The final episode of Lovecraft Country serves as a tribute to Black motherhood in all of its many shapes. Highlighting single motherhood, the loss of a mom, and found family, the finale puts a nice bow on the many threads running through Lovecraft Country. By ending at the beginning, with Hannah’s struggle to liberate herself and keep her unborn child safe, we get a “Full Circle” image of how Atticus became a man.
With Diana close to death again, Tic and Leti are sucked into the spirit world. Ester (not Hannah, who burned in the Oklahoma house), Hannah, and Tic’s mother appear around the salt circle ready to take out Titus The Recurring once and for all. While the women chant, Tic does what the army trained him to do. He beats the ever loving out of Titus and cuts a piece of his flesh out. Unfortunately, it takes a couple tries to end Titus, who briefly escapes the circle, landing right in front of Christina’s fancy car. Thrown from the vehicle, Christina nevertheless recognizes her ancestor. The clock to the autumnal equinox begins to tick.
When one calls on their ancestors for guidance, they’re asking for all the lessons learned by their makers to manifest in their being, so that they might make better choices in the present. Tic’s dealt with his daddy issues over the course of this series, but his mommy issues simmered in the background—not unseen, but untouched, the wound of that loss too much to bear. But the story of Lovecraft Country is a matriarchal one. It’s Hannah’s story. She ran away from an enslaved life while pregnant, and managed to destroy a physical representation of her objectification in the process. This choice protected her progeny for centuries. Now all the mothers, the bringers and nurturers of existence, guide Tic one last time.
As Tic and Leti release each woman, it’s done with an expression of gratitude. But when they get to Tic’s mother, he’s unable to let go. Leti carries Tic’s son, and that blood makes her family. She’s able to cast the spell. Hannah entrusted her with a single mission, and she helps Tic say goodbye to his mother. Finally, all of Tic’s demons, fears, and losses are exposed to his love, and his burdens dry up in the light. For the first time, Tic’s able to operate unencumbered by guilt, grief, or shame. Which is perfect timing, because Christina walks into his uncle’s garage like the colonizer she is.
One thing about Christina, she always felt entitled to her actions. Impressive, given she lived in the 1950s, a time period well documented for trying to shove women back into the kitchen. On the other hand, she consistently claimed to understand the Black plight in America, even going so far as to pay to be killed like Emmett Till. Yet, she storms into that garage demanding ownership over a stolen book. “This isn’t generational hate. Our families are not at war. This has never been personal,” Christina states. But they were one family, connected by blood, not two feuding families. She enters believing her right to freedom trumps Hannah’s sacrifice and Tic’s magical ability. “(Tic’s) death is a consequence of a spell I’m attempting to cast,” she pleaded with Montrose who survived more in the last 48 hours than she would experience in her entire life. “There’s no other way…at least that I could figure out.” But there lies the rub—Christina stopped looking. Once she found a way out of the male dominated circle her father forced her into, she stopped caring about the consequences of her actions. An entire life became inconsequential to her. The arrogance! In petty fashion, Christina yanks her protection spell from Leti, making her and the baby vulnerable again.
Speaking of innocent babies, Diana, whole and in her bed, thanks to the grueling physical sacrifices of her mother, remained hurt by the brief time her mother left her side. “You left me.” She hurled the greatest sin a mother can commit, and expected it to land a crushing blow. Instead, Hippolyta gives Diana a gift. A mother made whole lights a path of excellence for a child.
When my baby brother and I were in grammar school, my mother earned two degrees, including her master’s, and eventually became a teacher at the local college. Her mother before her earned her Ph.D. while my mother was in grammar school. Before her, my great-grandmother opened a hat shop during the Great Depression to feed her children while they went to school. And before that, my great-great-grandmother sued her husband for alienation of affection, won, and moved three of her children across the country to find a better life, when my great-grandmother was six. Each woman tells the story of their mother making space for herself with pride and admiration. For it was in those long nights, when we first had to fend for ourselves, cook our own dinners and check our siblings’ homework, that we could appreciate all the warmth and protections our mothers crafted for us. Their strengths were too close to be appreciated for the treasures they were.
Seeing Mom dominate a new road, while we conquered the homefront, gave life to new goals, possibilities, and realities for our future. But most importantly, mom became real. Flesh and blood, fallible, courageous, exhausted, and stronger than ever before Mom taught us how to be independent women. How to survive in the world on our own two feet. Like Diana, we did not yet realize that though Mom pulled away, she was not first to do it. At some point, most children will ask their primary caregivers to stop helping them. Stop picking out the clothes, don’t pick out the activities. Until one day, the child moves away entirely. The relationship between a parent and child is a series of letting go. Until finally, one of them takes the ultimate journey, where none may follow.
Diana’s too young to understand this. She emotionally managed the murder of her best friend, her first frightening run-in with the cops, and the murder of her father by herself. None of the adults in the room had the fortitude to walk themselves through these crises, let alone a child. So, Diana clung to the now familiar comfort of anger, struggling to forgive the person she loves the most. Luckily, Hippolyta respects her daughter. She apologizes, and makes a solemn promise that Diana will draw again. Then, she shows her a secret room with bells and whistles that we did not get to see.
