“Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” put all eight episodes on Netflix on 17 September, and it answers the question we asked in August. Lizzie Borden did not swing the axe alone. The season puts the maid’s hands on the handle with hers, and it keeps them there for eight episodes and the rest of their lives. Ella Beatty leads it as Lizzie, and Vicky Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid the Borden household called Maggie. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have built the fourth Monster season around a partnership rather than a killer.
We called this on 12 August, off one second of the teaser. Our piece that day was built on a single shot of an axe handle with two hands wrapped around it, one out of a crisp white cuff and one out of a bloodied floral sleeve, fingers laced over the other set. We wrote that nobody was fighting for the axe and that they were holding it together. That is exactly what the season does. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for all eight episodes of “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story”, including who the show says killed Andrew and Abby Borden and how the finale ends.
The season puts the maid’s hands on the handle with hers, and it keeps them there for eight episodes and the rest of their lives.”
This is written from the broadcast rather than an advance screener. Every beat below was checked against several independent accounts before it went up, and where those accounts disagree this piece says so instead of choosing. Netflix dropped the whole season at once, so there are no weekly recaps by design, and nobody gets to hide behind a slow reveal.
Episode one is called “Bloodbath” and it refuses to be coy. The cold open puts Lizzie in the house with the axe, Abby first and then Andrew, before a word of context arrives. Then the season jumps back four months and lets Bridget walk in the front door as the new maid. The hour closes on the two of them sharing a bath tinted red with cherry juice while pigeons move around the room. It is not a whodunnit. It is a how and a why, declared inside the first hour.
The murders land in the middle of the season, not at the start. Episode four is called “R.I.P (Rest in Pestilence) Abby Borden” and episode five is called “41”, which is the number the nursery rhyme gave her father. Abby (Rebecca Hall) goes first, upstairs, and Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) follows on the sitting room couch. The show does not stage either killing as a mystery. It stages them as work, done by two people who had already agreed to do it.
One detail is genuinely unsettled, and it is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. Several write-ups have Lizzie taking the first blow at Abby and Maggie taking the first at Andrew. Others describe Lizzie killing Abby and then turning on her father herself, with Maggie as the one who proposed it and helped afterwards. Every account agrees on the thing that matters, which is that both women are in the room and both are guilty. This piece is not picking a winner on the choreography.
What the season is really about is the second woman. Bridget Sullivan was a real person, she was in her twenties, and she was in the house that morning. History has her as a witness. Here she is the engine. Krieps plays her as the one with the clearer head, and the relationship between the two of them is romantic long before it is criminal. The Bordens called her Maggie because it was the name of a previous servant and nobody bothered to learn hers. The show uses that, hard. Monster has already done Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein, and Beatty is the first woman the anthology has put at the centre of a season, which after three runs of men reads as a thesis rather than a casting choice.
Our second August piece called the other structural trick eight days later. On 20 August we wrote that Sarah Paulson had turned up in the trailer as Aileen Wuornos, standing in an upstairs bedroom of the Borden house in a Members Only jacket, a hundred years out of place and framed like she owned the room. Episode six is called “Bed and Breakfast”. The Borden house is a working bed and breakfast by then, Wuornos is staying in it, and the season has been running her story alongside Lizzie’s the whole time.
Episode seven is “The Trial of the Century” and it goes where history goes. Lizzie is acquitted. Emma (Billie Lourd) testifies, and the show leans on what the real jury leaned on, which is that a respectable woman was assumed to be incapable of it. Nobody else is ever charged. Maggie is never charged either, and that is the season’s sharpest point about class. The maid helped hold the axe and the maid was never a suspect.
The season does give Lizzie one last chance to muddy it, and she takes it at a dinner party. She walks her guests through three candidates: a Portuguese labourer tied to another killing, her uncle John Morse (Joey Pollari), and an illegitimate son. Then she says she believes it was simply a random act of violence by a stranger. The show is not retracting anything there. It is showing you the performance she gave for the rest of her life, and the audience has already watched her do the thing she is denying.
Then the season does the thing that will split people. Lizzie and Emma buy a house and name it Maplecroft, which is true. Maggie goes to Ireland and a husband she cannot stand, which is roughly true, and then comes back, which is not. The two of them end up living openly together and campaigning for the vote. It is a hundred and thirty years of speculation resolved into a love story with a happy ending.
The finale is called “Carnival” and it belongs to Paulson. Wuornos stands trial for killing Richard Mallory, tells the court he raped her, and is sentenced to death. The execution is shown. Then her eyes open, and Lizzie and Maggie are waiting for her. “All is forgiven,” Lizzie tells her. Whether that lands as grace or as an anthology letting itself off the hook is the argument the season wants you to have.
Reviews have split about as hard as you would expect. Variety called it wildly entertaining. The AV Club’s line on the premiere was that it has the axe but no point. Both of those readings survive contact with the finished season, which is unusual, and it is mostly because the show is doing two jobs at once. It is a true crime season and it is an argument about who gets believed, and it is better at the second one.
One last thing, and it is ours. The teaser opened on the hatchet in a museum case, lit cold, with engraved placards above and below it like a specimen label. We said at the time that starting with the artefact rather than the crime was a choice with a point of view baked into it. Eight episodes later the show has taken the most famous unanswered question in American crime and answered it with two women and one handle. You do not have to agree with the answer. It is an answer, and it is the one the teaser promised.
What Do You Think? Does putting Bridget Sullivan’s hands on the axe make the Borden case sharper, or does it let a real woman take half the blame for something nobody proved? Was the Aileen Wuornos thread earned, or is it the anthology reaching for a bigger idea than it has? And is a happy ending the right place for this story to land?
See you on the next binge!
