Bloodbath

The cold open is the crime itself: Lizzie with an axe, first in the guest room, then in the hallway with her father. Then the series rewinds four months to April. Abby is preparing Lizzie for a gentleman caller, and the evening goes as badly as it can — he tells her she is too plain to marry, she faints, and her period stains Abby's prized couch. Abby is more upset about the upholstery than about her stepdaughter.

Dinner makes the house's rules plain. Andrew complains about living among women and never having a son. When the maid serves the wrong soup, Abby throws it in her face and fires her — the latest in a run of dismissals. The next applicant is Bridget Sullivan. She asks for one condition, to dress and make herself up as she likes, gets the couch clean, and is hired on the spot. Abby announces she will be called Maggie.

Andrew, who runs the family's undertaking trade in the series, shows Maggie his collection of axes and pays her extra to keep them sharp. He also expects her in his bed. Meanwhile Maggie finds Lizzie in the dovecote that is her only refuge, notices that every book she owns was written by a man, and tells her about the Hungarian countess said to have bathed in the blood of young women. The hour ends with the two of them in a tub of cherry juice. Lizzie's line — if only it were blood — is the season's thesis in miniature.

The household is real. Andrew Borden was a wealthy, notoriously frugal Fall River businessman who had started out in furniture and undertaking; Abby was his second wife, married in 1865 after Lizzie's mother Sarah died; Lizzie and her older sister Emma lived with them at 92 Second Street. Bridget Sullivan, an Irish immigrant, had worked for the family since 1889, and the household did call her Maggie, a name carried over from an earlier maid.

The rest is invention. Lizzie was 32 in 1892, not a debutante being shown to suitors. There is no record of a sexual relationship between Andrew and the maid, of Abby throwing soup at servants, or of a romance between Lizzie and Bridget. Lizzie did keep pigeons in the barn; accounts of the case say they were killed that spring — a detail the show reshapes in the next episode. Elizabeth Báthory was a real sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman, but the blood-bath story is legend, and nothing connects it to the Bordens.

Two props in this hour come back. Andrew's axes are the weapons the season will use, and the series gives them names. Abby's couch — the one Lizzie bleeds on — is where Andrew dies in Episode 5. The real Andrew Borden was killed on the sitting-room sofa, so the show is building its symbolism on one of the few physical details the record does preserve.