The group heads back to Leti’s house. Across the street, another Black family has moved in! They’re taking back the neighborhood. Two dozen exploded cops and no arrests probably led to swift white flight. The Orisha’s X remains on the doorframe, and each member of the family pays it a nod of respect as they enter the domicile.
And Ji-Ah returns: I knew they didn’t bring this woman all the way to Chicago to be dismissed by Tic. Of course, she finds herself dealing with white nonsense and objectification. At least Tic makes a proper apology for his cruelty. Ji-Ah’s recently lost her mother as well. Tic, who just learned his mommy lesson two minutes ago, does his best to pass what he learned to Ji-Ah. He claims her as family, and she offers up the truth of what she’s been told. Tic will die, and she will become a monster. But Tic once thought the same thing in the middle of a war, until he met Ji-Ah and realized he could choose. Ji-Ah will need to choose, too.
Ruby had two families, neither treating her as she deserved, to pick from. Her sister, who flies in at her convenience and out at her hysterics, whom Ruby could never rely on nor trust, claimed everything would be different. Christina—who humiliated Ruby, used her, and listed to her—makes love to Ruby in her true form for the first time. While Christina wishes she didn’t have to kill her last living relative, the option remains fully on the table. Ruby eventually chooses her blood, giving over a vial of Christina’s blood so Leti and company could perform the binding spell.
Once in Ardham, they form a salt triangle, and Tic eats the bit of flesh he carved from Titus, and chases it with Christina’s blood. In the burned out hollow if the Braithwaite ancestral manor, under the full moon, the creepy white townsfolk prepare Tic. How’d they know he was coming… I feel like this is a fatal flaw in their plan. Is this a plan?
Back in the meat silo that once held Montrose, Leti and Ruby begin drawing protection runes on the top floor. But then, a double cross. Christina stole Ruby’s body! Now, it’s time for everyone to prove what they learned about physically fighting for their life over the summer. In a dramatic family fight that would make WWE fans happy, 2X4s and chairs fly as Hippolyta and Montrose fight some of the locals on the covered bridge. Just when Leti pins Ruby/Christina to the ropes, dangling five stories above an open stone pit, Ruby/Christina bounces back and shoves Leti out a window! My god, are they trying to kill us? Plot armor must protect her right? Or is this an alternate ending?
Of course, when Tic hears the news his beloved died, he is beside himself. Strapped up, everyone tied and brought to a knee, poor Montrose laid up on a makeshift gurney, Christina in a white dress, the witching hour is upon them—all truly seems lost, and certainly Tic is a goner.
Their only hope? Diana waited in the car with her flashlight and read a comic book her mother drew. A wererabbit leaps from the ground and slams into the car, scattering shattered windows everywhere. But then, just as the hour seemed its darkest, familiar beast tackles the wererabbit. Did they perform a new protection spell for Leti?! Did it happen just in that moment?
Leti’s body still lies on the ground. Christina drinks from Tic’s slashed arteries. Her white lace dress soaked in blood made me think of innocence lost. The entire time we’ve known Christina, she insisted she was nothing like her father. Here, she stands in his full image, completing his goal, murdering the same son he tried to kill another lifetime ago. She is the arbiter of her own nightmare, and she didn’t even know it. Any part of her worth saving vanished the moment she murdered Ruby.
But as we soon see: Leti lives! Plot armor rules.
Unfortunately, our dear Tic dies, though not before he sees the love of his life one last time. The twangy banjo makes me want to hear the ballad of Atticus Freeman. It’s quite the story.
Leti, full of rage, charges at Christina, piercing her through the abdomen. But Christina never turned over her blood, and she finished her spell first. It’s here that the premonition given to Ji-Ah makes sense. The plume of smoke, being one with the darkness, seeing a lot of death, her hundredth kill, all add up to her binding Tic and Christina.
Then, the Lord’s divine judgement takes place. Balanced on the scales, Tic and Christina stand their judgment. Tic, now baptized and made whole through his journey of acceptance and forgiveness, is practically a saint. Christina killed the woman she loved. So. You know. She goes to the bad place.
In the spirit of bringing things full circle, this makes a lot of sense. If the spells were stolen from indigenous and enslaved people, it’s nice that they ended up with the rightful owners. Christianity played a huge role in enslaved life, the Underground Railroad, and later, the organizing of the Civil Rights movement. Many Black Americans, like Leti and Ester, still cling to the values and community of the church. Seeing both the ancestral religions and the religion of the new world blend together does feel circular.
The final goal accomplished, magic now belongs to Black Americans, which is as sweet a wish as I can imagine for Black people, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A guaranteed protection from white supremacy would be the greatest gift. Of course, magic takes as much as it gives, not unlike the Lord. We have the unenviable task of watching Michael K. Williams act his ass off as he must come to terms with the death of his child. Knowing now what Montrose survived as a child, this scene shatters the heart. In death, Atticus gives a final gift to Montrose. He asks him to be the father he always wanted to be, this time to his grandson. For the second time, Atticus plays hero to his father.
