Stewart Hotston takes a look at the themes of the third episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country…

Wow. Just wow. I know, not quite the cold hard analysis you might be hoping for. Yet episode 3 stalked out the gate with a funeral which made me cry for some deeply complex reasons (not least of which having been in almost that exact scenario and feeling every ounce of Leti’s pain for myself). That one scene did a huge amount of work with extraordinary staging and some phenomenal acting. It reminded us people died and those left behind are the ones who have to figure it out, diminished somehow in the aftermath, lessened by their loss.

Beyond the consequences of episode 2 we’re back into familiar tropes both for the show but also for horror. This episode is centred around a house, possibly haunted and certainly one with History. It is a bad place and the story is about what makes bad places, or more precisely the people who make them. In more unironic racist versions, the Bad Place for US shows has often been a house built on ‘disturbed Native burial grounds’. It’s always been a conflicted trope (beyond the obvious racism) because it posits that the genocide of a people isn’t the reason they come back to haunt you but the (in comparison) minor misdemeanour of disturbing their own graveyards (and not the ones we made for them). It’s as if the grand murder of millions doesn’t warrant our guilt but ‘we should have known better’ than to mess with their graves, as if that’s the only part of their legacy we might still consider to have any power. Or perhaps we’re too scared or uneasy to consider the real consequences of our civilisation spanning murder sprees called manifest destiny.

The sense that the unquiet dead come back to haunt us is everywhere in horror fiction yet we see something here which elevates the premise beyond schlock and even while delivering more of the same.

The series coda is, by now, that passage I quoted from episode 1 about History not being forgotten but needing to be owned.

This episode is also about change. Change of circumstances, change of perspective, literal transitioning from one life stage to another. New homes, new people and most of all, new claims upon the world.

Yet through it all the coda of history not being forgotten comes back to taint and influence everything we do. This isn’t the only call back to episode 1 as a certain baseball player is referenced as a dream, and also possibly as a person who inspired a dream full of hope.

The combination of changing within the context of the life which got us to this point continues to work hand in glove.

What’s most exciting for me about episode 3 are two key themes the show continues to centre. The first of these is that danger of the monsters we’re faced with are carefully constructed to be INDISTINGUISHABLE from the people around us. In episode 1, the threat was twofold – White people and monsters except the show did something very clever – it made nature of the ‘monster’ irrelevant to the terror and danger the main characters were in.

Episode 3 delivers more of the same. It doesn’t matter if the house is haunted when your neighbours are breaking in with guns and bats to kill you. Who cares where the threat is from if, whatever happens, you’re going to die because of it.

In this case, again, the show takes it further and shows us that people make bad places, that we’re responsible for the histories of violence that mark somewhere and it’s us who create the kind of evil which hunts people down and turns them into nothing more than dead meat.

However, the show also states its second key theme – that we can own the past and in so doing transform it, turn it into something new. Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors are smashing it out of the park in terms of manifesting characters who can tell everything with a look and in this episode, which centres Smollett’s Leti it makes some pretty profound claims. It asks us to remember that staking a claim in the world costs and doubly so when the world is hostile to us trying to take up space for ourselves.

Leti has to choose – run and give up her claim to life, or stay and fight and maybe die anyway. The challenge is not simply to remain, although that’s crucially part of what she has to do, but to stand up and live the life she is grasping for. And we see the cost and it should remind us all that changing the world, change of any kind, costs us. I don’t believe it’s too dramatic to say the cost we pay may be our lives because we only have to look around us right now and see the struggle playing out for two visions of the world and how it is literally costing lives.

Leti stays, angry, determined and somehow focused on what she wants. It’s here we see the show tying up its themes – she stays to confront the history of the place she now owns, she stays in order to own history and not be owned by it.  Tic tries to help but it’s her history, her stand. And the show tells us in so doing we can heal the wounds of history and that is its most hopeful message of all.

I have one reservation – which is making one of the bad people implicitly Jewish, especially because they appeared to have been tapping into myths about Golems. It didn’t have to go down that road and it’s unexamined and hence problematic. It’s a minor point but a misstep in my view nonetheless.

Finally, as a little throw away, the Count of Monte Cristo made its weekly appearance and I continue to be excited about how that’s going to play into the story more explicitly – we have the pieces already laid out (go check out the plot structure and see for yourself) but the show’s yet to engage more concretely with its themes.