Warning: This article contains discussion of racism, violence, homophobia, murder, child abuse, and death.

Engaging with (and relating to) fantasy, science fiction, horror, and any combination of the above will often, if not always, require accepting some otherworldly or even outlandish logic. Leading up to its penultimate episode, Lovecraft Country has been no different. Despite some moments that felt overcrowded, choppily paced, or otherwise not fully thought through, I have (for the most part) been all-in.

To date, the story has been one that establishes its rules — admittedly sometimes through exposition-heavy sequences that make me wonder if the writers underestimate the audience’s intelligence — clearly and without hesitation. Similarly, it lays out the rules it’s deliberately breaking the same way.

I’m often reminded while watching this show, of Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory.” In it, she discussed using things that aren’t factual to express and convey things that are true, because the empirical facts can exist without human intelligence or emotional meaning. To express and make sense of things that are true may involve and even require leaning into the allegorical, the symbolic, i.e. the non-factual — whether it’s a black shoggoth or an elaborate multiverse machine — to say something that is honest.

Lovecraft Country’s deliberate willingness to bend, alter, and break the rules of fiction genres that have often been dominated by straight white men works much the same way. By deliberately abandoning and even undoing the “facts” that have been imparted about how science fiction or horror is “supposed” to work, the show unearths and grapples with significant, fundamental truths. To me, it is these truths that imbue the show’s strongest moments with the heart and emotional throughline that makes them work so well.

Unfortunately (and frustratingly) there are moments where the rules that Lovecraft Country establishes for itself either don’t quite manage to hold up under pressure, or simply don’t convince me to accept their logic. I say frustratingly, because I have so much love, enthusiasm and emotional space for what this show is doing when it’s at its best. When it doesn’t convince me, or when the writing puts forth choices that knock me out of the story, I’m frustrated and stung knowing that it’s capable of better.

This ninth, penultimate, episode is one of those moments for me. Admittedly, the episode establishes rules of time travel that it swiftly refuses to abide by. However, this is something that often comes up in fiction involving time travel or multiple universes. I am willing to have patience with some slightly painful-looking acrobatic leaps here.

Similarly, while I find it jarring that the episode begins with a number of elements unaddressed — where did Tic’s black shoggoth go? Are the Order of the Ancient Dawn coming for Atticus and Leti? — I am somewhat willing to grant the benefit of the doubt that these details will reappear in the final episode.

More importantly, I find myself struggling to accept the logic of some of the storytelling “rules” or “facts” that this episode clung to. Especially when the show’s greatest strengths often come from rejecting rules that don’t suit it.

As the relationships and various story threads raised throughout this first season finally begin to weave together, building toward a climax that is just beyond our reach; we pull together the final threads making up the connection. The necessary interdependence between rage and love reverberating throughout this episode.

We understand in bright, clear strokes by now that the pain of trauma, loss, intergenerational violence, and inherited oppression that inflects all of these relationships exists at this crossroads, too. Ruby and Leti are so frustrated with each other because they love each other. They believe each is fundamentally, inherently capable of a deeper love and humanity than this.

This applies with Atticus and Montrose, too. Over the course of the episode, Atticus finally comes to see his father as a human being, and not only the slightly mythic shape of the abusive and absent authority figure. Walking through this journey with him, we understand that his anger and hurt with Montrose runs so strongly in him because of his love for his father, not in spite of it.

Likewise, we understand that our core cast have much to love, cherish and take pride in as Black Americans. There is a love for their community, and even for the country that they live in. So too, where there is righteous frustration, hurt and anger, it has roots in belief in a fundamental goodness. There is a fundamental humanity, that is not reflected back to them in a broken and violent system. A system made by broken, cruel, and violent people unwilling to love them in turn.

The tools through which Lovecraft Country carves out this thesis are so valuable. They are inevitably both deeply timeless and painfully contemporary. Much of understanding this core argument necessarily comes through the ongoing and deliberate act of witnessing. This applies to both the audience and the characters themselves.

In this sense, the intent behind “Rewind 1921” is clear in its storytelling choices. By having the characters (and the audience) bear a close and intimate witness to the horrors, violence, and cruelty of the Tulsa race massacre, this too demands and entails an act of commingled rage and love. Something that is still extremely (perhaps especially) salient in 2020.

