Edward Borden exists in a world of female archetypes. There’s his sainted wife Sarah (Scarlett DeMeo), an ethereal beauty whom his memory renders largely mute. In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Episode 5, Sarah welcomes him into his marital bed and displays the bloodstained sheets proving her loss of virginity for all to see. She bears his children. Then she dies, allowing them to wither on the vine through no fault of her own. She is a blameless vessel of femininity: beautiful, willing, motherly, and ultimately, something for a man to have feelings about.

Now just look, he would implore you, at the women he’s been surrounded with since. Abby, his frigid second wife, no use in the bedroom or the nursery. Lizzie, his “not right” daughter, “like a tree that grew crooked,” quite a simile for a man with an axe collection. Bridget, the Irish maid he views as little more than a half-trained animal and a convenient relief valve for his sexual needs.

Even in the 12 or so hours that separate his wife leaving him and his daughter killing him, he has two close encounters of the female kind. A woman beats him unconscious in the street with her parasol for drunkenly chopping her husband in half while “fitting” him for a casket. Later, a sex worker (Madilyn Sweetin) he overpays by heedlessly giving away a beautiful ring Lizzie gave him as payment for the evening’s festivities takes pity on him, staying the night by his side and fixing him breakfast (and booze); he repays her by demanding the ring back. 

Madonnas and whores, dream girls and ice queens, mean old biddies and ungrateful little bitches — these are the women in Edward Borden’s mental neighborhood. Lizzie and Bridget are almost doing him a favor by killing him, since this way he’ll never have to listen to another woman talk again.

Indeed, Edward devolves over the course of the episode into a would-be woman-killer himself. Charlie Hunnam branches out from his Daniel Plainview impression into doing a mean Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining — blind drunk, wounded, carrying an axe, and vibrating with family-annihilator energy. He even falls down a flight of stairs, gets locked into a cellar, and slinks around like a caveman after he gets free, in case you’ve somehow missed what this episode is doing.

Bridget and Lizzie do get him in the end. Boy, do they ever. Once again they reduce one of Lizzie’s hated parents’ heads to a bloody pulp, although this time Lizzie insists that Bridget take full part in the mutilation. As her beloved maid does so, Lizzie — or is it Edward? — sees flashing images of items from their family’s life. (He bleeds to death all over one such item, Abby’s fainting couch.) The episode ends with the sound of the ocean, as Edward drifts off into nothingness, and Lizzie’s hopes for any semblance of a normal life with him.

An episode this focused on Edward Borden, one of Lizzie’s hugely unsympathetic victims, invites some wider musings about the whole Monster project. I’ve wondered why it bothers people so much, beyond understandable squeamishness about the subject matter and distaste for Ryan Murphy. I think it comes down to the way Brennan is using both killers and victims as stand-ins for society’s misfits and outcasts, the people who can’t hack it, the abused who become abusers. The fact that all of Brennan’s killers could be considered in some way queer is just one example of how the show complicates our sympathies. 

To me, the idea is fairly straightforward. People are people, and our experiences are often quite similar at root no matter how different we seem on the surface. Things that turn some people into monsters have the opposite effect on others; somewhere in between are the rest of us, stumbling along, struggling through the blows life has dealt us. Monster posits that all these lives are worth examining, even if the killers get top billing, because in their lives we see glimpses of our own.

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.