In the show’s final scene, Diana ends the life of Christina Braithwaite. Revealing a mechanical arm her mother built, she crushes the woman’s neck as her new protector howls at the moon in a dramatic conclusion. Diana will never be unprotected again, never be vulnerable to white supremacy again. They kept her from the portion that would emotionally scar, and gave her the tools to survive in their absence. What wonders will she wield? Her future is endless.
161 Comments
Diana finishing off Christina with her bionic hand . . . did not see that coming.
That seemed kinda… future big bad guy to me.. idk.. like Christina was the bad guy of course but she never did anything to Dee and in face sort of saved her at one point. But the white people fucked with Dee one too many times and now shes snapping white peoples throats. Can’t blame her but it seems like a step to the dark side as opposed to uplifting and free.
but she never did anything to Dee and in face sort of saved her at one point
Christina could have saved her wholesale, including her arm but left her to die. I’ll give you that the audience knows that and maybe not the Freemans but she definitely knows that white folks with magic took her arm and this specific one took her older cousin and probably did it in the same place that took her dad. It’s why Dee tells her “you still ain’t learned”. Cause she hasn’t. She’s half dead and still trying to get over by having Dee help her. That said – I’m going to get wild dislikes for this but I did not understand this episode. It was just so fast. Even for this show.
I feel you but Dee only knows from over hearing that Tic will die if Christina finished her spell and that they were planning to stop her. Nothing is shown on screen that Dee saw them carrying Tic so imma assume she is unaware Tic died so really she should have assumed Christina failed. So shes really killing her off the fact that a white person did her harm and Christina attempted to kill Tic. That is some hardcore shit for a young person lol
It’s why Dee tells her “you still ain’t learned”.Dee says, “They still haven’t learned.” She’s referring to white people, not to Christina specifically. So it’s correct to see in this sentence, if one so wishes, the beginning of Dee’s descent into some form of “the only good white is a dead white” vigilantism. Portraying a kid becoming a ruthless cold-blood murderer is not usually associated with good things to come.
I thought the “they” she was referring to was the leti and them not finishing off Christina, so she took it into her own hands.
That’s how I read that line.
Why was Dee there at all? Oh, wait, because Hippolyta left her before and I guess she would rather her be in harm’s way instead at home safe because she didn’t want her to think she was being abandoned again?
She was in on the whole plan, they just left her in the car to be safe. The shoggoth was protecting her. We saw that in the flashback when Ji-Ah was on Tic and Christina; Tic ‘introduced’ the shoggoth to Dee. And Dee also already had her robotic arm, which, I was *kind of* assuming that Hippolyta either made or took to the future to get made, so either way she had to have been largely in on what was happening. Plus, I believe she was reading the book.
It is we like the start of Season 6 Willow from Buffy. Are we getting a dark path to be saved by a yellow crayon.
I think every major character did something leading to someone else’s death that would nominally be unforgivable if a villain did it in any other series. (…Other than Leitita who was only ever in jail and I don’t think they explained why but I assume it would have been relatively minor?)I get the premise that they would want to show Christina doing some sympathetic stuff, like play tag or seem to genuinely care about Ruby so there’s any sense of ambiguity. And on the flip side, respectability politics is a losing burden where even the playing that game does not guarantee protection or acceptance so these are flawed protagonists who have made their good or bad choices…But then it’s still so hard for me to map this onto the years of more standard storytelling. It seems like the show actually relished a lot of grotesque victories throughout. (And in hindsight that’s even true with the presumably white flight of Leti’s neighborhood, where we see a black single family household but that only comes about through rivers of blood and pretend gas explosions?)
“Uplifting and free”? Christina killed her cousin/possible half-brother. Christina was involved in the death of Diana’s father. She also represents the Whites with power who don’t seem to suffer any consequences for their brutality against her, her late best friend, or countless others in her community.Why should she let a direct oppressor live? Why do Blacks have to constantly turn the other cheek? It does no good and doesn’t serve as a deterrent to our mistreatment at the hands of society. Uplift? Not our job. Free attackers from responsibility or assuage White guilt? Again, not our job.
Season 2
I’m presuming that it is just one possible seed for another season, which…honestly, I’m not all that thrilled about. This adaptation was a bit of a mess in places—the anachronistic use of modern music never really worked for me, for instance—but I think the whole worked thematically. I’m just not crazy about this modern trend of leaving an opening/cliffhanger for another season; I would much prefer that they just wrap things up and let the season be a season. If they get another season approved by the network, great, they can write from there; if not, you’ve still told a complete story.In a pragmatic sense, I know this is just how modern TV production has to operate, in order to compete for audience and limited network love. And I know that this ensures that the talented performers, writers, showrunners, and other staff working on this show will have regular employment. Yet it still bothers, mostly because it mars perfectly good season endings. Perhaps the next time I get invested in a promising new show, I’ll just stop watching at the last five minutes or so…
But, there’s no cliffhanger.
Seems appropriate, though, for a girl whose life is defined by violence. In a way, she now has the ultimate American currency: the ability to inflict pain and death on anyone she sees as a threat.
Christina dieing is a good thing. Completely agree.I don’t really get why Diana did it.Every and any other character would make sense to me. Why did Diana do it?I loved Diana standing there with her cyborg arm, pet Shoggoth by her side; not needing protection any more, with black Shoggoth howling at the moon. Great scene.
