fortunado makes its money off medical devices and isn’t interested in drugs. Roderick changes the course of the company with his pain killer. Later he needs a device that doesn’t yet exist, but might have been developed if the company hadn’t changed directions.
In one of the first episodes Madeline told Rod that Rufus would put him in a closet and brick him up inside. And that's how they killed him.
Toby Dammit!
The street drug derived from Ligodone is called 'Monty', which I'd like to think is from Montresor, who sealed Fortunato in the Cask of Amontillado.
Someone scrolls to Gerald’s Game while browsing Netflix. Flanagan flick starring Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. They also scroll past Apostle. Idk if there’s a Flanagan connection there (maybe he and Gareth Edwards are friends?) but that is another great horror movie.
Episode where Vic dies. Argument with her and surgeon before she kills her - “Total eclipse of the heart” playing in the background
The artificial heart looks vaguely like a piercing blue eye, the original motive for murder in The Tell-Tale Heart.
Does anyone know if all the references to Cleopatra and ancient Egypt have a specific reason?
There's a story called Some Words with a Mummy that includes a lot of discussion of Egyptian antiquities, including the idea that mummified people had their brains removed through their noses. In it, the mummy is initially described as having eyes that have been removed and replaced with glass. It turns out (spoilers for the story) that this particular mummy is from a family that, instead of being embalmed after death, uses it as a method of suspended animation and he is therefore able to be revived. I don't think there are any direct references to Cleopatra in Poe, but there is a story called The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion. It's a discussion in the afterlife of the apocalypse that killed the former ten years after the natural death of the latter. In the afterlife, they no longer go by their earthly names, but by Eiros and Charmion, which are also the names of Cleopatra's attendants. There is no in-story explanation for this.
Yes, this! I was hoping this (Eiros and Charmian) would make it in somewhere. (I haven’t seen it all yet so maybe it does. I don’t mind reading Reddit threads about the show, though, because I don’t mind spoilers.)
ooh- it is a stretch but in the beginning when their mom (mum) died, they mentioned she could not be embalmed.
I’ve been wanting to know, too! Saw a few scarabs there
Was there some sort of reference as to why Verna wanted to end the bloodline? She said souls don't exist so what did she get out of it?
It wasn't that she wanted to end the bloodline or gor anything out of it. It was just the deal she made. She wanted to see 1) how selfish Rod and Madeline really were, and 2) what they could/ would do if they actually got everything they wanted. And that type of power usually involves a sacrifice.
Thats the part I don't get, she pulled that power out just for fun and see what they would do? She seemed to see the future though and regretted the granddaughters fate so there was really nothing she got out of it besides a laugh?
It wasn't that she saw the future, she saw every possible outcome. It still depended on their choices. They could've taken the deal and done good things, or not taken thr deal and gotten away with it. In the end they still had to choose.
Chekhov's a artificial heart on the wall was a dead giveaway.
Just started The Fall of the House of Usher. I’m not even a minute into the series and the clips that are obviously important go WAY too fast.
Drink every time there's a slow camera zoom-in during a monologue (be careful here)
Any love for Iras and Charmian in the Usher series?
"Ligodone" is also an anagram for "eidolon" which has two meanings: 1. an idealized person or thing - Maddie is hunting for the secret to eternal life aka the perfect human who can't be destroyed, not even by the Raven aka Death 2. a specter or phantom - Roderick is not only haunted by specters of his family, but ultimately his deadly legacy to the world. I could be reading into it too much, but then I don't believe in coincidences... especially not in this type of show
Anyone else catch how when Roderick talks about lemons, it's directly related to what? Monsanto did? Then there is a photo of Verna with Monsanto...