After Emmett Till’s lynching in Mississippi, his mother held a funeral with an open casket. Displaying the full extent of torture that Emmett—a 14-year-old Black boy—experienced at the hands of grown White men, and the utter disrespect that the whole country had for a human being, was brave. It was angry. It was sorrowful. All those raw and overflowing emotions are there in episode eight right from the first moment. But perhaps the most salient point is Ruby’s: “He looked like a monster,” she remarks, barely able to recognize the person underneath what White men did to a Black child’s body.
Lovecraft Country knows monsters. It isn’t shy about showing us the shoggoths and ghosts and shapeshifters, because those monsters are all made. White people saw this young child as a monster and used violence to make him resemble one. The whole series wants to show not just the monsters but the making of them, the contexts from which they arise that are so much more horrible than a simple bit of gore or a toothy maw.
Ruby takes her comfort where she can in an unsettling sequence, drinking a potion and then letting it wear off as she has sex with William(/Christina).“Today of all days I didn’t want to be a Black woman…fucking a white man.” That subtle ellipsis, that pregnant pause. Ruby comes back to it later in a conversation with Leti and declares that she doesn’t want to shed her race—she’d rather be a Black woman with power. But in the conversation with Christina following their race- and gender-bending sex, it’s clear that there’s much more going on. The ability to put aside race and then take it back up, the ability to find gratification in the gory sloughing of a white body—yes, Ruby may be talking about power as if it’s a single thing, something to pick up and put down, but what she’s actually experiencing is far more complex.
Much as I loved Hippolyta’s monologues last week, Ruby’s speech to Christina might be the best in the entire series thus far. She doesn’t want Christina to say anything and she doesn’t even go so far as to demand that Christina do anything—she just wants her to feel something. It’s a low hurdle to clear, but not only can’t Christina do it, she won’t. Even more audacious: she tells Ruby she’s wrong. That Ruby doesn’t care, either. There’s something seductive in her speech about absolute self-interest, the invulnerability of complete individualism. If you only care about yourself, then there’s only one way to hurt you. And Christina already has that covered.
Invulnerability is the real theme of this episode, how to make it and how to break it. Christina has it in many more ways than just magic, and she wants yet more: she wants to become immortal. Ruby’s seduced by the idea of rejecting her own vulnerability. Atticus and Leti both give Christina what she wants (the pages and the key) to get some invulnerability for themselves and each other.
The alternative has been very clear over the past eight episodes, after all. Vulnerability means an open casket for a tortured and murdered 14-year-old boy. Vulnerability means the cops harassing and hurting you. Vulnerability means Dee, a girl too young to own funeral black, has to wear a white church dress to her best friend’s funeral, only to be intimidated, grabbed, spat upon, and tormented with magic that she has no context for.
Dee’s story is the scariest thing to come out of this show by far, at least as far as traditional scares go. The leering objects are a great build-up, and then we get the creepiest little girls since The Shining. Topsy (Kaelynn Gobert-Harris) and Bopsy (Bianca Brewton) moved like daddy long-legs and grinned like Pennywise. They were styled like blackface caricatures, hideous for yet another layer of reasons, and the whole effect combined with the music cues was so eerie I had to pause turn the lights back on (and catch my breath).
Dee’s defiance in the face of both terrors is a wondrous, hopeful thing to behold. Telling off Captain Lancaster and then immediately playing chicken with Topsy was a one-two punch of badassery that would have been a triumph by itself. But then she goes and constructs a trap, luring Topsy and Bopsy in so she can take them one at a time. And not even content with that, she draws them: her curse might render her unable to tell anyone about her haunting, but she can certainly make a comic. It’s a brilliant backup plan, but at first it seems like she won’t need it. She’s actually succeeding in fighting off Topsy and Bopsy before Montrose stops her, thinking she’s having some kind of fit. Her storyline is going to extend into next week, I see, but I sort of wish she’d been able to triumph after all of her brave acts and preparation. (Also, I’m not super keen to see Topsy and Bopsy again.) As with Hippolyta’s story, Dee’s story doesn’t get enough spotlight because we’re still focused on Atticus and Letitia—and in this case, also Montrose and Ji-Ah.
Ji-Ah turning up may be emotionally dramatic, but I’m not sure it accomplished much, story-wise. Ji-Ah doesn’t know anything more about Atticus’s death, and Atticus was already motivated to pursue his self-protection magic. Montrose, though, at least manages to open up a little to his son and vice versa. When they manage to talk calmly, they’re able to at least agree on the importance of family—and the importance of protecting family from the world, even if it’s with magic. In this case, vulnerability leads to protection, which is a nice counterpoint to the way that Ruby seems to be closing herself off.
Christina seemed to also try her hand at vulnerability when she weirdly reenacts Emmett Till’s death. She pays a couple of men to beat her, strangle her, and throw her into the river, and they’re actually able to wound her. They don’t manage kill her, of course, but still, it’s interesting. It’s not clear if she’s finding a strange way to connect with Ruby or feeling something after all, or if she’s just testing herself and her powers once again.
It’s clear, though, that Ruby’s feeling something for Christina. She reveals her alliance and defends it to Leti, and Leti gets upset without revealing that she doesn’t quite have a leg to stand on after her own deal. Ruby and Leti are finally getting into it, but what looks like half the Chicago PD descends on the house to put an end to their chat. Atticus returns home to the sound of gunfire, and to a bunch of trigger-happy cops eager to add him to the carnage. In a moment of perfectly pure tension, Leti races out to save him—but his own spell turns up first.
Yes, the spell worked, and spectacularly well, too. Something leaps out of the asphalt and destroys everyone. The creature and the violence is a callback to episode one, only now we have some experience and some confidence. Now we aren’t waiting to see what happens to the characters, but what they themselves will do. They’ve embraced monsters. What comes after that?
