Let’s address the vomiting—an astonishing, almost operatic amount of it. Blood, bile, and apparently rancid oysters erupt from Rebecca Hall and Charlie Hunnam in relentless streams, pouring from every conceivable opening. They retch, convulse, sputter, and spew across the dining room, coating the tablecloth and floor as a horrified Lizzie Borden weaves around the spreading mess before finally fleeing the grotesque scene to find help.
Yet the bodily horror has a sharply satirical edge. Only moments before their disastrous meal takes effect, Edward and Abby Borden are happily laughing over Mrs. Borden’s killing of Lizzie’s cherished doves earlier that day. Abby audaciously claims Lizzie left her no choice, while Edward angrily tells his daughter to stop talking about her “stupid birds” and leave him alone.
Beneath the Bordens’ moneyed respectability and fixation on appearances, they are vile people. Why shouldn’t the show make their physical reality just as revolting?
The image of the Bordens erupting like something out of a Monty Python routine is both appalling and strangely pathetic, reducing them to helpless, childlike figures. Lizzie’s punishing menstrual bleeding symbolizes the confinement imposed on her by womanhood. Edward and Abby’s diarrhea and vomiting, by contrast, simply reveal their essence. This is not merely happening to them; it is them. If people are what they consume, perhaps they are also defined by what they expel.
For Bridget/Maggie and Lizzie, the bad-oyster poisoning plot proves frustratingly unsuccessful—or, in another sense, far too successful. Their intended victims purge so violently that they rid themselves of the toxins before the poison can finish its work. Lizzie therefore lands on an execution method better suited to her parents: an axe, the same implement her cruel stepmother used to kill the doves. Call it justice, or perhaps fowl play.
Before her mother turned red and slaughtered those birds, Lizzie had resisted Bridget’s proposal to murder her parents. Yes, their deaths would leave her with a considerable inheritance, even if it is only a sliver of what she feels she is owed and much of the family fortune is destined for her despised sister Emma, played by Billie Lourd. Yes, Edward and Abby are monstrous. But Lizzie does not truly break until she receives undeniable proof that neither parent cares about her in the slightest.
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Bridget, however, cares deeply. She buys Lizzie a steam-powered sex device intended to break her hymen, though the pair appear to lose their nerve once they see the bizarre machine in operation. Bridget also continues reading about Elizabeth Báthory, who blamed her crimes on her servants to avoid punishment. Elsewhere, amid imagery of birds trapped in cages, Bridget kisses Lizzie and teasingly suggests, “Maybe I should be your beau.”
Even while dealing with the aftermath of the abortion Edward paid for at her insistence, Bridget takes Lizzie to see celebrated American actress Nance O’Neal, played by Jessica Barden, perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream. O’Neal is introduced while urinating, and she quickly—figuratively, at least—urinates all over Bridget’s purple hair before agreeing to Lizzie’s invitation to dine with the Bordens. Whether the family will still be alive to receive her is another matter entirely.
Ian Brennan’s lurid Lizzie Borden reimagining, brought to the screen by creator, showrunner, and writer Brennan alongside director Max Winkler, remains intoxicatingly outrageous. The series casts Lizzie as the target of overlapping forms of oppression: ageism, ableism, misogyny, and homophobia, compounded by the relentless emotional cruelty of her parents.
Then comes a woman offering a route out. She is worldly, unconventional, cultured, queer, an excellent cook, and not remotely opposed to murder. Above all, she is the one person who refuses to see Lizzie Borden as a lost cause. Bridget sees her as intelligent, alive, and worth killing for. That kind of devotion is its own powerful poison—and an easy one to drink.
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. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.