Let’s talk about vomit. Lots of vomit. Gushes of it, gouts of it, firehose torrents of blood, bile, and bad oysters, firing from every available orifice in Rebecca Hall’s and Charlie Hunnam’s bodies. Hurling, heaving, gurgling, spraying, splattering, oozing all over the tablecloth and the floor, forcing poor Lizzie Borden to nimbly dodge the puddles as she belatedly leaves this chamber of bodily-fluid horrors to seek help.

But scatology can serve a satirical purpose. Just moments before they began exploding out of both ends, Edward and Abby Borden were chuckling gleefully about Mrs. Borden’s slaughter of Lizzie’s beloved doves earlier that day. Her mother had the temerity to blame Lizzie for forcing her hand; her father screamed at her to shut the fuck up about her stupid birds and leave him the fuck alone. 

Under their wealth and their obsession with surface-level propriety, their behavior is repulsive. Should their physical presence be any different?

The truly spectacular sight of the Bordens geysering forth like a Monty Python sketch depicts the Bordens as simultaneously disgusting and pitiable, almost infantile. Whereas Lizzie’s severe menstrual bleeding represents her imprisonment by her gender, Abby and Edward’s vomit and diarrhea is just…them. It’s what they are. It’s who they are. If you are what you eat, it stands to reason you are also what you excrete.

Unfortunately for Bridget/Maggie and Lizzie, their attempt to poison her parents with bad oysters fails — or rather, it’s so successful that they puke and shit and bleed all the toxins from the bad oysters back out before they can succumb to its lethality. So Lizzie selects a more fitting form of execution for her folks: an axe, the same weapon her wicked stepmother used to slaughter her doves. Turnabout is fair play. (Or fowl play, as it were.)

Until her mom faded to red and killed those birds, though, Lizzie was not on board with Bridget’s suggestion that they off her parents. Sure, she’d stand to inherit a small fortune — a mere fraction of what she deserves, since it’s all going to her hated sister Emma (Billie Lourd), but still quite a bit. And sure, they kind of deserve it, the creeps. But she doesn’t snap until she’s given unequivocal proof her parents don’t care about her at all.

Bridget cares plenty. She orders a steam-powered fuck machine for Lizzie to perforate her hymen with, though they seem to bail when they see the contraption (there’s no other word for it) at work. She keeps reading the story of Elizabeth Báthory, and how she fobbed her crimes off on her handmaidens to save her own skin. Meanwhile, in a sequence laden with caged-bird imagery, she and Lizzie kiss; “Maybe I should be your beau,” she says provocatively. (Oooh-whee.)

Despite suffering from the effects of the abortion paid for by Edward on her demand, Bridget also takes Lizzie along to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the acclaimed American actress Nance O’Neal (Jessica Barden). We first meet the woman while she’s taking a piss; true to form, she pisses all over Bridget’s purple hair (figuratively speaking) before accepting an invitation to dinner at the Bordens’ from Lizzie. We’ll see if they’re even still alive to host her by the time she shows up.

I continue to love the lurid spectacle of creator/showrunner/writer Ian Brennan and director Max Winkler’s fantasia on Lizzie and the sociopolitical phenomena for which she stands. She’s suffering from culturally pervasive ageism, ableism, misogyny, and homophobia at once, as well as horrific emotional abuse from her parents above and beyond all that. 

In sweeps a woman who offers escape. She’s she’s well-traveled, she’s free-spirited, she’s cultured, she’s queer, she’s open to murder, she’s a hell of a cook, Most importantly, she’s the only person alive who sees Lizzie Borden as something other than a hopeless case. Indeed, she sees her as smart, vibrant…and worth killing for. That’s a poison anyone might be tempted to swallow.

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.