Though it doesn’t come up in the episode directly, this week’s “Strange Case” is a reference to not just the chapter in Matt Ruff’s book, but to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Transformation is the watchword for every single character, starting with Ruby, who wakes up in William’s bed with a very strange case indeed: she’s somehow become a White woman.
Having a panic attack on the streets of Chicago in a silk robe is not a great idea, but it turns out that it’s a bad idea for the people around Ruby more than it is for Ruby herself. She draws stares and concern, and then cops—cops who immediately threaten a young black boy who tried to help her. They hurt him before Ruby finds her voice. It’s a potent example of White (female) silence equaling violence that primes us to start asking the questions about violence and who gets to wield it when.
Ruby’s surreal jaunt comes to an end when she’s returned to William by the cops (noteworthy: the police might “protect” a White woman, but they don’t believe her), and he takes a knife to her once the doors are closed. Maybe it’s because I’ve read the book and I know where all of this is going, or maybe it’s because our culture’s delight in violence inures us all. Or maybe I’m just dead inside? Whatever: the gore was not interesting.
More interesting was Atticus and Leti’s dramatic confrontation with Montrose, which I’m glad the show didn’t try to delay. When Montrose implies what he’s done to Yahima, Atticus leaps on him and begins beating him, a far more emotionally charged act of violence that had me wincing. He later blames it on the war bringing out his violent side, but we can see clearly that it was Montrose who planted those seeds. Violence is a heritage and birthright for Atticus as surely as any cult membership, and this episode for him is about fighting his metamorphosis into his father.
Ruby’s transformation asks equally urgent questions that are very self-consciously without the threat of violence as she wends her way through the city as a White woman. The juxtaposition of “dark phrases” from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf and Ruby experiencing life as a white woman is, again, very well done. Ruby is finally being “handled warmly” by the world, delighting in the kind and generous treatment she deserves as a person—but gets to experience only in white skin. It’s a one-two punch of irony and tragedy. And this time, she gets to recover from her ordeal in the bath, not in the back of a police car. Ruby is recovering from her ordeal in the bath, still in William’s house and still curious in spite of herself. Ruby wonders why she’s been chosen, and William asks the very good and simple question, “Why not you?”
Yes, why not Ruby? Well, Ruby knows exactly why, but she tries her hand at “why not?” and applies for a job. And gets even more than she expected, once she’s wearing White skin: she’s immediately made assistant manager. The show knocks it out of the park again with the (ruby) red dress for “Hillary”—and all the red gore that follows.
I’m not remotely surprised that the set and costume departments are continuing to kill it, but I do remain entirely impressed. Take, for instance, a detail from William’s bathtub where Ruby soaks after her first transformation: the faucet is a gilded swan. Swans, obviously famous for their whiteness, also feature heavily in stories of transformation. There’s “The Swan Princess,” and “The Ugly Duckling,” and also the story of Leda, who in the form of a swan gave birth to two sets of twins, two male, two female, two divine, two human. Transformation is sometimes about swapping categories like those, but more often it’s about blurring them, twisting them until two distinct categories becomes ambiguous, perhaps even irrelevant.
But I digress. We’re braiding together three storylines this week: Ruby and William, Atticus and Letitia, and Montrose—and Sammy.
Yes, Montrose is in a secretive, hesitant relationship with Sammy, whom he is eager enough to have sex with but refuses to kiss. Sammy also does drag, and provides a quietly buoyant counterpart to Montrose’s brooding silence. His drag show (which we sadly never see) and presence in drag is a pointed reminder that it might not be necessary to buy into Christina’s world to experience transformation. Like Marine (the medium), there are already people with power in the community—but here, Montrose has too much internalised homophobia to embrace it. Their relationship is tense and quiet, still uncertain for all that it seems relatively long-term, while Atticus and Letitia’s relationship begins to grow with meaningful conversations and greater openness.
Ruby/“Hillary” isn’t pursuing romance, but she is getting to know her colleagues. The White girls at work are shitty, since they’re all casually racist, which doesn’t surprise Ruby much. What is surprising is that Tamara is not what she expected. After quizzing her about her education and work history, Ruby is disappointed to learn that Tamara doesn’t have nearly as many qualifications as she does. It creates a one-sided sense of competition in Ruby. She still doesn’t think she can challenge her White female colleagues or her White male boss even when she’s wearing White skin, and so she repeatedly goes after Tamara. It’s a really thoughtful depiction of how structural racism affects everyone, as insidious as any tentacled horror or madness spore.
