Stewart Hotston presents the last in his weekly commentaries on the themes of Lovecraft Country.

MASSIVE SPOILERS contained within

 

This episode asks us a lot of questions and the answers are, for the most part, satisfying.

One of the most amazing things this series has done for me, personally, is show men crying. Those men, primarily Tic and Montrose, have been through the wringer, but they get to feel, they get the space to share how they have been challenged, broken and lifted up by their experiences.

For Tic the journey has been one from anger to love, not just with those around him but about how he feels towards himself. At the end of this show Tic has grown into being a man who can love. He remains flawed but he’s the kind of man you want on your team because he’s fundamentally decent, fundamentally good – and that goodness has grown up out of wrongdoing and tragedy but, for me, it only makes its arrival sweeter. Tic finds his family, gives up the trope of being the only one who matters and works out what he’s living for.

Montrose? It’s tougher because this man has been through very much indeed and continues to live a life which doesn’t truly understand what’s being asked of him. Yet at the end we see he’s ready to let go and allow others to live their lives as he wished he’d done for himself. I say wish – I’m not trying to suggest he could have simply done things differently – I’m not sure we’re given the idea he had that luxury. Yet Montrose held on tight and it’s only here, at the end, he finds a sense of what might have been in letting go.

Yet the show belongs to Leti.

Around her gather women from generations long gone and still to come, and together they bring a power to the show which sees them. They’re not filtered through someone else’s view, not presented as a trope but seen as real flesh and blood people with flaws, stupid decisions and limitations.

For example, even once healed, Diana is angry, grieving and her mother knows this. Their relationship isn’t easily mended but was anything worthwhile ever easy?

Between them these women create a safe space, not to be shy and retiring (although there’s nothing wrong with that) but in which to heal, to examine their rage and turn it into something else.

And for a long while they threaten to be different types of hero – not ubermensch but ordinary folk making extraordinary decisions in collaboration with one another. If it feels like a dream it’s only because we so often don’t see people solving problems together. Superhero teams are limited to basically being tag team wrestlers, and detectives have to be mavericks or geniuses. Here we see something different – people being family and working together for the common good and it’s wonderful to see because the statement it makes is ‘you could be these people’.

In the final analysis we’re shown that all of us have the capacity to be monsters or heroes. The decision is ours and we become what we choose to be. Yet none of it’s shown to be one-sided or smooth. We make bad decisions, we make good ones and often there’s little to tell us in advance whether our trajectory is going one way or another.

Tic dies and his death buys time for the others to defeat their enemy – except they were trying to save Tic. He sees a different world, one where Cristina has to be stopped even if it means he dies. The others don’t see it, don’t understand what he means to do until it’s too late. The great evil is stopped (and Babel once again averted) yet in that movement, Tic is lost to us and it’s not clear the evil was all that evil compared to others they’ve faced. It’s a well worn trope and it kind of undermines the point of the entire show for many of the characters – which was save Tic, save the world.

But I guess this is where we come to my problems with the finale.

Before I talk about my struggle with the conclusion I want to reiterate how much this show has done well, how it’s taken a story whose origins are deeply racist and reclaimed it, made space for a different view and has done so with honest heart from the first moment. I would watch all of these actors read the dictionary and I look forward to what they and the showrunners do next because Lovecraft Country has been a revelation.

However.

The show ends with two decisions about which I don’t know how to feel.

The first is that magic is closed off from ‘White’ people. Honestly, I find it jarring for a number of reasons. The first is the simple problem of who qualifies as ‘White’? I am one half European. Does that make me White? Would I be counted? What about Indians or people from the Pacific Rim? What about those White people who, in their non-US context are oppressed? Are they now to find their only tools for resisting their (also white) oppressors gone? To make this victory about categories such as skin colour at the end of a show so dedicated to showing the evil of racism seems backwards and, to me, deeply troubling.

The other issue with this decision is that it puts the Freemans into the role of their persecutors – defined by them and, in reality, effectively becoming them, just the mirror image.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I can understand the desire for revenge rather than restitution and equality. I can understand the rage and the righteous smiting of one’s foes. Yet this decision by the show really sits against how I, personally, want to see the world hence my comment that it’s my struggle, not the show’s.

What would I rather see? I would rather have seen them render Cristina and her ilk powerless but not by becoming them but by rendering them invisible, irrelevant, by taking that supposed birth right they refused to give up earlier in the episode and using it to construct a world where they can live freely.

The show suggests that unless White people are excluded there is no possibility of being free. And you know? It might be right. Yet I cannot bring myself to accept that as an outcome I want to cheer. I want the outcome to be one where it’s not by the colour of our skin we’re defined. Not that we’re colour-blind but that it’s not a feature of our lives that our skin colour defines whether we get the chance to live a happy life.

To my mind the last 5 minutes of the 10 hours of Lovecraft Country states clearly that the colour of your skin matters and not in a good way.

The second issue is Diana Freeman. At the end she kills Cristina like Cristina and her white supremacist ‘family’ wanted to kill Diana. Yet again we see a becoming of what was hated and feared with no more of a statement than ‘all your mythos are belong to us.’ It’s shocking for sure, but not for reasons I appreciated.

Again, I may simply be missing the call to arms here – but if I am I’m happy with that.

In discussing this with friends someone pointed out they could be setting it up to be explored in season 2. Which is fine as far as it goes, but really, as a standalone piece which is how I’m experiencing the show this feels like a tone-deaf ending. I’m certain more militant people than me will cheer but I’m not a cheerleader for gatekeepers and I’m certainly not cheering a gatekeeper for suggesting the only real way to be a BIPOC is to be Whiter than the White folk around us. To be so White the White folk disappear is not a motto for me and so I finish Lovecraft Country conflicted and knowing my view isn’t the only one. Yet I can’t contort myself to agree with its final view on what Black independence means – which is to adopt and repurpose the prejudices which kept it enslaved against its oppressors.