When last we left our beleaguered heroes, they were drenched in blood and being made welcome to an unsettling house in an even more unsettling locale, the Braithwhite mansion in the middle of woods filled with monsters. Atticus, Letitia, and Uncle George had little recourse but to accept the strange hospitality of the strange man in an ascot, but this week, we find that their stay has been—briefly—glorious.
Not only do they get cleaned up in a gloriously gothic setting, they are each given all the distractions their hearts desire. Uncle George somehow managing to dance with a whole library is the only good thing to happen since Bong Joon Ho made his Oscar statues kiss (you know, 500 years ago in January 2020). Letitia dressing up is also lovely, but it is not good. No, when Letitia steps out in her attire of choice, a full riding outfit compete with an ascot, it is downright wicked, and I died several deaths. Letitia Lewis, hot holy goddamn.
I was brought abruptly out of my swoon, though, by the sight of the Braithwaite founder, a man in robes that are absolutely meant to invoke KKK. Titus Braithwhite, patriarch of a clan with “white” literally in their names, rich because of the slave trade. Well, that’s that for our brief idyll in a house of magical closets and bookshelves. Now time for William the not-exactly-a-butler to be vague and creepy, graciously giving them the run of the house while looking like his vest should be Patagonia. Are his eyes made of cocaine? Is that why they look so lifeless? But hey, he doesn’t explicitly stop them from setting out to look for Atticus’s father Montrose. He just wants them to have lunch first! Letitia ringing a silver bell for salt deserves an Emmy. It probably deserves its own category.
Over lunch, it becomes clear that only Atticus remembers the horrifying events of their previous evening. There’s a mercifully brief interlude in which Letitia and George debate whether Atticus is crazy, which isn’t super unsettling because we as the audience know that something is up. Fortunately, the episode plays with illusion and perception much more effectively later, so I’ll let it go.
In exploring and looking for Montrose, the trio find a village plucked right out of the 1750s. It’s a little odd, but not really that unsettling aside from the kids treating a giant wicker effigy as a maypole and wrapping it in red string, singing “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” That’s excellently low-key horror.
Overall, though, the producers are really not going for a horror vibe here. I can see why they made that choice since it looks like they might be trying to fit the whole book into the series, and horror requires more time to build slowly. But just because I understand it doesn’t mean I like it. They have a fantastic set piece in the strange tower, with dead animals suspended from the rafters and the suggestion of a dungeon below. Then they make almost zero use of it.
They also have a marvelous villain in Dell, the woman with the dogs who accosts our heroic trio and makes hideous comments comparing them to animals. Jamie Neumann delivers a brief but flawless performance here with all the ignorance and menace I was hoping to see in last week’s sheriff. She combines the sneer of a debutante with the underbite and hunch of an inbred Igor. It’s like seeing a Karen before it hatches into its final form.
Other than this brief scene, though, they don’t make much use of Dell either. The episode is more interested in Christina, the Braithwhite heiress, who shows up to the village to urge our trio home. Don’t miss the A/V pun: everyone can hear the dog whistles at this point.
After shepherding Atticus, Letitia, and George back to the manor house on an actual horse, Christina tries to convince Atticus that she’s a decent gal. Abbey Lee is definitely channeling Christina Ricci, and she does the whole fragile-sullen-defiant balancing act well enough. “Not all us white folks are out to get you,” says a wide-eyed White folk definitely out to get him. Atticus asks her for “actions, not promises,” and of course she doesn’t follow through. She barely stands up to her father, her tone snippy but her overall obedience unquestionable.
Samuel Braithwhite demands obedience in some pretty strange ways. He’s obsessed with the story of the Garden of Eden, claiming that the Language of Adam and Adam’s naming of the beasts gives the world order, an order he can interpret and control.
It clearly has some basis in reality, since the house and its inhabitants reveal more and more magic powers. George, Letitia, and Atticus are trapped in their rooms until dinner, forced to experience uniquely gutting hallucinations. I already feel so much and so strongly for these characters, who come out of their rooms looking like wounded children. Uncle George is truly the best, comforting them and giving them kindness when he himself also had plenty of reason to be upset.
