Stewart Hotston presents his weekly commentary on the themes of Lovecraft Country…

You can feel we’re circling the end now. The show is moving us towards resolution and it began this week.

For the heart of Episode 7 we start with a conversation from episode 1 between Hippolyta (played by Aunjanue Ellis) and her husband George. She wanted to go on the next road trip but he wouldn’t let her. He was gentle, concerned, but in the end it was clear these justifications were to allow him to go and to deny her the chance to grow.

Although Tic, Leti and Ruby are present they provide a backdrop for Hippolyta and I have to say I’m glad we get to see her journey.

However, let’s get the rest of the cast out of the way (not because they’re incidental but because Hippolyta’s experiences in this episode deserve our time without interruption).

Tic goes to St Louis on the hunt for family and discovers they exist and they may have something absolutely crucial to his well-being but, at the same time, they may have lost it during the Tulsa massacre.

I’m a little uncomfortable about this. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, there’s the implication that Black folks did well in Tulsa because of the magic item Tic’s family had. Alternatively the read could be the massacre happened because Tulsa’s family had the magic item White people wanted. Either way, a real world event of huge evil against good folk is simplified by linking their success and/or downfall not to the banality of evil but to some magical McGuffin. It takes away from the real horror of those events in which hundreds of people were murdered by racist White mobs (read the general population because these weren’t lone wolves or ‘extremists’).

It appears a dead end until we remember Montrose recalling being at Tulsa. So is the magical item lost at all? It remains to be seen.

Then we have Ruby who learns ‘everything’ from Christina Braithwaite and next thing she’s forgiving Leti (and then spying on her). Is she a cuckoo in the nest or someone looking to exercise power without constraint? The question remains for me as to whether she has lost herself in the exercise of unrestricted power. Watch this space I guess.

So far so much plot.

The real joy of this episode is not in plot or mystery, it’s in self-discovery.

Hippolyta’s journey is one she determines to make alone. She starts the episode angry, determined and prepared to push out the way those who she sees as being to blame.

Once she’s free of her other obligations she follows the leads she’s been piecing together and this is the first triumph for me; we see a smart, independent woman in action. It’s competency porn and I love it. Honestly – give me more people who are good at what they do, who thrive on solving problems and aren’t weighed down with ridiculous unsustainable flaws (I get enough of that when I look in the mirror).

She’s quite brilliant and we’re taken immediately to the idea of those early human computers, before there were electronic computers, who got rockets into space by doing the hard maths longhand. We understand now why she wants to go to museums, why she reads, why she and George ran the guide and had a shop full of books. She is no slouch.

With a little sleight of hand she overcomes the immediate confrontation with some aggressive police officers but then winds up on a 1970s inspired freakdelic journey through space and time.

The colours, the hair, the clothes. Everything speaks of those pulp novels from the 1970s, speaks to the hopes and aspirations of people who had only just started to understand they could be more than servants; poorly educated and down trodden.

Her journey includes nakedness, dancing, sex, love and Afrofuturism.

I’ve seen a lot of debate about her nakedness in this episode. I want to say two things about it. Firstly bravo and I wish this kind of representation could be normalised for us. Secondly, it’s hardly the major movement of what the show is trying to say – it’s part of the harmony. To focus on it is to miss the point, because the show is giving us a woman discovering who she is.

Now that sounds simple but if you don’t see it, trust me, it’s massive. Hippolyta learns that if she’s a prisoner it’s in a prison of her own making. That she became small (just like Ruby discovered when she was also given a similar opportunity to live any life she wanted), that others had colluded in both taking advantage of that but also in shrinking her horizon and reducing the space she could take up.

Through a series of different experiences told in good old-fashioned montage style we see her learn the space she can actually take up if she wants it. Hippolyta becomes the woman not that she imagined but the one waiting to get out and live. There is this sense towards the end, when she’s proud of who she is, accepting of it, loving it completely independently of what the world might say, that she knew it was there all along but it’s only now she recognises herself properly.

If this show has given us deep insights into living as other than White in a majority White population, it spent much of this episode explicitly exploring what it means to be a Black Woman, not only in lived experience but showing us ambition and aspiration. Telling us, shouting at us – THIS THING YOU SEE SHOULD BE NORMAL.

I don’t know where this leaves Hippolyta – as eventual saviour or fellow adventurer with the rest of the family – but I want to see her return. I want to see what she brings when, inevitably, the Freeman family stand together again in one room and talk. I want to see what kind of mother she will be to her daughter. Hers is a life I want to see.

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