3 hours ago, TeslaNewton said:
Before I finished the entire episode, I thought he had more humanity than Madeline. I think she had more humanity, miniscule that it was.
She was always a rule breaker, but in ways like if mom says don't go near that house, we are going over the gate to get to that house. She had compassion (try and imagine today's Madeline crying "I'm sorry, Mommy" and you can't do it, but when teenage her realized they'd buried their mom alive, she wasn't just scared she was remorseful), and a sense of justice and injustice, especially where men were harming women.
She was calculating, but used it against shitty people, like their bio dad and first foster mother. If her only comes around a few times in a century brain had been rewarded instead of her getting dismissed at every turn, and she could have achieved the success as a technology pioneer she should have, making a great living, we might have had a different Madeline. But by the time the opportunity to screw Griswold back and then some comes, she's become the Madeline that will commit murder.
And then the power and money totally corrupt what was left of her sense of right and wrong in the world at large, so that she sees the wrong in others but not in herself.
4 hours ago, Ohiopirate02 said:
Not only did he doom Frederick and Tamerlane without a second thought, he chose to have 4 more children knowing the deal he made. He could have gotten a vasectomy at any time after making that deal. At least Madeline got an IUD almost immediately after making the deal though she was never going to willingly have children before making the deal.
That's the huge thing for me. They mostly convinced themselves it was a folie a deux, but deep down believed it was at least possibly real. Like she says, she believed it enough to get an IUD, while he couldn't even bother to wrap it up with flight attendants. She left it up to him when Verna offered, because she didn't have kids and he did, so dooming a bloodline is up to him; all she had to agree to that affected her is that they go out together (and I so love her trying to use that as a loophole in the end, that if that doesn't happen, there's no deal, and he'd be dying fairly soon even without the deal, so if he kills himself, she, her immortality work, and Lenore can all live on), but he's the one condemning his kids. And then he makes more of them! The six of them only produced one grandchild, but he had no way of knowing that; he could have sentenced even more people to die as kids/teens.
I was trying to figure out how old Madeline and Roderick were in the end, since Verna had promised them a long life; they're older than the actors, based on the flashbacks (the first one, when they're kids, is 1953, when Mary McDonnell was a year old and Bruce Greenwood hadn't even been born yet), so mid-70s? That's not a short life, but it's not what I'd call long, either, given averages. Then at the end of this episode, when Verna is leaving the trinkets on all the headstones, we see 1950 as Roderick's birth year. But that makes no sense; that would make them three in the first flashback and 12 in the second, but they're older than that both times.
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