Warning: This article contains mentions of rape and incest, parental abuse, images of blood, and spoilers for Lovecraft Country.

Lovecraft Country’s sixth episode, “Meet Me In Daegu,” offers a change of pace, change of tone, and change of location, largely to the benefit of the show’s overall sensibility. Don’t get me wrong. I still have my significant concerns about story choices made concerning representation around gender and sexuality. These include major missteps like the graphic murder of Indigenous, intersex two-spirit character Yahima in episode 4, as well as episode 5’s “shock gender reveal” regarding Christina and William. Not to mention its questionably rendered depiction of a violent sexual assault.

So too do they include smaller (but still pertinent) fumbles. Hello, TV and movie writers, if you’re reading this: use lube, not spit, if your characters are having anal sex. Thank you. That stuff hurts, and not in a fun, sexy way.

Point being: I was both excited for and nervous about this episode. Meeting Ji-ah was something I’d been greatly looking forward to. She was an otherwise mysterious figure weaving her way through the first half of the season, yet had not fully been given her own voice until now. The show’s stumbles when it came to addressing identities and experiences — particularly when they involved sexuality and gender — that weren’t those of their Black leads, though, gave me pause and left me wary.

Having watched the episode, I’m pleased to be able to say that, for the most part, I was wrong. The writing room made smart, responsible choices by choosing to center “Meet Me In Daegu” on Ji-ah’s perspective and her own life, and to frame it through her own language. While your mileage may vary on the ingredients of the story expressed this week — I’ll return to this in a moment — it made room for a refreshing approach to tropes that usually turn me off fast and hard.

Equally, “Meet Me In Daegu” benefited noticeably from choosing to focus on one storyline. As much as I’m deeply worried about Hippolyta and Dee — though we’ll be catching back up with them in episode 7 — I am relieved that neither the depth of their story nor Ji-ah’s has been sacrificed or rushed by trying to cover both in one episode.

On a more complicated note, this episode gave me a window of breathing room after feeling wounded and unsettled — and not in the thought-provoking, enjoyable way horror’s supposed to unsettle you — for two weeks in a row. It’s hard to posit that as an unequivocal good. I worry that the writing will try and sweep its errors under the rug by episode 7 and hope that we’ll have forgotten. All the same, at least I didn’t have to spend several hours after the episode bandaging my feelings.

That said, the choice to focus on one storyline also provided a wonderful opportunity to let the ever-spectacular Jamie Chung truly shine in her role as Ji-ah. She put in the work, and embodied anger, fear, love, grief, shame and resilience confidently and seamlessly.

Moving the narrative to 1949-1950 South Korea allowed for an important and worthwhile unpacking of America’s looming global shadow and intrusion into countries and communities trying to heal from conflict under the pretext of “liberating” them. It made room for a nuanced, intelligent confrontation of the idea of the usually uncritically presented “American hero,” and grappled with the recruitment or drafting of Black and Asian-American soldiers into overseas, colonially-inflected warfare.

While the eventual romance between Atticus and Ji-ah doesn’t come as a surprise, the hows and wherefores of it offer some highly compelling moments of character work for Chung and Majors alike. Ji-ah, inhabited by the spirit of a kumiho who must — at the behest of her mother figure — seduce and consume one hundred men in order to become human again, initially sets her eyes on Atticus following his involvement in the torture and murder of her best friend, Young-ja.

It is not surprising that she develops feelings for him and ends up struggling to keep her powers at bay. Nor is it surprising that, when her control does slip, Atticus’ incomprehension and fear severs the relationship and leaves him unable to hear or understand her warnings that she’s seen a vision of him dying if he returns home to America.

It’s worth noting here that, while as a white Canadian it’s not my place to speak at length on the respectfulness of how the kumiho mythos was used, it does seem to be somewhat Americanized or rehashed to suit the episode’s aims. I won’t belabor the point, but I think it’s worth recognizing that this reinterpretation of existing folklore may not work for everyone. There should be room for critique or querying of the choices made in how the kumiho legends were utilized.

Similarly, while it’s refreshing and interesting to see an exploration of a specific feminine Korean spirituality through the lens of a mudang, something we rarely see depicted in mainstream fiction; your mileage may vary on how authentic this depiction was.

What’s of interest in between, though, is the underlying story wrestling with the vulnerability of loving and being loved in the wake of abuse. Also delving into what that means for these two characters whose lives have been so marred by violence and domination.

As I hinted at earlier, your mileage may vary on whether or not the romance worked for you. My feelings are certainly mixed, and perhaps they’re supposed to be. There’s a long and deeply troubling history of “love” stories revolving around a soldier from a hostile force who “falls in love with” (read: takes advantage of) a young marginalized woman. In these stories, said woman is often herself presented through shamefully racist stereotypes.

I acknowledge and appreciate that this episode told the love story almost exclusively from Ji-ah’s perspective, for a change. Doing so ensures that, while Atticus’ involvement with her is a fraught and tumultuous one, the focus is not on some fetishistic conquering of Ji-ah and her body. Rather, the thread that runs throughout this narrative is the things they have in common as survivors of abuse struggling to reclaim and re-establish their identities and bodily autonomies in systems and families that have sought to undermine or destroy both.

It’s a fundamentally and refreshingly human approach to this story, and to the depiction of a sexual abuse survivor. Though Ji-ah, inhabited by the kumiho spirit as she is, does not have any memories of the young woman she was before her rape at the hands of her stepfather, I connected strongly with her.

In her anger and fear, in her longing for connection not only with others but with her own emotional life, in her shame over feeling that she’d become or been made monstrous, I saw much of my own experience after my own sexual assault. So too did I recognize the painfully out-of-step grief of her mother. She was so desperate to have her daughter back “the way she was” before her trauma that she refused to see and love the young woman her daughter was now and would continue to be.

It should be said that I strongly wish that the translation for the episode’s subtitles had grappled with the history of comfort women and Ji-ah’s sexual exploitation without resorting to anti-sex worker slurs. Nonetheless, the mother-daughter dynamic here remains a powerful and movingly complicated one that made excellent overall use of its screen time.

Equally striking are the deliberate parallels between Ji-ah and Atticus’ abuse and control by parents who claim to be attempting to protect their children. Yet these parents are going about it in deeply wrong, deeply hurtful ways.

The promise of reconciliation and healing shown between mother and child in Ji-ah’s case is something we can only hope to see between Atticus and Montrose in turn. Still, it’s clear that Montrose has a long way to go in his own self-acceptance before he can truly love his son. The writing needs to take some lessons from the sensitivity and respect displayed this week and continue applying it elsewhere.

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Lovecraft Country

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Fantastic acting
• Refreshing take on some problematic tropes
• Complicating the idea of the "American hero"
• Representation of rarely portrayed spiritual traditions

Cons

• Americanisation of some Korean folklore
• Anti sex worker language