I wonder what she meant when she said “they never learn”?
I just not got around to watching the finale and that final scene put a REAL bad taste in my mouth. I’m not saying Christina didn’t deserve to die, of course, but doing it like that… I don’t know, it seemed in bad taste at best. I gotta mull this over for a while. And read more comments so I can find out whether it’s just me.
Makes me wonder if the “woman with the robot arm” who gave Atticus the copy of “Lovecraft Country” was actually future Diana.
Ohhhhhhh!
I mean, that’s what I’m assuming at this point, yes.
Well that was messy. At several points I kept thinking, where are we, why are we doing this and why are we going there? What was the deal with the baptism? Spiritual faith is pretty much sidelined in Lovecraft Country. Oh look Ji-Ah. Stick around gal, we may need to use your snake eyes to jumper cable the counter spell to keep whites from getting the Book of Names I guess. I have no idea………And Dee with her new Terminator arm that Hippolyta designed but no one mentions it in the car since singing Sh’Boom takes precedence…. How much fucking salt did they pack? Who were all those guys who wandered in from the set of The Village? Dee made a new friend, but I had no idea she was good with animals with shark teeth. Montrose still killed Yahima, but we’ll ignore that.This was a show, aside from the first and the penultimate episode, that the detours were far more compelling and realized. When the primary story becomes a Jenga Tower it can’t help but fall into a big pile of pieces.
“Montrose still killed Yahima, but we’ll ignore that.”Atticus even lists off all the things they’ve been through and no one mentions this. No one’s mad about it. Bad taste.
All in all, “Meet Me in Daegu”and “Rewind 1921″ were the highlights of this series for me. The main plot was just all over the place, which was a shame. Maybe another episode would’ve helped, but I think it was always going to go the way it did.
Atticus didn’t know that Montrose killed them.
Yeah I felt like half the little plotlines in this episode were just casually thrown in there without much of a care, felt a bit convoluted.
lol lol yes it was so cringey, didn’t know what the fuck the boxing match in the salt circle was with the ghosts either. Also I loved the writers with Yahima were like “we were trying to show how Montrose is oppressed but also an oppressor, we handled it poorly”. It’s like hmm don’t blame this on Montrose, this was ya’lls own transphobia.
Not just transphobia–frankly I don’t think they handled any of that with Montrose well. Sure, the trope of the closeted homosexual turning to drink is a valid one, but that he’s also apparently insanely violent with his own son AND basically a casual killer? Why??
Messy is right. And yes to every question you had–but I especially wondered why Christine had so many followers doing her bidding. Huh? Where were they before? I know their town was supported by her father but would they still follow her?
Great recap! I will miss this show.
“Diana waited in the car with her flashlight and read a comic book her mother drew.”I believe she is actually reading Lovecraft Country, the version of the book that Tic’s son writes in the future.
It is the Lovecraft Country book. I think she thought she needed to kill Christina so the blood spilt was more than Atticus’.
How old is Diana? The most surprising and interesting thing in the episode was a young teen killing a gravely injured person in cold blood. Ballsy! I liked the last image—very genre—but felt a little that it was there to look cool. Thematically I got that Diana is the next generation of Black magic and power and I look forward to her Terminator-arm adventures with her pet shoggoth.Explained in Sepinwall’s post-season interview with Misha Green: Christina, as Leti was falling, uttered the invulnerable spell to give it back to Leti since she promised Ruby that her sister wouldn’t be harmed. Since they didn’t show Ruby’s dead body, I hope she does come back. Sepinwall made the good point in his review that a character discovering their queerness shouldn’t be summarily killed right after. And Ruby’s character—of being a Black woman trying to navigate the white world—had more potential for further story. I want to keep seeing Wunmi Musaku in the role.Full circle of me not recognizing the Black actresses on this show. From the pilot, Leti played by Birds of Prey star Jurnee Smollet. From the finale (and before), I had no clue that Dora was played by Justified’s Erica Tazel. Marshal Brooks looked very different.Christina’s sociopathy in the scene where she impatiently, with exasperation, explains that Tic’s death is merely a consequence of the spell was a hoot. Don’t you understand, people?
The series had some amazing and amazingly great episodes. If we got them in the next season, I don’t mind the more pedestrian ones that are just genre stories. They’re fun. Now that I like this found family.
They did show Ruby in a bed by William, in a coma or brain dead or something.
Leti played by Birds of Prey star Jurnee Smollet.I like to think of her more as Misha Green’s Underground star Jurnee Smollett. Secondarily as former child actress and Eve’s Bayou star Jurnee Smollett. More frequently as “I can’t take my eyes off of her” Jurnee Smollett and “I seriously just binged her entire career including terrible, terrible stuff like Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor and that one CBS legal show with Jim Belushi” Jurnee Smollett. (She wore Ally McBeal-esque outfits on that show, so I regret nothing).
The CW birds of pray from way way back from a decade or two ago?
No, Jurnee Smollett is Black Canary from the Birds of Prey movie with Margot Robbie. The ultra-cheesy Birds of Prey show you’re thinking of was from an era when superheroes on TV weren’t allowed to be anything but white. Black Canary there was the properly Aryan Rachel Skarsten.
