Warning: This article contains mentions of colonialism, anti-Indigenous violence, homophobia, transphobia, and spoilers for Lovecraft Country.

Lovecraft Country has a well-established trajectory of utilizing, playing with, and subverting familiar entries into various (white) literary and cinematic canons. Lovecraft Country’s fourth episode moves away from pulpy horror and toward pulpy adventure. “A History of Violence,” featuring multiple references to Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, also evokes more recent works like the Indiana Jones, National Treasure, and Dan Brown franchises.

In doing so, it continues to place front and center the idea that the tropes, experiences, and stories that these works’ main characters get to live out can and should be reclaimed for the joy and empowerment of Black audiences. Lovecraft Country is and continues to be both a love story to, and a critique of, storytelling. Both its characters and its writers are intimately aware enough of the “accepted rules” of these stories that they’ve known where and how to break them.

“A History of Violence,” however, starkly complicates this previously powerful approach to the crafting of a narrative. Where Lovecraft Country’s most striking notes have often been the tropes transgressed, abandoned, or subverted, this episode features a number that ended up being played straight. This occurs to the show’s and the audience’s detriment.

I want to be very clear, I don’t believe it’s an infraction worth “cancelling” the show or the writers’ room over. It hurt to watch. It left a sour taste in my mouth. In some ways, it tarnished what was, up until that point, a fun, engaging, lively episode. Still, I think it’s born of an effort to interrogate and criticize something that needs to be interrogated and criticized. It was ultimately undermined by inadequate research and, perhaps, a lack of forethought as to how intent would translate into impact once it left production.

This doesn’t change that the first forty-five minutes of the episode were solidly entertaining. They maintained Lovecraft Country’s precarious and striking balance between character-driven drama and pulpy horror-adventure.

I had a great deal of fun watching Atticus, Leti, and Montrose embark on a road trip to Boston to try and find the missing pages from Titus Braithwhite’s copy of the Book of Names. The tension, pain and trauma lingers between them, with things they do and don’t talk about boiling up to a series of confrontations large and small. Even so, the coded puzzle solving and dungeon traps that populated this episode were an enjoyable refreshing of a familiar set of genre conventions.

When Lovecraft Country is doing what it does best, it does it expertly. The soundtrack for this week’s episode used songs ranging from Rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money and Jade Josephine’s Get ‘Em to Bo Diddley’s Cops and Robbers and The Clovers’ Devil or Angel. The music maintains both its fun and its deliberate blend of historical and present-day commentary.

The visuals also continue to be striking, with consistently delightful work from the costuming department, and a willingness to play with fun, pulpy visual effects. I was heartened to see the screen-time given to characters existing alongside our main trio expanding. This provided them with more nuance.

Ruby’s simmering, aching exhaustion was deeply, cleverly written and painstakingly acted. Hippolyta’s experience as a young Black girl, and now as an adult woman was also important. Seeing her passion about astronomy and sharing that connection with her daughter was both moving and one of the primary windows into Black joy in this week’s episode.

I look forward to seeing where these threads lead. Especially since “A History of Violence” forged more direct ties for both of these women to the magical and occult aspects of the story, from which they’ve previously been left out.

We saw Ruby rounding off a painful, exhausting, humiliating day through a pursuit of catharsis and relief by sleeping with William. However, she does not know that he’s a henchman of the Braithwhaites. Equally importantly, we saw Hippolyta and Dee pursuing the mystery surrounding George’s death, perhaps tapping into some magic greater than them. I’m increasingly curious to see where these character arcs lead.

Then we hit the last fifteen or so minutes of the episode, and a thread that had been vaguely worrying me from an earlier interaction came into a new and unavoidably uglier light. Earlier on in the episode, Tree (Deron J. Powell), who accompanied our core cast on their road trip in order to get part of the way to Philadelphia, intimated to Atticus that Montrose has been spending a great deal of time with Sammy.

The implication is that Montrose’s proximity to Sammy, who we know is queer from the first episode, means that Montrose may be or is queer as well. This implication is made explicit when Atticus responds with a tense, discomfited disdain.

It gave me pause, not least because it almost immediately leads to Atticus questioning and side-eyeing Montrose simply having a conversation with another man — a security guard at the museum providing them with the information they need to infiltrate by night. I previously felt positively toward Sammy’s presence in the text, and the fact that Tic wasn’t positioned as complicit in the era-typical homophobia. Yet this exchange started to call that feeling into question.

I say “started to,” because what comes back around in the last fifteen or so minutes of the episode completes the step toward casting even that character introduction in a new and worrying light. In short, Sammy’s introduction and the introduction of a new character this episode fail to express queerness and gender nonconformity without resorting to nudity and sex. These subjects aren’t treated the same way with cisgendered, straight characters on the show.

