You have to start somewhere. Before she gave her mother and father a total of 81 whacks, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story shows its title character hacking up Bertha Manchester (Linda Reiter). She’s got good reason to, as far as it goes: Unable to deal with her sexuality, Bertha takes it out on Bridget, who’s been forced to work for her, by whipping her bloody with a cat o’ nine tails. So the two young women decide to practice their murder skills on an old spinster who won’t be a problem. Bridget’s even learned that old people’s bones are easier to chop apart directly from Mr. Borden himself. 

But Bridget freezes when she sees Lizzie’s axe become stuck in Bertha’s guts. Lizzie has to snatch the axe from the maid’s hand and finish the job herself, splitting her eyeball right down the middle. 

While both the cops and Abby Borden briefly suspect, or at least consider, Bridget for the crime, Lizzie provides her with an alibi, and a Portuguese laborer is arrested instead. (The Portuguese are treated even worse by their American employers than the Irish.) 

Bridget apologizes to Lizzie for freezing, saying she couldn’t help but take pity on the old woman, who resembled a wounded animal in that moment. (Bertha’s adorable toy dog gets killed by a stray who comes in to sniff at the corpse, too. It’s literally a dog eat dog world out there.) But she’ll feel no pity for the parents who’ve mistreated Lizzie…because she loves Lizzie. Those wild kisses in the cherry blossom garden were no fluke; neither, I suppose, was the vaginal expression and the multiple sex-toy gifts. Bridget and Lizzie are in this together, for every definition of “this.”

There’s just one problem: It didn’t happen like this at all. Bertha was young, not old. She had no connection to the Bordens. She was murdered just days before Lizzie was already slated to go to trial for the killing of her parents. She wasn’t a dry run by Lizzie and Bridget. Other than the apparently coincidental nature of her murder, she had nothing to do with them at all. 

It seems safe at this point, if it wasn’t already, to drive an axe through the idea that writer/showrunner Ian Brennan is interested in historical accuracy here. He’s more concerned with painting Lizzie as an avatar for, for lack of a better term, female trouble. Her looks, her menstrual cycle, her unsettled sexuality, her dead mother, her abusive stepmother, her absent and uncaring father, her total lack of freedom or the prospect of it — all these things conspire to put an axe in Lizzie’s hand and force her to run wild, at least in the culturally received and transmitted Lizzie Borden narrative. That’s the one Brennan and company are exploring.

The guests who enter the Bordens’ world this episode are instructive in this regard. Nance O’Neal shows up, providing Lizzie and Abby with the model of feminine freedom to which they aspire: worldly, artful, successful, free of the burden of men and children, able to come and go as she pleases. Lizzie, I think, is just smitten with a beautiful, cool woman. For Abby, there’s the added bonus of Nance’s air of superiority over Bridget, whom she belittles mercilessly. Freedom isn’t really what a lot of people who say they want freedom actually want, mastery over others. Freedom isn’t free, to such people: It must come at a cost to others.

The Bordens’ other visitor is John Morse (Joey Pollari), the brother of Andrew’s late, beloved wife Sarah. Andrew repeatedly rejects his long lost brother(-in-law)’s request for a business loan, saying it’s forbidden by Scripture. But the two men do bond over their very similar collection of named bladed weaponry. John’s knives, it turns out, have male names due to their penetrative nature, while Andrew’s hatchets and axes are female; I’ll leave the vulgar explanation that they leave unsaid for you, the astute reader, to deduce. (Actor Charlie Hunnam leans all the way into vocal Daniel Day-Lewis/Daniel Plainview–isms here, as is appropriate given the similarity to a storyline from There Will Be Blood.)

This, then, is the world as Lizzie knows it. The women are unfeeling harridans who take out their own feelings of inadequacy and powerless on women further down the ladder. The men are uncaring brutes who bond over weapons but won’t dip into their generational wealth to help each other out. All Lizzie wants to do is expand the feeling of freedom and beauty she feels in the cherry blossoms and the dovecote to the world beyond, however many whacks it takes.

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.