Sorry, it has been a great show, until this last ep, which could be titled “Deus Ex-Machina”.Christina removed Leti’s protection spell. How the hell has she got it back? Because if the Freeman team could just do new protection spells that easy, nothing else makes sense (why not give one to Tic? Damn, why not to everybody else?). By all means, Leti coming back from that fall is a “Deus Ex-Machina”.Christina played them with the fake blood and completed her immortality spell. By all that have been established in the show so far, once completed, it’s over, Christina won, Tic dies, end of story. Yet… Ji-Ah something… Baptism blah-blah-blah… Leti’s never talked about before mumble-jumble… And then, suddenly, all out of the blue, there was a completely new and, up to the point, unknown way to cancel the spell. At no point before it was established that there were other ways to stop Christina. Goddamn “Deus Ex-Machina”.All the solutions came out unexplained. Worse: hand waved away with what ammounts to “It’s magic!”. That would be okay if it didn’t undermine the coherence of how magic works had been established up to this last episode.I still love the show, but the solutions to the conflict have let me disappointed.
I’m so relieved Ji-ah lived. Everything else in the finale went
pretty much as expected (although I hated Diana becoming a killer in
such a young age but I’m all for the adventures of a Cyborg Girl and
Black Shoggoth). But Ji-ah dying was my biggest fear about the finale. I
was afraid of them using a trope that would end with her needing to
sacrifice herself. But no, she lived and she saved the day. The spell
only worked thanks to her. And even better – it worked thanks to her
being kumiho so her choice to be who she is paid off. Even becoming
darkness was a good thing. I really loved how the all the doom markings
about her were just about her becoming a hero. I think this is the part I
loved the most – that her choices made her
After all if she
wasn’t there Christina would’ve won. The plan would’ve failed. If Tic
didn’t come to apologise and include her on the team the plan would’ve
failed. If they all didn’t work together as family it would’ve failed.That
was Christina’s biggest fault. She was always only about herself. Even
those she cared about like Ruby she only cared about if they didn’t
stand in her way. Same with Tic. She could’ve found family there but he
was only means to her ends. It’s even true for William. She had the
Invulnerability
spell that can heal but she wanted to use his form instead.
They could all chose to be monsters or heroes and she chose to be a
monster.
This was the difference between her and those close to her
and Tic and Ji-ah, Tic and Montrose, Leti and Ruby, Hippolyta and Diana.
Despite all the bad stuff that happened between them and the way they
hurt and failed each other there was always capability for forgiveness.
And there was willingness to make up for their mistakes and find each
other again. All Christina ever did was kill and use – her father,
William, Ruby, Tic – and in the end she was all alone. And she died
alone. As Tic said they have family. She chose to have nothing.
I
liked how Christina was also defeated by her own arrogance. She
could’ve stopped Leti from casting at any point with spells or her big
knife.
Just enough to break the spell.
But she didn’t even try because she didn’t believe “those people” could
outsmart her. She didn’t think they could hurt her. She was so sure no
one can touch her she even saved Leti
with
Invulnerability Spell. She thought herself superior to the very end. And she lost everything.
In the end it all happened the way
Tic learnt in the future. I suppose it was just like Tulsa situation and
the past couldn’t be changed. He died. Diana got mechanical hand. Leti
and Ji-ah took magic away from white people. I wonder how that future
looks like.
In short term I chose to believe Leti finds a way
to save Ruby. After all she is just in a coma and Leti has Book of
Names. Or she can find
with
Invulnerability Spell in Christina/William’s house and use it to heal.
Tic had to die for the future but Ruby doesn’t need to.
She was so sure no one can touch her she even saved Leti with Invulnerability Spell
I thought Ruby gave Leti the Invunerabilty Spell, after she found at the graveyard that Christina had broken her promise and removed the protection.I’m hoping Ruby can come back too, and that Christina meant “mostly dead” i.e coma.
We see both of those in the flashbacks of Christina’s life Ji-ah sees when she connects to her through her tail.
We see Christina as Ruby looking at Leti’s body from the tower and reciting the incantation. Since the Invulnerability Spell also heals I assumed that’s what she did to Leti to honour her promise to Ruby. I suppose it lets her think of herself as a good guy?
We also see Ruby on a bed connected to the machines just like William is (and Dell was) so I assume she is in a coma.
I assumed that William and Dell were in vegetative states, not comas. They only had machines keeping them alive, which is what Christina needed to use her morph spells. So I think that Ruby is brain dead, as well.
Possibly, but all Christina ever says is that they are in coma. Also we don’t know how good the Invulnerability Spell is at healing. It seems you just have to not be fully dead. So this still might be enough.
Weren’t William and Dell (and then Ruby) just being used as doppelganger host bodies for that spell?
They were used to make the potion for body change. This came from mixing the blood, hair and nails of the person shape one took and one using the new form. But to do that they had to be kept alive in coma. However, they don’t need to be anywhere close. Christina left both William and Ruby in Chicago so events in Ardham shouldn’t affect them much.