William picking Ruby up from her job leads to a few delicious little exchanges and one big, nasty favor come due: Ruby’s now needed as a Black woman to play-act being a waitress. It’s a slap in the face, but Ruby’s thunderous looks go ignored by all the partygoers as she passes out hors d’oeuvres. It does make her a an excellent spy, though, and she had little trouble getting into Captain Lancaster’s office to plant a magical thingamajig. She also discovers a man tied up in a closet—and is nearly discovered herself. In a moment of true horror (instead of extreme gore), Ruby clamps one hand over her own mouth and one over the victim’s, trying desperately to keep it together for two. Outside, the captain only chuckles: “He’ll talk. The dead always do.” So Ruby is trapped in a closet with a tortured, bleeding dead man who’s been reanimated? Ugh, now that is a genuinely unsettling possibility, all the more so because it’s a throwaway line. Give me more of that and less of the pyrotechnics of gore, please.
Understandably shaken even the next day at work, Ruby takes out her latent panic on Tamara. But when Mr. Hughes interrupts her freak-out, she doesn’t dare put Tamara’s job at risk. Instead, she fumbles for an excuse and accidentally entangles all of them in a trip to the South Side.
Ruby is forced to participate in the exotification of her home when she accompanies her White coworkers to a Black bar. She’s even made to feel complicit in Mr. Hughes’s attempted sexual assault of Tamara, since the potion wears off and she’s unable to call for help while wearing the bloody tendrils of a White woman’s flesh. Lovecraft Country juxtaposes that racialised and sexualised violence with the very specifically nonviolent, genderqueered bar where Black bodies are celebrated. I’m very relieved to see the show handle this with tenderness and delight. Sammy takes second place at a drag show and embraces Montrose, drawing him into the crowd and the dancing. The ballroom scene shimmers with glitter and acceptance, and Montrose finally kisses Sammy.
This doesn’t mitigate the previous episode’s choices, by the way. Montrose’s killing of Yahima is still inexcusable, as is the show’s treatment of her.
Atticus knows Yahima must be dead. Letitia thinks she ran off, but when he tells her she’s probably dead, Leti has an understandable freakout. She wants to stop investigating; Atticus insists that it’s a tool they can use for self-protection. Leti is increasingly becoming the writer’s voice on this show as she once again asks the most troubling questions: is protection really the goal here? And exactly how much violence is justified before protection stops being a cause and starts becoming an excuse?
How much of anything is justified? Ruby, after watching Mr. Hughes sexually assault Tamara, doesn’t want her magic Whiteness portal to a land just as shitty as the one she left. “I’ve been where you are,” Christina begins, trying once again to insinuate herself. Ruby responds with a very satisfying “Please shut the fuck up,” but Christina isn’t done. She invites Ruby to ask an even bigger why not? by telling her that the potion isn’t about being White.
“It was an invitation to do whatever the fuck you want.”
So Ruby really takes her up on it this time. The whole episode violence has been male-coded, a domain for men to inhabit and women to drag them out of if they can. Not so anymore: Ruby becomes an avatar of vengeance, and beats Mr. Hughes in a brutal scene that far outdid any of the blood and guts that came before. Also, “Bodak Yellow” was made for that sequence. Jesus.
Only when Ruby has fully embraced the potential of the magic she’s been given does Christina show more of her hand. She, too, shows us how she’s been using the power of transformation to get what she wants, and what a reveal it is. I had all the clues, and I’d like to say that I saw it coming. But I totally didn’t. This was an excellent twist.
That would have been a great note to end on, but the final scene is actually Atticus making another cryptic call to Korea, and to the woman we now know is Ji-Ah who knows…something. Other than the word DIE scrawled in his notebook, Atticus doesn’t give us any more clues, and neither does Ji-Ah, making for another cliffhanger that isn’t very shocking given what came before. But it does still leave me eager to know what’s in store next week.
