Warning: This article contains discussions of rape and transphobia, images of gore, and spoilers for Lovecraft Country.

My feelings about Lovecraft Country’s fifth episode, “Strange Case,” can best be summed up in one word: complicated. For what it’s worth, I think that’s deliberate. However, the topics and concerns being interrogated here are so difficult that putting my thoughts together into anything resembling a review is challenging at best.

I’m still recovering from the fourth episode, and that’s a big part of the reason it took me as long as it did to get this review together. On the one hand, the fifth episode queries and examines the relationships between ethnicity, gender, and sexuality more deliberately than the fourth.

No doubt, this is in no small part due to the directing efforts of Cheryl Dunye, following on her weaving of complex, nuanced films and stories about Black lesbians. It is also due to a clearer show of effort put into researching the history of queer survival strategies and social spaces.

On the other hand, there’s no one size fits all answer as to whether these inclusions — and the questions with which “Strange Case” wrestles — resolve the hurtful implications raised in “A History of Violence.” For me, “Strange Case” sought to tackle some rather ambitious questions and concerns, and in some ways did very well. In others, however, it didn’t manage to stick the landing.

A midway point in a season is often a good time to start questioning whether a show’s style, substance, and character work mesh together. Lovecraft Country does what it does best when it is able to marry all three. I don’t want to understate that it officiates that marriage expertly, when it wants to.

The reason I say “when it wants to,” is because I’m not sure it always does. On the one hand, “Strange Case” provides some much-welcomed character work and screen-time to secondary cast members. It also provides a celebration of lives and identities otherwise often found on the margins. As invested as I am in Atticus and Leti, making more room for other characters by letting them spend most of the episode in code solving was a welcome breath of fresh air.

On the other hand, Lovecraft Country as a whole seems to be developing a habit of utilizing its secondary characters as vehicles for ideas. It uses them less as consistently cohesive people with empathetically-treated motivations.

Maybe it’s the readiness to dispose of Yahima, their body, and their experience to feed a loftier conversation about colonial violence just moments after letting the camera ogle their genitals in titillated confusion. Maybe it’s the replication of certain rape-revenge tropes that lost their salience the moment they became an excuse to needle drop Bodak Yellow over bloodied stiletto heels previously used in a horrific sexual assault.

Either way, both cases stretch from the questionably worthwhile, to the disappointing and the hurtful. They ultimately threaten to undermine the conversations Lovecraft Country is trying to have. I was genuinely excited to spend more time getting to know the ins and outs of Ruby’s life.

The conversation, deeply uncomfortable and jarring as it was, about “passing” was had by giving Ruby magical access to a white body. It was both compelling and confronting in its significance. Up until the sharp left turn, there was a clear sensibility throughout of exploring the idea of “passing” as something that looks like it promises new freedoms and opened doors. Yet it may, for a Black woman, ultimately be a violent imposition of its own.

The other half of what made that so compelling as a narrative was that it married social interrogation with gorgeous, terrifying cinematography and effects. Furthermore, it did all of that without making Ruby’s interior (her desires and needs) expendable to the discussion.

For what it’s worth, I think there’s a reason “Strange Case” is both the goriest episode so far and the episode to feature the most sex and nudity. There’s an obvious (and deliberate) desire to engage with very intimate, fleshy horror and beauty, and the ways they can and do walk hand-in-hand. For the most part, it works for me.

Ruby crawling in and out of her magically woven skin is horrifyingly gory to watch. However, there’s something entrancing in her serial rebirths to herself, too. There was something heartbreaking in Montrose and Sammy sleeping together along with Montrose’s refusal to kiss him, over the strains of Frank Ocean’s palpably anguished, palpably queer Bad Religion. This scene is answered, later, with perhaps the most beautiful scene in the episode, centering on Montrose coming into his own and into the idea of loving and being loved at a drag ball.

I say “for the most part” for a reason. Montrose’s subplot this week ached in me in all the right ways, but still didn’t resolve the deep wound of the fourth episode. I want so deeply and intensely, for him to accept himself. In doing so, I want him to find the joy that will lead him out of the cycles of violence, hurt, and deceit that have marked out so much of his life.

