The title “A History of Violence” is the history of the Freeman family. Montrose opens the episode deep in his sorrow, drinking and burning the book he received from his brother George, the manual of the Order. “Smells like Tulsa,” he says, to himself and to ghosts less apparent but no less real than last week’s episode. We know that among his other traumas is his experience of the Tulsa Race Massacre, violence perpetuated upon him that he’s still grappling with. This same “history of violence” is also the history of America. Not just the violence of slavery and Jim Crow but the general violence of colonialism come into play in this episode. Which it addresses with great success, but also with an immensely disappointing sequence at the end of the episode.
We begin again where we left off, with Christina. Seeing her speeding her silver car through suburban Chicago while Rihanna demands “Bitch Better Have My Money” is a delightful mashup, but the show quickly gets down to business after that. She appears at Leti’s door and wants something, because of course she does, and couches her appeal with a dash of “we women have to stick together.” Uh-huh. This time she wants pages from the Book of Adam. But lo! Just as she’s about to get her way again, the house keeps her out.
The blood mark on the door makes it pretty clear that it’s the magic Martine, the practitioner who initiated the exorcism last week, that’s keeping Christina out. So why do Leti, Atticus, and Montrose go chasing after the papers Christina wants? Why aren’t they chasing down Martine and learning from her? I’m sure you could invent some convincing explanations, but the answer is actually “because the novel said so.” It’s not a huge slip, but it did wreck the urgency for me a bit.
Leti rightly gets upset with this attempted invasion and tracks Atticus down to the library. They whisper-fight about his research and his withholding of crucial information, all while a little boy is trying desperately just to enjoy his novel. He shushes them several times, but they don’t respect the silence of the library! Much-needed levity aside, I’m with the kid on this one—Atticus, quit arguing and start collaborating.
Undaunted, Leti tracks down Montrose instead, who lets slip that he knows more details about the Braithwhite family and the Order. He and his son share a stubborn curiosity as well as a reluctant desire to protect one another. Both these traits lead them to undertake yet another journey out east, this time to a museum in Boston that may hold the pages Christina is so eagerly seeking. But since none of them have a car, that means they need to borrow Hippolyta’s.
Hippolyta seems to be doing a bit better since last episode. She’s keeping up with the work and even indulging her own curiosity. Her passion is astronomy, and she’s eager to see Boston’s planetarium and show it to her daughter. The show’s doing a great job laying the groundwork for Hippolyta’s episode later on and I’m very grateful, since Hippolyta was my favorite character from the book. She gets a road trip properly underway, and even brings Dee and Tree, presumably as buffers against all the Letic (Letatticus?) UST.
Their trip is uneventful, and they arrive in Boston with plenty of time to scope out the museum. Tree has tagged along, and uses the opportunity to hit on Leti, and then to not-so-kindly let Atticus know that his dad might be gay. This adds an undercurrent of confusion to Atticus’s already-fraught relationship with Montrose. I’m glad to see the sexual encounter Atticus interrupted in the first episode had a narrative purpose, and I’m looking forward to the show exploring this further.
Lovecraft Country is doing an amazing job of weaving together a lot of storylines and characters who come together, part, and come together again. Though the scenes are more interspersed, for the sake of brevity I’ll just note that Christina and Ruby both have their own stuff going on.
Christina is inexplicably playing tag with some neighbourhood kids (whose neighbourhood? Whose kids, for that matter?) in a way that, if she were Matthew McConaughey, might be the right blend of creepy and whimsical. Instead she does a decent impression of a J. Crew ad until two cops pick her up. They bring her to Captain Lancaster, who claims Chicago as his turf. I guess we have another bad guy on the horizon.
Ruby, the fashion winner of this episode by several miles in her pink sequin dress and jaunty flower, nonetheless isn’t getting the attention she deserves. She feels that she’s missed her chance to get a job at a posh department store when she spots another Black girl working there, and then her singing gig doesn’t bring in much in the way of money or appreciation. The only person buying her drinks is the lizard-eyed William, who does manage to find the right amount of intensity to be believably attractive and attracted to Ruby, rather than creepy. Their hookup promises to lead to more in later episodes, but this time I’m just glad Ruby is enjoying herself a bit. Her scenes were so melancholic, and also a reminder that not everybody can go rushing off in search of magical manuscripts when there are bills to pay.
But speaking of the museum, Atticus, Letitia, and Montrose pull a trick from The Mummy (1999 version obviously) and find their way into a secret underground labyrinth designed by Titus Braithwhite. The whole sequence under the museum is pure Indiana Jones, and frankly, someone should make sure Steven Spielberg saw Jonathan Majors climb down that rope with a flashlight in his mouth, because that should be all the audition he needs to take his place in that franchise.
When Montrose and Letitia join him, the heart of the episode gets underway. I love the thematic left turn from horror into the adventure genre. The walk across the plank and the deadly pendulum are lifted straight out of The Last Crusade, but they’re no less effective for it. My heart was in my mouth as they navigated the trials, which were all the more intense for all the baggage they worked through during them. Montrose tries in his fumbling way to be a father, and Letitia finally gets to yell “can you stop acting like this is only happening to you?” It’s the perfect blend of physical and emotional action, all of it well-paced. And the idea that the haunted elevator actually opens the Boston crypts? Brilliant. Not only is it a cool magical feature, using it as a convenient escape finally provides Hippolyta with the evidence that she’s not being told everything.
But then—well, let’s talk about the last ten minutes.
In a vault filled with desiccated corpses, all of them both lurid and sad, the trio finally find the missing pages they’ve been seeking. But when, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, they try to take the final prize, the trap is sprung. The corpse contorts itself into life, revealing a living person named Yahima who speaks in only in Arawak. Atticus can understand, and translates for the others about how they were tricked into translating the language of Adam for Titus Braithwhite, and then how their people were all killed when they refused to further aid him.
The episode is definitely trying to say something about how explorers and colonisers harmed the people they visited, exploiting them for their utility and destroying them for any perceived slight. The literal foundations of this and many museums are death, theft, and exotification as human bodies are displayed in macabre facsimiles of what White people think they should look like. I respect the attempt to convey all this. But the way it plays out with Yahima is done very, very badly.
Yahima says they are a Two-spirit, which is a relatively modern (aka, in 1990) term created in reaction against non-Native oppressions of nonbinary individuals. It is not universally accepted for a variety of reasons. Native people are not a monolith. But maybe the creators did their homework and Arawak speakers and Taino and Lokono consultants generally agree that using the term Two-spirit makes sense. It still doesn’t excuse the way the character is treated. They’re introduced, tell their tragic story, get to be super exotic-magical, and then Montrose refuses to respect their (reasonable) decision to withhold Braithwhite’s pages. They are then punched in the face because their voice is too powerful that it causes others pain to hear. I mean—that’s barely even a metaphor. And then—after being relegated to silence once more—they’re murdered. Their whole appearance in the episode is less than 10 minutes of screen time.
No. Not okay. I understand that there’s a difference between a character doing something and a show doing something. I understand that Montrose is not a great person. The choice to kill a character is on him. The choice to kill a Two-souls identifying Native person is on the writers and showrunners. They are perpetuating the same callousness and exotification that they give lip service to condemning when they condemn Titus Braithwhite. This wasn’t necessary to shock people. There’s enough violence against Indigenous nonbinary people, and all Indigenous people. This was crude, and it was cruel, and most shamefully, it was entirely, entirely unnecessary.
