“Stories are like people. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You just try to cherish them and overlook their flaws.” –Atticus Freeman
Monster shows and movies have a lot in common with Christmas movies. No, no, hear me out. Initial disbelief or disinterest quickly becomes total absorption, a mad, desperate scramble for some McGuffin or destination ensues, and in the end, the meaning is always that the real monsters—like Christmas—were inside us all along.
America, the monsters have been inside us all along. And I don’t mean the winged squids and other beasties swarming right as the show begins. Nope, I mean racists, all the little cult-followers who worship Whiteness, and systemic racism like a many-tentacled beast. Lovecraft Country is going to be about as strong and unsubtle about it as Jackie Robinson taking a baseball bat to Cthulhu. Which is exactly what happens in the opening sequence.
The whole scene is about our hero Atticus. Atticus saw combat in the Korean War, and also has spent a lot of time reading what he calls “pulp” stories, the adventure and weird tales from the 30s and 40s. Both of these things have affected him deeply; they’re the first things about him that we learn. The first things that we learn about the home he’s returned to is that the Jim Crow South deserves a single-finger salute as Atticus’s bus drives toward Chicago—and that the rest of the country isn’t much better. When the bus breaks down, only the White passengers are picked up. Atticus and an older Black woman are forced to walk.
When Atticus gets back to Chicago, we’ve already met his Uncle George, his Aunt Hippolyta, and his young cousin Dee (Diana). George runs a travel agency and publishes a guide specifically for African Americans, collecting and sharing minute details about which hotels, restaurants, roads, and regions are safe for Black travellers.
That’s pretty convenient for Atticus, who despite his antipathy toward his father is concerned about that last letter he received from him. Montrose Freeman wrote him vaguely about his birthright and legacy, and then went silent. Uncle George confirms that yes—he’s missing. So where has he gone?
I would like to pause to celebrate Uncle George’s shirt-tie-suspender combo, which is epic. Keep this up and we will need a whole category called Big Uncle Energy for him. Sure, Atticus is super hot in his tee and reading glasses, but Uncle George is clearly the style icon here. They start figuring out where Montrose, Atticus’s father, has run off to: a town called Ardham, in the middle of a very racist part of Massachusetts. But why, and who lured him there?
In search of more details, Atticus accidentally walks in on a sexual encounter in a bar, which—why? Because HBO? Maybe I’m wrong and it’s because there will be thoughtful examination of the intersection between masculinity, race, and sexuality. But probably just because HBO.
Atticus calls Korea, and a woman picks up. He’s unable to speak, his emotions raw and powerful on his face, but she gathers that it’s him fairly quickly. I am very excited for this to get explored further since it’s not in the books. Partly because I just love Korea, and partly because I hope the show discusses how America ignores all the ways it affected and is still affecting the people it considers Other, whether they’re Black Americans in Chicago or Koreans half a world away.
But I digress. This unnamed woman tells him: “You went home? You shouldn’t have.” And with that ominous pronouncement, Atticus hangs up, and the road trip gets underway.
Scenes of Black American vs. White America follow, a montage of the barely-separate and deeply unequal existing in even the narrowest confines. Different counters, different billboards, different treatment, different expectation. The indignities and suffering are blatant, but it’s like we’re being granted the Second Sight, because only the Black characters—and we, through their eyes—can see it.
But throughout, there’s defiance. There’s still kids getting ice cream and music for dancing. I especially want to call attention to Letitia’s style, since it’s as defiant as it is beautiful. Letitia stays fancy as hell and I love it. She could carve my heart out with her sharp red lipstick and I’d thank her with my dying breath. I also love how thirsty she is. She’s zero percent subtle about snapping a shirtless pic of Atticus. If you transplanted Letitia to 2020—okay, I wouldn’t do that to her—if you transplanted Letitia to 2015, she would take about four seconds to adapt and then become an influencer and have a lipstick-trio-and-lingerie collab in the works with Fenty.
Their trip to a diner is just as ill-fated as most of their other experiences on the road, only with even worse results. They show up, they sit down, and within five minutes they’re running for their lives. It’s frightening and terrible, although George spitefully grabbing a handful of peppermints even as he’s running for his life is absolute peak Big Uncle Energy.
