Over nine episodes, Lovecraft Country has been bringing its characters all the way around. Those without power or knowledge have discovered both. Those who had authority have been brought low. The final episode is aptly named for its aspirations. Ruby wants power. Atticus and Leti want protection. Ji-Ah wants humanity. Christina wants anything but. The stage has been set well, but the circle doesn’t close. It doesn’t get broken wide open. It just fizzles away in a final act of special effects and gore that doesn’t fully realise its characters, its narrative, or its immense potential.
To properly set up the final confrontation, Leti and Atticus are drawn into what they are told is an Ancestral space, a safe place full of their family’s magic where they can speak to their foremothers. Atticus talks to Hanna, the woman who first fled with the Book of Adam, and then with his own mother. Rather than magical knowledge, she wants to share her wisdom. Terrible, no good, very bad wisdom. “If we’re ain’t walking toward an altar to sacrifice ourself for something important, what is our purpose?” she asks Atticus. That’s…that’s a terrible lesson. That’s a terrible lesson. What the hell? Life is meaningless if we’re not sacrificing ourselves?
She follows this bad advice up with worse: that people don’t have a choice. What? She softens this oddly bleak statement by explaining that she never had a choice but to love Montrose and George. I’m all for consenting adults making whatever arrangements make them happy, but let’s not blame it on a lack of choice.
Atticus does push back against this later in the episode, but that just muddles the narrative. Does Lovecraft Country want us to believe in choice, or in inevitability? This is the first sign that the episode isn’t clear on what it wants to say, and sadly, it’s not the last.
Atticus and Leti wake up with the knowledge of how to save Dee, and also how to thwart Christina’s plans. After removing the curse, they get down to business. “Ready or Not” by the Highland Park Collective is maybe the first musical misstep of the series. It’s too triumphal too soon, dissolving tension when it should be building it. It makes the scene especially jarring when the spell goes poorly, allowing Titus to escape briefly. (They’re getting flesh…from a ghost? Oh, well, whatever.) Titus lets Christina know that they have the Book, which is pretty much when the episode falls apart.
Yes—they have the book. They have spells upon spells. Why exactly is Atticus still willingly going to Ardham? Sure, Christina promised to leave them all alone if he does, but does he even need that promise anymore? This is the question I had only after the fact, because the show does its best to rush past all the logic. It throws all kinds of dire circumstances in the way—oh, they need Christina’s flesh and/or blood, too! Why? Because spell. And the Ancestors can’t help anymore! Why? Because reasons. The show never set up very good parameters for the magic, and now they’re breaking down to create whatever scenarios the writers want. This does create a great deal of uncertainty, but that’s not the same as suspense. Suspense is a narrative function, and it arises from only a limited number of predictable possibilities. Uncertainty is just chaos plus ignorance. It’s not satisfying to see chaos play out.
The ending is more chaotic than suspenseful, but before we get there, there’s still the problem of getting some bits and bobs of Christina’s body. Leti begs Ruby to do it, and Ruby’s rebuttal to Leti’s speech about family is cold and sad and perfect. All the character work has set up this conversation to be devastating to both of them, and they both walk away feeling wronged. That’s a tricky thing to pull off, because it relies on us having equal sympathies for each character, and each character having equally valid but subjective points. When Leti pleads for help, we’re on her side. And when Ruby can’t help but see it as Leti only wanting to be family when it’s convenient, we’re on her side too.
It’s particularly unfair, then, that Ruby dies offscreen, punished not so much for her disloyalty to her family or her disloyalty to Christina as for her inability to choose between them. But because her betrayal also happens offscreen, the last we see of her is falling deeper into Christina’s arms, both of them finally embracing in their true bodies. We have no reason to suspect anything, not in the narrative and more importantly, not in the emotional cadences of the story. So while it is shocking to learn of her death, it’s only shocking. It’s a twist for twists’ sake and it doesn’t give Wunmi Mosaku the chance to show us her phenomenal skills for a final time.
HBO, I am begging you: stop with the twists. All your shows seem to have them, and they feel so unsatisfying because they come out of nowhere.
But I’m jumping ahead again. Before all that we have to figure out where the rest of the characters stand before throwing them into the final battle. Hippolyta gives Dee a couple of speeches about how she named herself and how time is an illusion, none of which Dee has any context for. At lease Dee gets to respond like a normal kid, which is to say, confused and upset that her mother has turned into a giant weirdo. What is going on with this writing?
