Stewart Hotson presents his commentary on the themes and events of the penultimate episode of Lovecraft Country.

TW: Racial Slurs and mention of violent trauma

Also: SPOILERS.

 

For me this episode was shaped like a Nike swoosh. A low, slow start followed by a second half which had me in tears and ended at a tremendous high point for the show.

However, that first half needs some attention. A number of key points occur, all of which should have had profound consequences but, in the end, none of which do.

Having said that, I want to focus a little on the driving force for the episode, which remains Diana Freeman’s predicament. I didn’t discuss this much last week (nor, as an aside, the lack of any explicit reference to the Count of Monte Cristo). Dee is slowly being transformed into a pickaninny – explicitly the caricature of what a young female presenting Black adolescent is presented as in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was followed by both the children from the novel (the ‘angelic’ White Eva and the ‘mischievous’ Black girl Topsy). The trauma here is really deep – Dee is a Black girl. She’s seen her best friend murdered in a lynching and, as a young Black woman, faces exactly the kind of reductive approach to her personhood as portrayed by generations of images of ‘gollywogs’ and watermelon eating, wide mouthed and fuzzy haired pictures of People of Colour. Ironically, the spirits unleashed on her by the White cop will first reduce her to a caricature it’s safe to ignore before they kill her. In a very real sense it’s the challenge Dee has faced her whole life – to be heard rather than being rendered invisible (at best). The spell could be summarised as ‘being made into exactly what the system is designed to produce: a silent, comedic, thieving and ultimately dead Black girl.’ Except the truth here is that she’s dead the moment she’s reduced to the caricature, not when her body gives out.

Additionally, we see how the police chief finally dies and we’re reminded of how coloured bodies have always been used to help White people keep living. I was strongly reminded of Henrietta Lacks and her legacy without which so much of modern medicine would be impossible. It’s a subtle comment shown beautifully.

All of this is shown to us. My problem is that it’s drowned out by what we’re then also told. We’re told Montrose messed up when trying to save her. We’re told Leti messed up by trading away their only leverage. We’re told Ruby can get Cristina to help and we’re told Hippolyta is crucial to helping.

Some interesting leads are threaded in – not least Montrose’s revelation that he’s probably not Tic’s father (at last).

Yet there’s no challenge to Ruby about her relationship with Cristina, no challenge for Hippolyta who rocks up with glowing wrists just in time to make the difference with wild stories of being more than two hundred years old. The script demands the characters roll with each of these new revelations. They don’t just swarm the screen, they make these carefully drawn, nuanced, people seem like they’ve checked their brains in at the door, they also harm what’s come before.

So far so disappointing. In reality the show needed an extra hour to bring out the personal consequences of these circumstances. I hope it doesn’t lead to a final episode which continues in the same way.

Yet, we must not forget that the show allows its Black characters to be bad decision makers, good people and bad all in their own right. They aren’t forced into tropes we see White people writing for BIPOC at any point and that representation remains important.

However, if the conclusion follows the purity of vision shown in the second half of the episode we’re in for shellshock.

They hit Tulsa and it all falls apart. They come with a goal and a rule. The goal is to get the Book of Names and the rule is to not change anything in the past.

And it’s here I confess I don’t quite know how to write about what I’ve just seen. It’s too near, too emotional. I’m still recovering from the raw history Montrose finally shares with his ‘son’, Tic, and how they witness what it was to live in a community of Black people given the chance to live as they wished without constraint.

They find the Book of Names, or at least their own family’s house just as dusk is falling and just at that moment Montrose decides to break the rule and save someone he loves. Tic goes to stop him, leaving Leti to retrieve the book.

Except as dusk falls the massacre begins and Leti has to negotiate not simply the family but also the massacre. In a tremendously touching scene she and Tic’s grandmother console one another as the house burns down around them. Leti is invulnerable but she stays while Tic’s grandmother literally burns to death in front of her and all through it Sonia Sanchez’s devastating poem ‘Catch the Fire’ is being spoken in the background, churning our hearts and presenting a world of love and passion in gut wrenching opposition to the violence and hatred we witness on screen.

At the same time Tic and Montrose witness Montrose’s first love being murdered by Whites. Montrose decides not to intervene because he loves Tic yet at the end they realise it is Tic who was the baseball bat swinging hero who intervened in the story Montrose always told about surviving the massacre. They discover time can’t be changed and they were always going to have been there and Tic was always going to have saved his own father from being murdered. It’s a lovely bit of tying up their stories and a brilliant call back to Episode 1. The pain and depth Michael Williams brings to his portrayal of Montrose is worth the price of entry alone.

It’s not quite the final shot but we are presented with Leti walking slowly through town as fires burn with Montrose standing above here looking down and in the window a reflection of burning light in the shape of a cross. And all the while Catch the Fire and the music it’s inspired continues to be intoned.

I’m reminded of the saying that the moral arc of the world is long but it bends towards justice and this show, this episode, makes that claim on us all in angry, devastated, tired and righteous fury.

There’s just one episode left and we’re left with sides clearly drawn – Cristina and Ruby on one side and the Freemans and Leti on the other. There are many threads to be closed off but the stakes are clear and they’re about this: will Black bodies continue to be used to offer White people the chance to live without consequence?

Click here for our previous reviews and commentaries on Lovecraft Country