Edward Borden exists in a world of female archetypes.
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Borden → exist → archetypes
There’s his sainted wife Sarah (Scarlett DeMeo), an ethereal beauty whom his memory renders largely mute.
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memory → ’ → ?
In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Episode 5, Sarah welcomes him into his marital bed and displays the bloodstained sheets proving her loss of virginity for all to see.
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all → welcome → virginity
She bears his children.
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She → bear → children
Then she dies, allowing them to wither on the vine through no fault of her own.
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them → die → own
She is a blameless vessel of femininity: beautiful, willing, motherly, and ultimately, something for a man to have feelings about.
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man → have → feelings
Now just look, he would implore you, at the women he’s been surrounded with since.
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he → look → women
Lizzie, his “not right” daughter, “like a tree that grew crooked,” quite a simile for a man with an axe collection.
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that → grow → collection
Bridget, the Irish maid he views as little more than a half-trained animal and a convenient relief valve for his sexual needs.
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he → view → needs
Even in the 12 or so hours that separate his wife leaving him and his daughter killing him, he has two close encounters of the female kind.
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he → separate → kind
A woman beats him unconscious in the street with her parasol for drunkenly chopping her husband in half while “fitting” him for a casket.
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woman → beat → casket
Later, a sex worker (Madilyn Sweetin) he overpays by heedlessly giving away a beautiful ring Lizzie gave him as payment for the evening’s festivities takes pity on him, staying the night by his side and fixing him breakfast (and booze); he repays her by demanding the ring back.
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he → overpay → ring
Lizzie and Bridget are almost doing him a favor by killing him, since this way he’ll never have to listen to another woman talk again.
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woman → do → him
Indeed, Edward devolves over the course of the episode into a would-be woman-killer himself.
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Edward → devolve → killer
Charlie Hunnam branches out from his Daniel Plainview impression into doing a mean Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining — blind drunk, wounded, carrying an axe, and vibrating with family-annihilator energy.
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Hunnam → branch → energy
He even falls down a flight of stairs, gets locked into a cellar, and slinks around like a caveman after he gets free, in case you’ve somehow missed what this episode is doing.
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episode → fall → what
Bridget and Lizzie do get him in the end.
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Bridget → get → end
Once again they reduce one of Lizzie’s hated parents’ heads to a bloody pulp, although this time Lizzie insists that Bridget take full part in the mutilation.
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Bridget → reduce → mutilation
As her beloved maid does so, Lizzie — or is it Edward? — sees flashing images of items from their family’s life.
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it → do → life
(He bleeds to death all over one such item, Abby’s fainting couch.)
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He → bleed → item
The episode ends with the sound of the ocean, as Edward drifts off into nothingness, and Lizzie’s hopes for any semblance of a normal life with him.
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Edward → end → him
An episode this focused on Edward Borden, one of Lizzie’s hugely unsympathetic victims, invites some wider musings about the whole Monster project.
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episode → focus → project
I’ve wondered why it bothers people so much, beyond understandable squeamishness about the subject matter and distaste for Ryan Murphy.
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it → wonder → Murphy
I think it comes down to the way Brennan is using both killers and victims as stand-ins for society’s misfits and outcasts, the people who can’t hack it, the abused who become abusers.
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who → think → it
The fact that all of Brennan’s killers could be considered in some way queer is just one example of how the show complicates our sympathies.
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show → consider → sympathies
People are people, and our experiences are often quite similar at root no matter how different we seem on the surface.
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we → seem → surface
Things that turn some people into monsters have the opposite effect on others; somewhere in between are the rest of us, stumbling along, struggling through the blows life has dealt us.
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life → turn → us
Monster posits that all these lives are worth examining, even if the killers get top billing, because in their lives we see glimpses of our own.
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we → posit → own
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.
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Collins → write → Times
He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House.
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Pain → hurt → House
He lives with his family on Long Island.
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He → live → Island
The Aporia