There’s lots of animal imagery in the episode, from Letitia’s hallucination to the dogs to the birthing cow. I understand a bit of where the director is trying to go with this, making the Braithwhites appear as the truly animalistic and unnatural ones while making Atticus, Letitia, and George’s humanity shine, but I don’t know that it was well-seeded enough to be entirely effective. The scene of Christina assisting in a birth, for example, is just weird. Is it good weird? Bad weird? I don’t know. Mostly it felt like the director had watched Alien: Resurrection too many times.
We get back on track with the dinner in short order though. The black tie (the writers are killing it with the visual and auditory puns here) dinner is great because of Atticus and George, but the cannibalism is another weird moment. Good? Bad? Eh—mostly is just made me wish Samuel Braithwhite were played by Mads Mikkelsen. There’s not quite enough arrogance, not quite enough style in Tony Goldwyn’s performance for me to find it noteworthy. He plays Samuel like a banker who sits on the board of Ancient Dawn Inc., not a cult leader with actual magic powers.
Maybe this was intentional. Certainly the show and the book both set it up to critique the inaccessible world of rich White men, and money is like magic when you have enough of it. Likewise there’s a criticism here that no matter how privileged you are, it doesn’t make you interesting. All of that and more may be true, but it just doesn’t feel like Jonathan Majors gets enough to play off of here. After George’s great speech and Atticus’s magnificently succinct “get the fuck out,” Samuel’s response is lackluster.
But it’s Atticus & co. who want to get the fuck out, really, and after the disastrous dinner they make no further bones about it. They break into the strange tower, Letitia gets to be 100% badass again, and we get about five seconds of triumph before Montrose ruins it by being a dick. And then five more seconds before the cult ruins it even more thoroughly: by putting bullets in Letitia and George. Their wounds ensure Atticus’s compliance: only if he participates in the ritual will Samuel provide magical healing.
He’s so sure that Atticus will comply that he doesn’t bother to watch him. He leaves that to Christina, his daughter but not his heir, who can oversee the work but can’t actually take part in the boys-club-cult. She and Atticus have another little chat, which is slightly more helpful than their previous one.
And yes—Black men and White women. Christina has the power but not the authority; Atticus has the authority but not the power. It’s an elegant illustration of the larger power structures at play here, made all the more poignant by Letitia in the other room, a Black woman who here has neither power nor authority. Letitia’s panic attack in the bathroom is wrenching and powerful. She’s had two traumatic experiences in succession: first the attempted rape by someone she thought was Atticus, and then being shot. And yet she is the one who sounds the alarm, who shepherds everyone out.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While overseeing Atticus’s—ritual cleansing? sponge bath?—Christina admits to him that “The things they’ve done, it’s unforgiveable…And we call it family to make it seem okay.” Yes, it is easier to fight for change on Twitter than in your own family. It’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation. For this, I would say only that you should read Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman, a memoir and history of finding a KKK member in the family tree.
Christina can’t even deal with the emotional pain of defying her family, and meanwhile George, full of Big Uncle Energy even while bleeding out, manages to set aside the pain of a bullet to the gut in order to talk to Montrose. He delves into their abusive childhood and about how Montrose isn’t treating Atticus right. There’s even the hint of what might be another deathbed confession—a paternity issue?—which is quite the appropriate lead-in to this ritual.
“Whitey on the Moon” is a perfect juxtaposition with the ritual scene. The sound editing in general has been innovative and endlessly clever, and ought to win as many awards as this should also win for costume design. White triumph here is predicated on Black labor and Black suffering: the labor of the now-lauded Black “hidden figures” that let NASA reach space, and the blood and body of a Black man to reach back to Eden.
Only it’s not Eden. What Atticus sees through the portal is his ancestor—not Titus Braithwhite the raping slave-owner, and not even Adam. It’s his many-times-great grandmother, the as-yet-unnamed woman who survived and fled to freedom. She is the collective history of the men in the room as much as the white patriarchs. And it’s she who has power in the ritual, it seems. A house built on slavery should not stand, and Atticus’s unnamed matriarch seems to have a hand in making sure it doesn’t.
The fall of the house of Braithwhite is extremely thorough, but there’s a fall in the house of Freeman, too. It’s only episode two and I’m already so attached, and so devastated to feel a loss already. Part of it is effective storytelling, but most of the credit goes to the raw, naked vulnerability of Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors as they wring every last tear from their bodies (and mine). The last five minutes were a tragic counterbalance to the delight of the first five minutes, and I was awed.
Next week can’t come fast enough. The acting is magnificent, but there are still pacing issues and some out of place scenes
