Last week’s episode began in joy and ended in sorrow. This week, we begin with sorrow and the hope of finding, if not joy, then something like it. In the first episode that I have found genuinely scary, the community is in mourning for George, and none more so than his family. We see Dee and Atticus finding their feet again, but Hippolyta is a very poised, self-possessed wreck.
Watching Hippolyta on the bleeding edge of grief, seeing her anger, really meant a lot to me. Grieving isn’t always tears and despondency. Sometimes it’s the kind of helpless anger that rips pages from beloved books, and doesn’t know what to do but snap at the people trying to help. They’re not helping in the right way, at the right time—their very presence is a reminder of the wrongness of it all. Part of this is her particular shade of grief, but part of her also knows that some truth about her husband is being kept from her.
Montrose and Atticus are mainly doing the keeping, although Atticus is doing so reluctantly. He wants to let Hippolyta in on the secret (and the full extent of her husband’s courage), but Montrose makes a fair point when he says that telling Hippolyta about more horrors will deepen her despair. Montrose believes that neither he nor anyone else can do anything. Atticus disagrees, and the story of the man rescuing Montrose and George with a baseball bat hangs over their conversation. Heroism and victory are possible. (Also, baseball bats are going to be a recurring theme.) Atticus wants to believe in that heroism, Montrose won’t hear of it. Violently.
Atticus’s immediate reaction to Montrose’s violent gesture is a very accurate representation of abuse. At some level, Atticus is always waiting for Montrose’s outbursts, ready to flee or fight. He reacts as a child first, and an adult second. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment of pure truth, and it’s yet another reason I just cannot get over how good the acting in this show is.
Letitia is doing better at finding her joy, and she uses a mysterious windfall to set herself up with a house. She wants to set her sister up too—she invites Ruby to live with her and help with managing the property as a boarding house. Letitia’s optimism is infectious, but Ruby’s caution is more merited: Letitia hasn’t just bought a house, she’s bought a house in a White neighbourhood. And the neighbours are not pleased.
Letitia has more than the smug, menacing White boys leaning on their car horns to worry about. Her neighbours also include ghosts: disembodied hands pull at her bedsheets, and in a moment reminiscent of Bob’s first appearance on Twin Peaks, a ghost hunches by her pillow, waiting.
Though the floating hands are more humorous than frightening, the ghost itself is the first genuinely frightening thing I’ve seen since the show began. The entire episode totters on this unfortunate edge: certain things are truly upsetting, and other apparitions, like the giant lunging face we see slightly later, are…not. Horror without the right setup isn’t just lurid, it’s laughable. Fortunately the actors never fail us even when the visual effects are uneven.
Unsure whether her recent experiences have warped her perceptions, and unclear on whether it’s the local White supremacists messing with her house or supernatural entities, Letitia goes from bubbly to anxious real quick. It doesn’t help that Atticus is being a giant jerk about whether he wants to get together with her. There’s a scene in the bathroom that rollercoasters from hot to romantic to tragic so fast I almost felt nauseous, and it sours the party Letitia throws even before the White neighbours decide to get involved. Not content with car horns, they put a burning cross on Lettie’s lawn.
“Same tactics we used in Korea.” I’m glad for this line. There’s always an “other,” always some group that you’re not in that you get to abuse and hurt. Atticus has already begun to realise that he may have done bad things in the war; now, he sees another war on his own territory. His words are also a very frank acknowledgement that Black people are being treated as the enemy. They are the opposite side, a group that can be tortured and killed without repercussion.
All our heroes know this. Without any coordination or discussion, Atticus and a few other men get the shotguns and protect Lettie by the light of the burning cross while she’s smashing out the windows of the cars to stop the car horns. It’s very Beyonce circa Lemonade, except that nobody comes to arrest Beyonce. Lettie and co., on the other hand, immediately finish their business and get on their knees with their hands up. They only pause to toss the guns and bat in the trunk of a car that Ruby pulls up and then immediately drives away, getting rid of some evidence before the police inevitably arrive. It’s seamless, smooth. It belies the churning horror always waiting at the heart of this series, the monsters that Black people are so wearily familiar with fending off.
