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The hour starts with a wedding: Andrew and Sarah, Lizzie's mother, young and planning a house surrounded by fruit trees. Then it returns to Andrew in the present, drunk in his workshop after Abby's announcement, so careless with a corpse that he takes its legs off at the knees. Morse turns up demanding money and taunting him about Abby; Andrew tells him the marriage is over.

Andrew drinks his way through town, trades the ring Lizzie gave him for a night with a woman, and wakes up wanting his marriage back. On the way home he is beaten by a widow whose husband's body he mutilated. At the house he follows the blood upstairs and finds Abby. Maggie swings an axe into his back; he realizes his daughter is behind it and falls down the cellar stairs, where they shut him in while Maggie goes outside to wash windows in plain view.

He pulls the axe out, talks to Sarah's ghost, and fights both women when they open the door. What ends it is the apparition: Sarah tells him he was never a good father and to come to her. He drops his weapon, Lizzie strikes him in the face, and he collapses onto Abby's couch, where Lizzie keeps going and he apologizes with his last breath.

The real Andrew Borden came home at about 10:40 that morning. The front door was locked from inside, and Bridget let him in. He lay down on the sitting-room sofa for a nap, and some time before about 11:10 he was struck about ten times in the head as he lay there. There is no evidence of a struggle, a cellar, or a night out. Lizzie then called up to Bridget, who had gone to rest in her attic room, that her father was dead.

Some details are real and repurposed. Andrew did wear a gold ring Lizzie had given him, and he was buried with it. Bridget did spend the morning washing windows, inside and out — in her testimony it was a household chore, and the series turns it into an alibi. The story that Andrew cut the feet off corpses to fit cheap coffins is an old Fall River rumor, never proved. The title comes from the rhyme's “forty-one whacks”; the real wound counts were nineteen for Abby and about ten for Andrew.

Hunnam played Ed Gein in Season 3 and plays Andrew Borden here — two different real men in consecutive seasons. Both performances invent an inner life the record does not have. The cast guide sets each role beside the real person.