At least Atticus’s meeting with Ji-Ah is back to the kind of thoughtful and smart writing I’ve come to expect. (Although not the clothes: Ji-Ah kind of looks like a displaced Catholic cardinal.) Atticus does give Ji-Ah the apology she deserves, and even takes the time to reassure her of her humanity. He tells he that they can both be monsters or heroes, and while that’s nice, I don’t love the dichotomy. The show has previously shown itself more complex than that, more willing to look at monsters and see humanity, and humanity and see monsters. To reduce it in this final episode feels easy, trite.
More complex and pleasantly surprising is Atticus declaring that Ji-Ah is his family. It sounds like the start of a really interesting series of conversations about the meaning of found family—but this is the last episode, and so it goes nowhere. Atticus may consider Ji-Ah family, but he’s the only one who knows her. She’s now supposed to make a life with her ex-lover’s current lover, his abusive alcoholic father, and his biological father’s wife and daughter? That’s a tall order but not impossible—if we had seen any of it happening. But as far as we know, Ji-Ah never has a conversation with Leti. She never so much as says hello to Montrose, or Hippolyta, or Dee. We see them working together briefly at the end, but how exactly does she see herself fitting into this new family? How do they see her? If this is going to be a chaste relationship, is she okay with that? If this is going to be some kind of polyamorous thing, is everyone okay with that?
No idea. But sure—family. Okay.
This unusual little family does have a very sweet moment in the station wagon, pressed shoulder to shoulder and singing a joyful song. It’s a good start to their dire work—dire and nauseating. Atticus has to eat the bit of flesh he cut off Titus, and ugh. It’s the kind of gross-out horror that I dislike but have to respect, since my reaction was probably what the creators were going for.
When everything inevitably goes south after that, Atticus is strapped down and then lifted aloft in a Christ-like pose, albeit on a sextant and not a cross. With his mother’s talk of sacrifice, and the baptism and the faith stalk earlier, I guess this is meant to feel heavily Jesus-y. But it’s far too late in the show for me to take its sudden Christianity seriously. Religion has been a veneer, a bare-bones mythos to justify the existence of a magic book. Belief has been centred around the belief in magic, not God or grace. And so this final gesture, setting up Atticus as a Christ figure, is hollow: it’s not clear that his sacrifice was necessary at all.
The whole final sequence is another classic HBO twist, a rushed sequence of images that, while visually spectacular, are insufficiently grounded. Leti wakes up, having given herself back her invulnerability—I think? There’s some spell stuff, and some flashbacks that are too fast and vague to really give a good sense of what’s happening, and the gang uses all the power to bar White people from ever using magic again. Atticus dies for this. They almost sacrifice Dee for this.
Yes, let’s not forget Dee: everyone leaves a traumatised little girl alone in the woods that they know are full of racists and monsters, and of course she gets attacked. Atticus’s pet shoggoth saves her which, okay, sure. Then the show randomly has her murder Christina. What—? Christina has hurt her family, yes, but Dee barely has a reason to hate Christina directly. Having her be the one to pull the trigger, so to speak, is emotionally unsatisfying. And to have her commit murder in such a gruesome way is both upsetting and baffling. The shoggoth may have roared its triumph into the night, but I didn’t feel triumphant watching a child break a prone woman’s throat open. Dee is an artist, a child. Is this what the show wants to give children? The power to wreak bloody vengeance, the power to imagine only monstrous victory?
What, really, is the message of any of it? That heroism demands absolute self-sacrifice? That Black men will die, that Black women have to go on carrying bodies, that Black children get to compound their trauma with violence? Atticus tells Montrose not to bring the mistakes of the past upon the next generation, but admonitions don’t magically heal trauma. And speaking of magic, sure, they have it, and now no White person does. But the thing is, White people never need magic to do hideous things. Emmett Till’s murderers and the jury that acquitted them didn’t have any magic. Is magic enough for healing and justice? Or is it just enough for unsatisfying vengeance?
So, what now? The show doesn’t tell us. It just ends in grief and gore. Disjointed and ultimately unable to stick the landing, Lovecraft Country does not come “Full Circle” as the title promised. This is a long, beautiful, complex braid of individual stories that mostly trail off into loose and dead ends instead of coming together. Characters die offscreen, children become killers, other characters inexplicably come back to life, and all the thoughtful messages about trauma, grief, and hope get lost. It’s particularly sad to see Lovecraft Country end so badly after it found its feet so very well in the past few episodes, turning this into a good-but-not-great, ultimately uneven show. It was at its best with particularity and place; it stumbled trying to do everything for everyone.