Thanks, I had a hard time following everything that happened in those flashback montages. Still weird that Christina didn’t tell Tic that (I would argue that it would make him more compliant) but I suppose that was the show runner messing with out emotions. It’s odd: like you I have trouble understanding what Christina’s motivation would be. Was it love for Ruby? She claimed to care for William, but rather than save his life she chose to use his body as a suit. Christina expressed some regret — or at least reluctance— about ending the family bloodline, so saving Leti and thus Tic’s son might have been her rationale. But if she is making this gesture to preserve the family why didn’t she say so?And what was that last thing Leti told Ruby in the grave yard? Are we going to have to wait until next season to find out?
Misha Green said Christina give Leti the Invulnerability back because she promised Ruby nothing will happen to Leti. I think Christina was always telling the truth. She was going to look for a better way in the Book of Names. She didn’t think it personal. She had no ill will towards them unless they stood in her way of getting what she wants.She wanted to walk around as William more than she wanted him back. She wanted immortality more than she wanted family. So that’s why she made those decisions.I don’t think we’ll learn but it doesn’t really matter. She didn’t agree.
I think Christina was always telling the truth. She was going to look for a better way in the Book of Names. She didn’t think it personal. She had no ill will towards them unless they stood in her way of getting what she wants.I agree. Which is why I’ve always argued against seeing her as the Big Bad, which is a very one-dimensional approach. Which is why I have mixed feelings about this finale, because there at the end, Christina turned into the final boss, the adversarial cackling witch with no depth, and just a barely decipherable spray of flashing frames to partially counter this notion.Also disappointing: Ruby’s speech about choosing a family vs reminding someone of blood ties only when it’s convenient ended up not mattering, because Ruby decided to betray Christina anyway (whereas Christina didn’t betray Ruby. The “unless they stood in her ways” caveat doesn’t even apply here, because Ruby was co-plotting to murder her at that point, so one can argue stopping that plan was just self-preservation on Christina’s part). So blood does trump emotional bond and free choice, after all?And perhaps the most problematic aspect is that resolution where magic is taken away from “every white person in the world” (beyond the simple fact that it’s a grandiose solution produced in too facile a fashion, like a fairy tale wish). This idea might feel fitting in the moment but it’s predicated on the notion that no white person is trustworthy nor sympathetic (in fact, like you wrote, Christina was actually telling them the truth, but they didn’t trust her primarily because she was white), and especially no white person is ever oppressed. What about the descendants of the druids who fought against Roman imperialism? What if there was some Chechen sorcerer defending their people against Russians? How does the spell even draw the line at “white people”? Are Turkish white? Are Jews? Are Mediterranean populations? Worldwide is a big place to go. And considering races do not actually exist and there’s just an infinite number of skin shades with no clear boundary if not the ones fabricated ad hoc by those in a position of power, it’s not clear what the spell is supposed to be locking on. What percentage of white is white enough? Not to mention, the racial divide doesn’t even take into consideration different lines of oppression (gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc.) that the spell might just harm.It’s a strange point to end the season on, one that Misha Green didn’t make in Underground, where it was always clear to an extent that in order to build a better world, everybody, regardless of their skin tone, should reject the received culture of oppression and work together as equals. A reversed world where the oppressors become the oppressed and vice versa might feel like poetic justice, but it’s not a better world. Hatred is still hatred even when it’s justified. Is this what Lovecraft Country is telling us? Should we worry that Dee killed Christina in cold blood, or are we supposed to cheer? It’s unclear to me, as of now.Mostly, I was hoping Lovecraft Country would work to show unity is the only future for humanity. Instead, looking back, there was no white presence that wasn’t either a despicable villain or a faceless lackey (the latter might be taken as condemnation of lower-class white people’s passive laissez-faire attitude in the face of inequality and black oppression, but if so, it’s very undercooked). There was only Christina, with her potential for subverting expectations in a productive way, but in the end she still devolved into the usual one-sided figure of evil antagonist to defeat, her deeper motivations buried under plot and convenience (for one, we never really got why she felt the need to revisit Emmett’s agony on herself).
I think Christina was always telling the truth. She was going to look for a better way in the Book of Names. She didn’t think it personal. She had no ill will towards them unless they stood in her way of getting what she wants.“I agree. Which is why I’ve always argued against seeing her as the Big Bad, which is a very one-dimensional approach.”Regardless of her reasons, she was still looking to make herself immortal at the cost of sacrificing another person. She allowed George to die as a consequence of killing her father. Then she spent the rest of the season using the protagonists in ways that put them directly in the path of the other order of wizards, while offering the barest minimum of help in order to manipulate them further. Even her intimate moments with Ruby had her talking about magic as a free pass to do “whatever the fuck she wanted.” She may have believed it when she said it wasn’t personal, but she had such a disregard for the consequences of her actions and how they affected the protagonists, that there was no way they could have trusted her with the book. That level of entitlement, lack of empathy and ruthlessness is exactly like her father and Titus before him.“The “unless they stood in her ways” caveat doesn’t even apply here, because Ruby was co-plotting to murder her at that point, so one can argue stopping that plan was just self-preservation on Christina’s part).”No, one can’t. Their goal was to bind her magic and remove her as a threat. The worst she was looking at was becoming a normal person.