This is a part of history that is often downplayed, swept under the rug, or not taught in schools. Thus, to a certain extent I understand the why — if not necessarily the how — in the writers’ decision to place it at the center of this episode’s focus.

Intent, of course, does not always translate to impact. As a white viewer following this season to date, there are necessarily experiences had in engaging with this story that aren’t accessible to me. Understanding the intention and the decision-making process, in Lovecraft Country’s writing room leading up to this episode, in no way lessens the very real hurt and re-traumatization experienced by Black fans of the show watching these scenes.

For some, it’s feeling wounded by Leti walking unscathed through a burning house while darker-skinned Black elders slowly burn to death around her. For others, it’s feeling wounded and even betrayed by the minute focus on violence and cruelty with nary a breather given to Black joy, something nearly every other episode has deliberately balanced against the horror. Altogether, “Rewind 1921” raises many questions and concerns about, essentially, whether the writing choices made were worth it.

In these ways, I too find myself struggling with the rules by which the writing room chose to abide in this ninth episode. The reasons that Black creatives and fans of the show have, themselves, identified are already more than enough. While I can’t speak to that pain firsthand, I do feel that white viewers of the show have a responsibility to read, listen to, and understand it, just as we have a responsibility to understand the moments of joy and excitement.

While we’re here, I need to do and say something about Montrose. I’ve been talking about Lovecraft Country’s handling of queerness essentially since the moment that it came up, and sitting this close to the end of the first season, I simply don’t know that I’m convinced. In a series that takes its strengths from breaking and discarding fictional standards or rule sets that have been used to harm and exclude, I’m struggling to make sense of the show using the f slur not once but now three times.

I do accept the logic by which Atticus needed to empirically see, and choose to love, his father as a young boy (and traumatized human being) in order to begin mending their relationship. Nonetheless, I’m struggling to make sense of what it accomplishes to show us the murder of Montrose’s first lover in graphic detail.

I’m struggling to make sense of the show’s seeming inability to conceive of Montrose’s homosexuality as something he could cherish — even if it was in private for his own safety and that of his partner — and not solely a source of grief, trauma, and ongoing cyclical violence. This writing room has the ability to decide that love and sex between men can be a site of joyous, loving rebellion. It has the ability to decide that love and sex between women can be transgressive, sexy and affirming. It has the ability to decide that intersex and trans characters need not have their genitals ogled before their violent murders.

When it comes to queer and trans experiences, it seems unwilling or unable to break and discard the horror genre rules that have boxed these identities off into repression, corruption, abuse, and death. I am struggling to grasp why some rules of horror with roots in bigotry can be broken while others are seemingly inviolable.

For what it’s worth, though, the cast (as always) does an absolutely phenomenal job with what they’re given. Their love, passion and empathy for these characters (and these stories) is so clear. Despite moments that haven’t landed for me, or story beats that have hurt in ways they weren’t intended to, I do deeply want them to have a chance at a second season to keep inhabiting these stories and lives so vividly.

If I could give performance awards for this episode, they’d without question have to go to Michael K. Williams and Aunjanue Ellis. They deserve it for letting me feel these characters in my bones and my gut even through writing or directing choices that didn’t sit well with me. I also need to give some serious accolades to Janai Brugger for that absolutely stunning requiem, inspired by Sonia Sanchez’s poem Catch the Fire and composed by Laura Karpman uniquely for this episode.

All that being said, it is ultimately frustrating to be so close to the finale of a show that I mostly very deeply love — and be looking to that finale more with fear than with excitement. I fear that the many, many threads woven throughout this narrative won’t be resolved in a way that feels satisfying and conclusive. They do not necessarily need to be tied off, as there may or may not be a second season, but a satisfying conclusion is important.

I worry that the questions, concerns, and doubts raised by Black, queer, trans, and Indigenous audience members won’t be answered. I worry and fear in these ways because I’ve seen and known how much Lovecraft Country is (at its core) an act of love in its own right. It’s in knowing how wonderful it’s capable of being that I’m anxious of it losing its heart in this final chapter.

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Lovecraft Country

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Phenomenal acting
• Wonderful soundtrack

Cons

• Leaves some fairly significant plot gaps
• Some depictions of violence missed the mark