They make it—barely—with a little help from Letitia’s badass driving and the mysterious silver car, whose driver is a white woman in a bold red hat. Costume designers: you are killing it.
Watching the trio laugh about their narrow escape is a quietly powerful moment. They laugh out of triumph, but also because it’s the only other response besides crying. There is no other recourse, no justice, no meaning to it. It has to be a source of mirth, and so they make it one.
The fight between Letitia and her brother Marvin is rough and raw, and the fact that we only see it in parts through a window actually only makes it more potent. It’s like being a child watching the grown-ups fight and not fully understanding the content, but definitely understanding the tone and the danger. It stands in direct contrast to Dee hearing her parents making love in the beginning. She gets to roll her eyes and exclaim “gross!” because she feels safe and loved. Meanwhile, Atticus flinches and sidles away from Letitia’s fight, and can’t help reflecting on his own childhood, which was far from safe. The line “I was younger and smaller, too,” absolutely gutted me.
Already we see that family legacies aren’t safe.
They’re powerful, though. Even after everything, Atticus still gets up in the morning and keeps on his search for his father. He still endures a frustrating day looking for a side road that maybe doesn’t exist, and then endures far, far worse.
The trio is stopped by a hatchet-faced cop, who informs them with a smirk that this is a sundown county.
Here we start seeing that Abrams was maybe not the right person to help produce this. He’s competent, but he’s an action guy through and through. All of the most tense, interesting scenes were shot like action movies: with way more yelling and shooting and visual effects than were really necessary. Or maybe I’m unfairly judging Abrams, and it was a team effort to make this more action-y in an attempt to make it more broadly appealing to viewers.
Either way, the scene with the “sundown county” is perfect in the book (this actually combines two scenes, but actually they’re both perfect). It’s pure suspense and such creeping, awful horror that I could barely breathe. In this episode, it’s good but it’s not great. The sheriff isn’t quite as menacing or sadistic as in the book, but he’s plenty scary. He tells them they have until sundown to get out of his county, or he’ll string them up in the trees. He gives them a near-impossible time limit and starts following them as they try to get away without breaking the speed limit.
And then the sheriff starts ramming them with his car. Why? They’ve already been shot at in a different scene, how is getting fender-bumped really upping the stakes? Far better the car getting closer and closer, the sun getting lower and lower, the music getting more and more ominous…but no. Wham! Wham! Abrams just can’t help smashing stuff together.
Then, hen the shoggoths showed up I was…disappointed. Horror is about the buildup, the big reveal. This was just a weird alien in the woods. It wasn’t scary; it wasn’t even startling. Mostly it was a little gross, since it looks like an intestine with legs, but it’s nowhere near the madness-inducing horror Lovecraft dreamed up. Ruff’s original “shoggoth” was also much scarier—because we never saw it. And then blah blah blah, blood and gore and shouting, all of it vainly trying to distract us from the fact that this is episode one. We know the good guys aren’t going to get eaten yet. Even Game of Thrones didn’t go that far, and this isn’t Game of Thrones.
Well—hopefully it’s not. There are some of the same issues rearing their heads, though. Sure, the actors are phenomenal. The set and clothing design is magnificent. Those have never really been HBO’s issues though, have they? They hire brilliant people, let them inhabit a stunning world, and then they spill pacing issues all over it.
The final blood-drenched shuffle into Ardham was probably meant to provide a lot of contrast between our beleaguered heroes and the New England…castle? Mansion? It’s cool looking, whatever it is. But mostly I was just wondering where their car was. It clearly didn’t break down because the headlights didn’t go off. Why weren’t they driving? Where’s Woody, the faithful sedan? I guess it’s not that big a deal, but nobody has their bags, either. Would three Black travellers really show up at a mansion in blood-soaked clothes, after they were just attacked by racists with badges in the next county over? We’re supposed to understand the pervasive, unrelenting racism as the source of horror here, and I’m not sure this ends the episode on the right note.
I have some qualms about Lovecraft Country’s ability to handle narrative nuance and horror, but overall I’m extremely excited by this first look. There’s immense potential that’s already being realised in the great performances across the board. They crammed a lot into this episode, and I’m looking forward to seeing it pay off across rest of the series.