Regardless of her reasons, she was still looking to make herself immortal at the cost of sacrificing another person.
Eh. It was Atticus. I would mark that as neutral. It was selfish, but then two Korean woman get retribution, don’t they?
The key word being selfish. There was nothing altruistic about her choosing Atticus and any karmic debt that was paid was accidental. She had no prior knowledge of what he had done and only acted with the knowledge that he held the blood that she needed.
I liked the fact that we saw some of Christina motivations and empathise with them. That we got to understand the way her father damaged her and created someone so selfish. I too wish she could’ve learnt to be better and that she’d tried another first and chose them instead of immortality. I wish that car trip teaching her about family did change her mind and she just stopped came back to Ruby and tried to live differently.
But the villainy isn’t in motivation – it’s in the methods and hers were clearly evil.And the arrogance in believing she is so much better than them and they could never hurt her and the who incredulity at them not understanding that her need to be immortal is more important than Tic’s need to live has shown she was her father’s daughter after all.
It was pretty clear from the beginning that her selfishness would be her undoing. She could’ve changed her ways anytime. Autumnal equinoxes come every year. She could’ve stopped what she was doing and try to find another way. Like Ji-ah she could’ve put people she cared about above her needs. Like Montrose she could’ve found a way to connect with her family despite the bad blood. She could’ve earn the trust and access to the Book or Earth 504 with its infinite possibilities. Instead she chose the instant gratification. But, yes, the whole taking magic from all the white people was a little overboard. I couldn’t stop thinking that this is 1955 and back in my part of the world it’s still Stalinism with people tortured and sent to hard labour camps. Often the very people who just fought Nazis only to be jailed by Communists. And once Stalinism ends next year and people try for little more freedom it ends with tanks and more oppression. Could’ve used some of that magic there. But as I said after first episode this a very American show and it’s very American-centric.
Yeah, maybe I am misremembering, but does Christina ever do anything super evil? Also, to make matters worse, she is definitely coming out when she kisses Ruby. 1. The only lesbian in the show is portrayed as evil 2. I totally get Ruby and Christina if their reductive and stereotypical plots of “I wish I was white”/”I wish I had a penis-power” was really a desire to be out and proud. They would literally be the only compassionate characters in the show.
The issue I have with that entire scene is everything went by so quick, in flashes, it was really tough to make out what it was we were seeing. As you try to process one thing, you’re missing 3 other things happening. Or atleast that’s how it was for me. I can appreciate good blink and you miss it moments, but that shouldn’t be used for plot relevant details WHEN it needs to be relevant.
Yes, I had to rewind a watch them again to figure it all out. Without DVR that was hard to spot.
Christina, as Ruby, put it back on her after she fell. When Ji-Ah is running through her memory there’s a flashback of that.
But as we soon see: Leti lives! Plot armor rules. In the flashbacks of Christina and Tic’s life Ji-ah sees while her tails connect them we see Christina as Ruby giving Leti the Invariability back after she threw her of the tower. We saw before that spell also heals so she brings Leti back again. I’m sure she did it to keep promise to Ruby. In her own mind Christina was saying the truth about this not being personal. She just couldn’t grasp why it is.
We also see Tic giving his shoggoth to Diana. This is what allows Daian survive the Ardham shoggoth attacks. Of course Diana is only alive thanks to Christina too (not that she knows though – she was unconscious then). But same with Leti Christina only went so far as it didn’t inconvenience her (as I said last week could’ve made Lancaster call it off but chose her revenge instead) and she didn’t do it for free.One could think it’s ungrateful for these two to end Christina (I saw some saying it tonight) but the truth is they don’t owe her anything. This is the same as Titus saying to Hanna he gave her more than any other n****r but the truth is he gave her scraps he didn’t need and took more than she was willing to give. And then tried to take even more. Same with Christina. What she took – both from Ruby and Tic – was neither freely given nor could ever be repaid. Any part of her worth saving vanished the moment she murdered Ruby. In those flashes of Christina’s life we also see she didn’t murder Ruby. To make those potions a person has to be in a comma and Ruby is in one now. I wrote in my post above I think Leti can save her but Leti probably thinks her dead and would she even know where to look?But I also realised something else. I said Christina should’ve healed William but what she said about saving him with her own blood, hair and nails may mean she can’t wake him up without hurting herself. But Diana killed her and now I wonder if William just woke up. Maybe he’ll be the bad guy next season – if there is a next season – and using Ruby to get access to magic somehow.
Leti would look for Ruby’s body so they could have a proper funeral. She would go to the manor looking for her dead sister so she could honor her remains, and then find Ruby in a coma instead.
I’m just not sure Leti knows where too look. I think Ruby told her what part of town William’s house was but I don’t think she gave her the address. She may also think Christina just got rid of the body. She doesn’t know about the coma requirement.
Leti possesses and has read a lot of the Book of Names. She may know very well that Ruby is still “alive.” In the book, William (Christina in the show) makes a point that the dopplergaenger-ed person experiences what the person assuming their form does, so there’s a level of consciousness, rather than a vegetative state. On top of that, the only way they would know that is if the coma victim woke up and reported this.