Lettie is isolated from the men and put into a car next to a White officer who takes sadistic delight in hurting her. His taunts inadvertently hand her the keys to successfully managing the haunting, but his malice in the meantime is truly wrenching. Here is the tension and horror I was expecting from the cops in the first episode.
Letitia endures the cop and the arrest to emerge shaken but stubborn the next day, undefeated by her tenants fleeing. It takes a slip of the tongue and Ruby’s fury to really get to her. Ruby lays it all out in a brutal monologue about selfishness, all but nailing Letitia to the floor and watching her squirm. It’s amazing how the writers manage to squeeze so much exposition into these emotional exchanges, revealing more about Ruby and Lettie’s strained relationship even as that relationship evolves in the present. I can’t wait until we get Ruby’s episode, because this is some good and fertile groundwork.
But we see the fallout from Letitia’s side well enough. Without her signature red lipstick to sharpen her smile, Letitia’s bare-faced vulnerability—and instability—finally break open Atticus’s façade. Like Hippolyta, Lettie is desperate to talk about what’s wrong. Atticus doesn’t know how to do that, especially not when it comes to their attraction or their brief encounter. He doesn’t even know how to talk about Letitia being haunted—but at least there he offers to listen. Letitia lays out the history of Winthrop House, pulling together the stories of eight missing Black people and one White scientist fired for ethics violations, and we can all put together the rest of the pieces. Especially in light of the basement of Winthrop House.
Worse than all the clutter, clack, and clatter is the empty secret room. A basement below a basement? There is absolutely nothing good down there. And the fact that it’s empty makes it worse. The director is finally doing horror rather than action: withholding from the audience, letting our minds fill in the details, is so much worse than showing us upfront what’s going on. This is the effective horror that Lovecraft Country is beginning to find and utilise, and I’m glad, since the scene in the basement is magnificent from start to finish.
Very effectively juxtaposed with the supernatural exorcism is another kind of exorcism, the attempt of three White residents to purge their neighbourhood. The smug White boys break in to commit violence at the very least, and maybe outright murder. The people they encounter, though, are already dead. Two come face-to-face with a ghost that’s right on the line between creepy and laughable, a haunting that looks like one of the Super Mario Bros. movie Goombas. Fortunately, the housebreaking isn’t the major focus. The episode is more concerned with who’s already there: Atticus, Letitia, and the barbaric Hiram Epstein, who possesses first the medium, and then Atticus.
Atticus’s possession is maybe the scariest one since The Exorcist. It’s horrible. I loved it. Majors does an incredible job in every scene he’s in, and I’m sure he’s going to get accolades for plenty of other scenes, for his sadness and his joy and his quiet thoughtfulness. This will probably not make it on to any award consideration reel, but it’s a small masterpiece, too. It’s not the visual effects. It’s him.
Letitia facing him alone is terrifying. But Letitia facing him with all the ghosts of Epstein’s victims is even more terrifying—and exhilarating. Letitia reaches out for the broken souls and doesn’t let their appearances intimidate her anymore. She knows who the real enemy is.
It’s a small thing, but you as you stare at these tragic ghosts, you also realize that the ghost who woke Letitia up wasn’t trying to frighten her. She was trying to help her get to the boiler before it exploded. The ghosts have been her allies, but they were too scared to stand up to their killer as they were, alone and literally in pieces, as the disembodied hands suggest. Letitia brought them together. She didn’t just stake her claim in this weird new world, she helped others re-claim their power.
The ghosts join her in an act of collective bravery and defiance. Seeing the horribly mutilated ghosts returning to wholeness, to heal even after death—that is power. And Letitia’s last banishing words are the same ones that the white ghost screamed at her. She really claims that goddamn house and her power.
In claiming her house, she also takes more responsibility for the souls under her care, both living and dead. We see her making a point of taking in low-income residents. Yes, Lettie has found a more sustained joy. But Atticus? Atticus doesn’t trust it. He does a little digging of his own, and finds the Realtist* who sold Lettie her house—and Christina, alive and well and behind it all.
9/10: Powerful acting, much better pacing, and the horror is improving. But some of the visual effects are a bit cringeworthy.
* If you want to learn more about Realtors and Realtists, Lovecraft Country the book goes into far more detail about how White real estate agents worked to keep Black people segregated, and how some Black people worked around the system to become homeowners anyway.