None of that equips me to get over or forgive what was done to Yahima. I have abundant room for complicated, fraught, tormented characters. Asking me to get over an act of gazey, transphobic, anti-Indigenous, queerphobic violence isn’t a part of that.

Similarly, the beauty, terror and anguish in Ruby’s storyline falls out of step with itself in a particular instance. Having caught her manager at Marshall Fields attempting to rape Tamara, the lone Black woman working at the department store; Ruby responds by violently raping him with a stiletto heel.

The Lovecraft Country Radio podcast explains the enactment of this violence as some form of retribution not only for Tamara and Ruby, but for the generations of Black women who had been raped and abused before them. Indeed, much of Lovecraft Country is in a constant conversation with the history of inter-generational and inherited violence. One could certainly argue that this sequence is part of that conversation.

Being aware of that, I wanted to put aside my usual reservations about this form of rape-revenge. Sexual assault to answer sexual assault in other works of fiction has never worked for me. Still, I wanted to give it a fresh chance; I was nearly there. Nearly, until what had started out as something that seemed deliberately set up to be a horrific violation in its own right became the stage setting for a catchy soundtrack cue.

Ruby’s characterization — and the compassion for her desires that had been emphasized throughout her story to date — seemed abruptly set aside for a scene that couldn’t decide if it was meant to be terrifying or empowering. Ultimately, it ended up feeling cheap and insulting for trying to be both.

This review wouldn’t be complete without addressing Christina. Christina is the gory cherry on my gory mixed feelings ice cream sundae. Picking up on a thread several fans of the show have been speculating about for a while now, “Strange Case” confirmed that Christina and William are, in fact, the same person. Christina has been using a potion, similar to what Ruby used to enter a white woman’s skin, to enter a masculine body. In doing so, she is able to enter masculine spaces and spheres of influence.

Okay… how did this get through the door of an episode that was otherwise doing a lot of the legwork to communicate something more queer-affirming than the fourth?

First of all, let us not forget that this means Christina used William’s semblance to sleep with Ruby. “Mistaken identity” sex is but one of many ways that an absence of consent to sexual intimacy gets played out in fantasy and horror fiction. That lack of consent poses problems on its own. Furthermore, the body language Christina exudes when she’s in Ruby’s space as herself might imply a more legitimate attraction of her own.

All that really means, though, is that a fundamentally compassionate show has stumbled headlong into reproducing the deeply problematic concept of a predatory lesbian who secretly wants to be a man. that says nothing of the fact that the shock gender reveal of a villainous character is well established as having transphobic implications. What had been a worthwhile interrogation of hierarchies of gendered privilege has become something, even when I give it my utmost benefit of the doubt, desperately confused.

I’m a queer, nonbinary person who’s attracted to women and feminine people. I have breasts and a uterus. I am almost exclusively put on the outside of conversations about “women in men’s worlds.” I no longer fit the narrative the moment they lean into the idea of a woman using a “masculine body” or appearance to gain access to spaces previously closed to her.

Even on my most masculine days, I will probably never be interacted with or received as a man. Investing in a binder and a packer won’t suddenly provide me with the means to interact romantically with straight women. I have trans masculine and trans male loved ones who may never “pass.” Even if they do, the implication that undergoing transition is a calculated move by confused lesbians to “access” privilege is almost a verbatim replication of a transphobic myth.

Horror, as a genre, asks us to hold two seemingly contradictory things in tension all the time, which is part of what makes it so effective. At a first glance or two, Lovecraft Country seems to know it — until it starts to stretch that good faith beyond what may be its limits.

I was ready to hold my hurt over Montrose’s abuse and control of Atticus and my desire for him to grow, heal and become self-actualized as a loved and loving queer man in tension. I was ready to hold my deep love for Ruby and my conflicted feelings over her envy and resentment of those around her in tension. I was ready to hold my dread of Christina’s mile-wide manipulative streak and my sympathy for her struggle for respect and acceptance in tension.

I was ready to do that until the show seemed to drop the ball on all three of these characters, and I don’t know if my hands are big enough to hold in tension that which I’m being asked to.

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Lovecraft Country

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Gorgeous cinematography and visual effects
• Powerful acting
• SIgnificant character work for some side characters

Cons

• Rape-revenge tropeyness might not have needed rehashing
• Clunky, hurtful interrogation of gender