Stewart Hotston presents his commentary on the sixth episode – warning this includes a discussion about child abuse, rape, murder.

 

Following the shocking ending to Episode 5 I was thrown when the opening moments of 6 suggested we would be spending time in an extended flashback. I also wondered what was so important the show would concentrate on Atticus’ time in Korea.

My view is this was a decision they were justified in making.

However, I think it’s not without its issues which will make this a difficult episode for some to watch. Not least it contains some difficult subject matter and although it feels like it’s handled adroitly by me, I’ve never lived the experiences they discuss and I am aware I’m missing the nuances of that.

Additionally, I’m not qualified to talk about the politics of Korea during the Korean War.

I’m leading with this because it will inform the elements of the episode I do want to talk about and will, perhaps, explain why I don’t talk about others.

We begin with Judy Garland and a dream of family life impossible to obtain for nearly everyone. A life with fathers who love, mothers who support and siblings who all grow together.

Then we meet Ji Ah (played by Jamie Chung) properly and learn she’s a lonely only child with a cold mother living on the poverty line and desperate to have a life with meaning.

The show centres her and her experience of living in a country under siege both from without by the communists and within by the US occupation ostensibly there to stop South Korea becoming a communist regime.

It is a remarkable decision to make from a show which, to this point, has centred Black experience in the US. The change of perspective together with the change of context could have failed (and indeed in the first few minutes I was expecting it to) but then, somehow, Ji Ah’s humanity shines through and I realised we were going to see something amazing.

I’m pretty sure we don’t hear a White person speak for the entire episode. Additionally, there’s no English spoken until about the half way mark.

We live in Ji Ah’s experience throughout.

And it’s upsetting and disturbing and uncomfortable.

We learn that Ji Ah was raped by her father as a child. Not once but systematically and that her mother knew.

Her mother is played well and provides a nuanced response of powerlessness and intense frustration at the shape life has forced her to adopt in order to keep living. It is clear she hates and loves Ji Ah in equal measure and it takes some time for us to understand this central dynamic between mother and daughter. When we realise why Umma hates Ji Ah as much, if not more, than she loves her it’s already apparent there can be no good ending for any of them.

The reasons are many but primarily because this is an episode about becoming. Not origins, not even transformation but becoming. We see butterflies, we’re presented with Judy Garland again and there are many coded discussions about being the person you want to be and not what others want to make you.

Except we’re also reminded that there’s no way to simply ‘be who you want to be’; that all our choices are conditioned by what came before. If last week we saw the poverty of ambition and imagination in those whose entire lives have been flattened by oppression, this week we see the struggle of becoming when those around us, our care givers and support, have their own agendas.

And of course we all have our own agendas, so there’s no way to avoid this conflict we see playing out for Ji Ah.

Atticus gets a lot of screen time here and we see more of his running away from home and a true follow up of the discussion about role models from episode 5. We also see that from Ji Ah’s perspective – a man who has done evil and who knows it and struggles to explain it, hoping it’s not his fault but knowing, deep down, that there’s no one else to blame.

In line with K-Horror tropes, the heart of the episode is not Ji Ah’s relationship with Atticus (which is really all aftermath) nor her relationship with her mother (the precursor). No, her relationship with her best friend is where this show finds its heart.

Young Ja, someone who is, on my reading, queer coded and as much an outsider because of this as because of her political leanings (and hey, with a queer communist you could be forgiven for thinking the show’s just plain out trolling more reactionary White viewers).

This is also the weakest element of the episode for me. I wanted more of this friendship. What the two actors say with their looks and small moments of intimacy was so emotional I wanted to see more of it, to feel the weight of what it is which brings Ji Ah to an understanding that she can love, that she can be human without having to follow through with the arcane rituals her mother is demanding from her.

This is why Atticus is postscript, despite his substantial screentime and Jonathan Majors doing yet more amazing work. Ji Ah can only fall in love with him because of her friendship with Young Ja. Before this friendship was the time of her mother and the denial of all emotional connection.

I think it also explains why she doesn’t go with him when he returns home. She has unsettled business and although love was blossoming out of their friendship Ji Ah had her own journey to take. Atticus was never going to stay with her and, situation reversed, why should she travel with him?

And here’s where we have to discuss The Count of Monte Cristo, which takes a central place in this episode. I have to stop calling out which character is most strongly related to the Count of Monte Cristo after this week’s episode. I made the singular mistake of assuming it was about just one character. What this week’s episode makes clear is that all the major characters are channelling Dumas in some way.

Ji Ah has the entire arc in this episode. A person hiding their true identity, which was actually stolen from them. Then taking revenge on people who don’t know what’s happening to them or why. She has her own Abbe Faria, her own reasons for revenge and is able to take it without her true identity being revealed. In an excellent discussion with Atticus they talk about the ending and foreshadow the ending of their own relationship and that of her with her mother. The layers are so beautiful to consider. Yet there remains the sense that the Count is Montrose’s story and so I believe there’s more to come on this.

To finish though I want to talk about the place of women in this episode.

Ji Ah exists as a kind of wish fulfilment for her mother but also as a point of hatred for her. Umma can focus all her emotional need on her daughter and in that becomes defined by it. Yet that definition includes her own failing to be a protector and it’s that she can’t forgive her daughter for.

Ji Ah is centred but as a stereotypical beautiful woman. In need of something to do in a society that doesn’t want to provide it. What’s startling is the show challenges the traditional role of women and the prevailing view that single beautiful women of marriageable age are to be treated with suspicion.

Indeed the entire point of her true character is to subvert the traditional view of what a Fox Spirit is. As someone whose own experience is outside of the mainstream white western viewpoint I am familiar with how women are mythologised as problematic in other parts of the world. Whether they’re out to seduce ‘proper’ young men, murder them, take them away from their family or whether they’re just unworthy to start with seems a central preoccupation of so many folk stories from around the world. It is no different with the idea of the Fox Spirit (at least in Japan and Korea where they are typically female) where the female fox spirit/human is characteristically seen as an antagonist or anathema to ‘proper’ living.

The show gives Ji Ah a chance ‘to be human’ but this is carefully coded and should really be written as a chance ‘to make her own decisions’ which, granted, isn’t something the characters could plausibly say.

The show carefully deconstructs what a ‘monster’ is, suggesting they’re made (not the first time we’ve had this suggestion) and that the inhuman is far from being monstrous compared to what humans get up to.

If episode 1 suggested the monster and the human presented exactly the same existential threat, episode 6 suggests it’s really the humans who are the problem. Perhaps the monstrous is what we make of it. As a discussion of otherness it’s fantastic and challenging.

Which, in the end, brings us back to the last line of the previous episode. Ji Ah is who she is. Yet when Atticus rings her he fails to see it. All he can manage is to demand she explain herself because his impoverished experience of love means he cannot grasp what he’s been offered, doomed to skate on the surface of impulse.

Ji Ah’s story is one of tragedy, a story where in becoming human she becomes radically alone in a way she never was before.

Click here to read the previous reviews and commentaries on Lovecraft Country