Carl Lumbly wears an unidentified watch

Halfway through The Fall of the House of Usher, Auguste Dupin sits across a desk with his hands clasped, and a watch shows at his cuff: a round gold-toned case, a pale dial, a brown leather strap. Carl Lumbly plays him, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who has spent the better part of forty years trying to put the Usher family in prison and has finally been invited into their crumbling house to hear Roderick Usher confess to all of it.

Mike Flanagan built the series, eight episodes, as a loose Edgar Allan Poe anthology over a plainer target: the Ushers are the Sacklers, their company Fortunato is Purdue Pharma, and its painkiller Ligodone is OxyContin. Dupin is the show's one honest man, and the plain watch suits him. Propstore auctioned it in January 2024 as screen-used, lot 123, alongside the tape recorder he uses to record the confession, a Polaroid camera, a black wallet, and ten of his business cards, three of them signed by Flanagan. The catalog calls it one watch with a braided brown faux-leather band and stops there: no brand, no model, so it stays unidentified, the anonymous watch of a man whose whole method was to keep showing up.

The cards in that lot read C. Auguste Dupin, Junior Fraud Investigator, the title he carried back when he first went after the company. By Propstore's account, all of Intrepid Pictures' net proceeds from the auction went to the SAFE Project, a group working to stop addiction deaths: the leftovers of a fictional opioid empire, sold to fight the real one.