The format of Lovecraft Country has encouraged a number of intimate portraits of its characters. Atticus, Leti, Hippolyta, Ruby, Ji-Ah and Dee have shown us their worlds and their hearts in aching detail, down to the fine details. But Lovecraft Country is also about systemic, institutional racism, and therefore is necessarily also about generational trauma. Montrose, the only major character who hasn’t had a full episode yet, has been increasingly haunted by Tulsa, and tonight we finally get to see the demons he’s been keeping at bay.
To do that, we start with a possession: Dee remains comatose, possessed by Bopsy and fading fast. Blame and solutions fly fast, but ultimately, it’s Ruby with the solution. “Christina will help Dee. For me.” It’s a bold revelation, and it’s even partly true: Christina does help. In exchange, Atticus agrees that he’ll go back to Ardham on the Autumnal Equinox, even though he’s pretty sure he’s going to his death. Leti and Ruby have some strong words about this, with Leti convinced that Christina is using everyone (she’s probably not wrong), and Ruby convinced that love has blinded Leti into believing her own situation is any less dangerous. And it’s true: Montrose is ready to hit her after learning she traded the pages for her own invulnerability, and her boarding house is presumably still has smouldering cars on the lawn.
They may have parted in anger, but Ruby still cares for Leti. In fact, she may be the only thing Ruby is still willing to care about: she gets assurances from Christina that Leti will be spared—but when Ruby learns that Christina does plan to kill Atticus, she still chooses to stay with Christina. It’s a dark and daring moment made all the more chilling by Ruby turning off Dell’s life support. “I always saw myself as a redhead,” she says, casual and deadly serious. It’s a beautifully understated moment of horror, and of insidious evil. Ruby’s seduction seems almost complete.
As Ruby goes resolutely down a dark path, Hippolyta returns triumphant from a bright one. She arrives, pauses long enough to power Christina’s spell, and then gets down to business. She’s going to save her daughter, and to do that, she’s going to get the Book of Names from the last place they knew it existed—the past. When Hippolyta is gathering supplies to get to the portal, the rest of the gang pauses their intense family drama to gog at her, which gives us at least a brief respite of humor: “Hippolyta, I don’t know where you disappeared to, but you’re starting to sound crazy,” says Montrose, with absolutely no trace of irony.
We need that dose of lightness, because this episode is heavy. It’s heavy. With the threat of returning to Tulsa on the night of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Montrose’s memories of trauma and of child abuse surface further. To cope, he drinks. And in drinking, he starts letting a lot of things slip. Like the first bombshell of the episode: George, and not Montrose, might be Atticus’s father.
Please, someone give Jonathan Majors every single Emmy for his reactions on this show. Please.
Already reeling from the revelation, Atticus gets upset when Montrose seems out of it and continues finding ways to drink when they’re in Tulsa. He thinks he knows what’s going on, and declares an ultimatum: when they’ve gotten the Book, they won’t be father and son anymore.
But then they watch Montrose get whipped as a child, and the whole neighbourhood seems to walk by with blinders on, carefully ignoring the scene—except for Atticus’s mother, Dora, who puts her body between Montrose and the switch. In any other show, this would have been a pinnacle moment. Here, it’s background. That’s not a criticism; it’s an illustration of how intense this show is and how deep its understanding of human goodness and badness goes.
But even more poignant is the adult Montrose watching, who says perhaps the three most gutting words of the episode: “I deserved it.” His delivery is so terribly fragile and yet so utterly convinced that I had to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, Lovecraft Country understands generational trauma, all right. The intimate kind as well as the historical.
When Montrose absconds a few moments later, there might be a horror first: the characters split up for a good reason. Atticus wants to stop Montrose from warning George about his death in the future, thereby altering the timeline, and Leti absolutely has to get the book. This show is truly an antidote to moronic horror tropes.
Atticus does indeed find Montrose, but he’s not there to warn George, as it turns out. He went to warn Thomas—his first love. But instead, he watches the murder all over again, a traumatised witness who is being asked to see his worst memory as inevitable, as something with purpose. “If you don’t end up with Mama, I won’t exist,” Atticus begs, arguing for his right to exist against Montrose’s right to be a whole person. It’s a hideous position acted with all the broken grace both actors can muster, an unparalleled scene of sacrifice in which we feel the bloody weight of Montrose’s final declaration: “I did it all and I’d do it again because the only thing I ever wanted to be was your father.”
Leti does get into Dora’s house, but the whole family is there, trying to defend it against the White rioters. She’s thrown in with Beulah, Dora’s sister, and is forced to reassure her even though she knows that the whole family will die. “I deserved it” might be the worst sentence of the episode, but Leti saying “Everything’s going to be fine” gives it a run for their money. Oof.
That sequence is heartbreaking, but it’s the scene with Leti and Atticus’s Grandmother that takes the cake. Leti explains her true purpose, and begs for the Book on behalf of her unborn child. Montrose has to be a witness twice, the second time knowing where all of it will lead. And Leti has to give that terrible knowing to another person and ask her to bear it as well: she has to ask Atticus’s Grandmother to stay and die, burned alive, to preserve the future.
And she does. Because she believes in hope. Leti’s child is, to her, “my faith turned flesh.” Leti finally gets to understand the strength of faith not from an uneasy meeting with Christina in a church, but with a brave Black woman in a burning building, holding on with prayer to a future she won’t see.
With “Catch the Fire” by poet Sonia Sanchez playing over the scene, it does feel hopeful: there have been burning crosses and burning buildings, but Leti is being given a different fire, the burning love sufficient to counterbalance generational trauma. The kind of love that bears witness most intimately by experiencing pain and holding grief without flinching, in order to give the next generation a way forward.
The point of witnessing is twofold. It’s to be above—yet be intimate. And it’s to be down in it all—yet keep in some ways untouched. To preserve the self so that the future can proceed, bound to the past but not trapped within it.
Atticus may get to be a hero on a night of villainy, beating up a bunch of thugs with a baseball bat, but it’s only a brief sorbet in a bitter, bitter meal. He even makes it back through the portal, but Hippolyta can’t keep it open, and Montrose has to live his hell from above. He has to bear witness looking over it all, reciting how they killed women and children, how they killed a doctor who was only ever sworn to do no harm, how they burned everything. Hell indeed. But he also gets to witness Leti walking through the flames, invulnerable, like a goddess of sorrow. She’s carrying their untouchable hopes: the Book and the child. The past and the future.
This episode does not need my conclusions; they would be paltry. This episode speaks and concludes for itself. Watch it.
