PIHM Mad Science: The Fall of the House of Usher
Mike Flanagan’s run at Netflix is one of the most successful on the streaming platform. The series he made were incredibly popular with audiences as well as critics. In this entry of Mad Science, I’d like to discuss The Fall of the House of Usher miniseries for Pride in Horror Month. Here, I’ll mainly be talking about Victorine LaFourcade and Dr. Alessandra "Ali" Ruiz. Spoilers for the series and some Edgar Allen Poe stories. Seriously, spoilers right away in the next paragraph!!
The Fall of the House of Usher follows the bloodline of Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline. They scheme and kill their way to the top after making a cruel deal with an enigmatic entity named Verna. They will gain vast riches and get away with their crimes, but the entire Usher bloodline will die when the twins do. The series follows how this decision eliminates the Usher family while also critiquing the pharmaceutical industry and how some in that field made obscene amounts of money while giving millions easy access to highly addictive drugs.
One of Roderick’s children is Victorine “Vic” LaFourcade. Vic appears to be some type of biomedical researcher, biomedical engineer, or a medical doctor. Perhaps I was not paying close attention, but I don’t recall her ever explicitly saying what her training was. Regardless, Vic is pursuing research on a novel diagnostic heart mesh medical device. The device will closely monitor a myriad of variables that may be associated with heart disease or cardiovascular illnesses in general, including various types of vascular dementia. This is a noble pursuit and one that could save many lives for people with genetic predispositions for any of the diseases related to the heart and vascular system.
However, Vic is a highly unethical researcher. In her pursuit for her father’s approval and his increasing demands, Vic starts falsifying and fabricating data, as well as injecting medication to alter her animal subjects’ heartrate, making the heart mesh appear effective. She manipulates the data by performing secret, undocumented surgeries to add or remove animals to the count to twist the numbers. It is one of worst nightmares for an ethical scientist as it could so easily happen. There are many examples of unethical research that have tarnished the reputation of scientific pursuit, particularly in the biomedical field, so Vic feels very believable.
It is also upsetting that Vic’s research subjects are chimpanzees. All research animals deserve ethical treatment, regardless of their place in taxonomy, but the chimpanzee was likely chosen because of the controversy of using them in biomedical research. The chimps also tie in nicely with the Poe themes of the story, tying the chimps to the orangutan in Murders at the Rue Morgue. Shockingly, though, it isn’t an escaped research animal that does Vic in. She dies by her own hand after losing her mind. Although I do believe there were supernatural events at play, there are fans who suspect the hallucinations Vic has during her featured episode could be signs she has also inherited CADASIL, a vascular disease that can cause dementia, from her father. One reason Vic is pursuing her research so hard before her death is her father’s unexplained, ever-increasing demands for to get the mesh ready for human trials. He believes it will help extend his life before succumbing to CADASIL. This seems extreme and would be a huge conflict of interest at best. Roderick’s demands have cost Vic her integrity and could taint any future research for a few decades. We don’t know who she was prior to joining this family, but it is implied she was not always so irresponsible.
Vic’s wife/partner, Dr. Ali Ruiz, is a kind and dedicated woman. She is a surgeon and may perhaps be an MD/PhD, an MD and a veterinarian, or at least spent a few semesters doing primate research during medical school. Med students often rotate in research labs, to varying levels of success in the lab, but Ali seems to have mastered heart surgeries in both humans and chimpanzees. She is more cautious than Vic, often urging her to consider the repercussions of her actions and how they can ruin the entire study if they are not careful. While Ali’s name is on the line, she also starts showing genuine concern about the ethics behind her and Vic’s actions. It isn’t fully clear how much Ali knows about the extent of Vic’s manipulation of the data, but she is clearly unhappy and it is straining their relationship. This comes to a head when it is revealed Vic has been pressuring a patient, secretly Verna, to have the heart mesh surgery before the procedure has been completely tested in their preclinical animal model. Ali finally sees that her relationship is unsalvageable and chooses to leave, desiring to come clean about the data manipulation. The two women fight and Ali ends up dead. In a disturbing, yet twistedly romantic, take on the Tell Tale Heart, Vic implants the mesh in Ali’s corpse, trying to revive her dead lover. Vic completely loses her mind, and like the narrator of the Poe story cannot escape the sickening, pulsing sound of the mesh forcibly pumping Ali’s heart, the heart she stopped with her own actions.
Vic and Ali are just two of the several queer characters in this series and Flanigan’s shows seem to always include some queer rep. While Vic and Ali are not portrayed in a particularly positive light, the Ushers and their spouses are all shown to be a bit off in some way. They are an example of how even the most well-meaning researchers can fall prey to unethical research practices due to pressure from their financiers. Especially Ali, who eventually pushes back, but the damage had already been done and it costs her life. The entire series critiques some of the worst practices in the pharmaceutical industry and offers a reason why so many continue to lose faith in science. We are already seeing how these anxieties have led to biomedical research in the US coming under attack, and extreme reductions to the NIH or NSF budgets. Scenarios like those seen between Vic and Ali may become more common as competition for funding amps up and only the most promising studies will receive funding. More and more researchers may feel the need to falsify data or skew results, leading to further distrust of the field.