At what should be the episode’s peak, “A History of Violence” introduces a haunting colonial expedition ship turned mausoleum full of Indigenous bodies curated by Titus Braithwhaite. At its center is Yahima Maraokoti (Monique Candelaria). Yahima is a two-spirited Arawak person who was manipulated by Titus to translate pages from the Book of Names for him. They were then imprisoned among the corpses of their murdered people when they realized who he truly was and refused to continue complying.

This introduction — at first borne out by some entertainingly spooky visual effects — quickly turned from the confronting to the sour, though. It almost immediately hit on several troubling habits when it comes to depicting both Indigenous and trans or intersex characters.

Yahima describing themself as two-spirit — albeit translated through Tic — is, or should have been, an exciting inclusion of an identity rarely depicted in “mainstream” media. However, the lingering fixation of the camera on Yahima’s body equates a two-spirit identity to an intersex one. This raises the question of how much or how carefully the identities at play were researched. While there certainly are intersex, two-spirit Indigenous individuals, these two identities don’t accompany each other by default.

Lovecraft Country also falls into the trap of using a seemingly unquestioning, gazey replication of something adjacent to the tired, overused and often fetishizing Trans Nude Shot by lingering the camera on Yahima’s genitals. This mistake fails to communicate that it knows the distinction, and further presents Yahima’s body and personhood as something shocking, not as something to be understood and cherished.

In so doing, it further echoes the Otherwordly and Sexually Ambiguous trope often applied to gender-nonconforming and nonbinary characters. A trope which may additionally run into troubling territory when applied to an Indigenous character.

It’s a jarring turn from a show that has (until now) prided itself on celebrating and cherishing lives, experiences, and bodies that “mainstream media” has seen fit to humiliate, dehumanize, and discard.mfurther entrenching this harm, Yahima’s voice is taken from them the moment they leave with our leading trio. It is replaced by a piercing shriek that leads Tic to almost reflexively punch them into an unconscious silence in an unsettling, upsetting moment that almost felt as though it was intended to play as slapstick humor.

This continued silence smothers them altogether when Montrose summarily and rather graphically slits their throat right before the smash to credits. Montrose does so, trying to keep the contents of the Book of Names from Tic, as Yahima’s the only living person who can translate it. It does not make it any less appalling.

It’s been stated since that the episode’s aim was to interrogate and examine a different aspect of inter- and intra-community issues. It brings Black lesbian writer and activist Audre Lorde quote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” to the forefront.

The question at the episode’s core was (or was meant to be) what happens, when a marginalized and oppressed person has been so harmed by the colonizing, oppressive force that they replicate those harms in a desperate, fear-tinged attempt to cope. It also questions (or means to) how, and why this happens.

It’s a conversation that’s worth having, though it’s outside of my lane to conclude it. Similarly, there’s a thread to be pulled on between Montrose’s ostensible queer-coding and the failures of cisgender queer individuals to engage inclusively and lovingly with trans and gender nonconforming people.

To me, though, the effort to ask these questions and interrogate their answers ended up simply playing these tropes straight in a hurtful and troubling way. Yahima’s introduction, silencing, and violent death were not justified by the goals the writing room had in mind.

This may not be the first time Lovecraft Country has missed the mark or dropped the ball in its committed goal of punching up. Jewish commentators pointed out the worrying, and still unexplained, choice to change episode three’s villain’s name from Hiram Winthrop to Hiram Epstein, a typically Jewish surname. Especially in having him participate in ritual murder, echoing the anti-Semitic blood libel stereotype.

Those commentators suggested that the choice, while undeniably harmful and in need of addressing, was in all likelihood neither deliberate nor conscious. Similarly, I don’t think the hurtful mishandling of Yahima’s character nor the dangerous possibilities raised through Montrose’s coding were crafted with spite in mind. I think they were born of a lack of understanding, and perhaps an inadequately researched context.

That doesn’t make them okay, however, and any subsequent apology or clearing of the air isn’t ultimately mine — as a white AFAB viewer — to accept. The writers’ room should have engaged with trans, intersex, Indigenous, and two-spirit creators. I would say they should have also more closely researched the history of the fiction they sought and ultimately failed to subvert in order to take this angle.

Ultimately, I had a hard time writing this review. I wasn’t left with the same feeling of excitement for the next episode either. Rather, I’ve been sitting with a heavy, wounded feeling, hoping against hope that the episode that follows will clear the air. Maybe it will. I hope it will. I want to believe it will.

I don’t think it was intentionally mean-spirited, and I want (and choose) to believe that there is enough care and responsiveness in the writing room to manage the course correction. Still, this is the last show I expected to leave me waiting for the next episode not out of excitement but out of hoping it’d rectify some of the missteps of its predecessor. Only time will tell if it does.

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Lovecraft Country

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Great soundtrack
• Striking visuals and effects
• Compelling screen time for side characters

Cons

• Painfully missed the mark on queer, trans, and Indigenous intersectionality