That last part is me just reaching, because I REALLY liked Ruby and want her back.
I haven’t read the book so that’s nice to know. It plays well into my theory for the next season with William waking up. It’d also explain why Christina went to watch Lancaster die looking like him.
I got so muddled on some of this show’s themes. It’s about family and Christina is somewhat chastised for killing her father… but he was even more objectively awful and I’d argue it’s her rejecting at least some of the biased systems she was raised in. Then she made a choice to expand her family to Ruby (if only conditionally and definitely more abusively at some point) which is more or less what Tic did with Ji-Ah but that was after he too conditionally rejected her and was given some incredibly vague amount of time to come around. (Maybe about 6 months?) When it comes to families by blood, Ruby genuinely did have a point about Leti mostly coming to her to use her, almost as transactionally as Christina did. I guess I still don’t fully get why the show leaned so hard into Christina as the big bad when it seemed to pointedly also give her some other beats that were more sympathetic (playing tag, checking on Ruby after flying through a windshield, reliving Emmett Till’s murder to better understand a horrible historical event…). Why lay any of that groundwork at all yet insist that the character was inflexible and deserved to die. Also I’m fairly certain everyone in the main cast but Leti killed someone and somehow none of that matters for their respective endings. (And even then I just realized Leti essentially brainkilled that one gamekeeper woman Ruby wore.)
Great series. A little heavy handed with the symbolism at times but everyone in it is top of game. As a white dude, it was effective in conveying the horror African Americans faced then and unfortunately still today( and probably pales in comparison to reality). A well timed allegory the inverts the Lovecraftian tropes and inherent racism into a pretty thrilling ride.thanks for the reviews 🙂
Many black Americans ‘still cling to the values and community of the church’. Well…What else should they be ‘clinging’ to?
I raised an eyebrow at that too. “Cling” is an interesting choice of words. As if blacks are foolish for doing so.
This show has some really powerful individual moments, but it never coheres as a whole. Like, apparently this was all building up to Atticus sacrificing himself? That really does not feel like a natural culmination of what came before. The final scene is a confrontation between Dee and Christina, who barely interacted (if at all) previously. Ji-ah’s solo episode was one of the highlights of the show, but otherwise why is she even in the show?On a technical level, I’ve come to think that the show’s special effects really undermines a lot of the weight of some events. Like when Christina draws Atticus’ blood, it’s show via two cartoonishly-animated gushes from his arms that I find impossible to take seriously. We’ve had decades of practical makeup effects that could make characters bleed while looking much more visceral.
Atticus sacrificing himselfAnd let me voice once again that I can’t accept as a Jesus figure someone who, within a narrative about how you have to choose to be the hero or the monster, made the choice of murdering innocent civilians in cold blood. I swear by now there must be a recognized trope of “yes, our hero killed someone, but it’s okay because it was just an extra, don’t read too much into it, extras with no lines aren’t real people”.
Ji-ah addressed that very point in her confession to Atticus in her standalone episode: “We’ve both done monstrous things – but that does not make us monsters.”Does Ji-ah’s role in defeating Christina change the fact that she’s killed dozens of innocent men? Atticus’ sacrifice doesn’t change what he did. We all make choices in the moment – the point is that simply because we made bad choices before doesn’t mean we have to keep making them.
That’s not my point. My point is the final portrayal of Atticus as a Jesus figure (he was even called a saint in the review). You’re committing the same logical fallacy you’re accusing me of. The fact that Tic is not a monster doesn’t make him a saint — or even just someone to root for.
I was confused why she would fall in love with Atticus after he shot her co worker in cold blood without a though then murdered her best friend later offscreen. Bad female character writing. All the Freeman family seems to be murderers of defenseless people. Montrose killed the two spirit, Atticus the nurses, Dee suddenly became a child who murders by killing a powerless Christina (I guess because blood other than Atticus’ had to be spilled ) and Ruby turned off a life support machine plus violently raped a guy. I am not sure how they are supposed to be heroes. Ji-ah’s killing was at least part of a curse. There is just not much story of why the other hero characters murder without a thought…are we supposed to cheer them on?
I think what you may be misconstruing about what Atticus did in his time as a soldier is that it was neither “in cold blood” nor “by choice.” Yes, the hero killed innocents, but he’s spent much of the season internally wrestling with that baggage. Unlike the things Ruby or Montrose did, the show very much recognizes what Tic did was wrong and holds him accountable, at least on an emotional level.
So it is ok to murder someone if you feel a little bit after? Or raping someone? Or beating a kid? The characters of this show are really flawed. It is hard to see anyone outside of Hippolya as a hero.
Ji-ah was there to connect them with her tails to give us all that exposition they didn’t give us on screen.
I always thought the special effects were going for a pulpy look but I admit it’s completely at odds with the seriousness of some of the rest of the show and I just find something off about the tone. Also, I admit that I think Hannah’s statement to Tic being taken as unequivocal fact–something about how basically sometimes we have to sacrifice our life for our family, kinda stinks.
I can’t remember but aren’t the monsters with all the eyes supposed to be people at one time? I need to go back and look at the first time wee see them if they were all white. The one that protected Atticus was black and then tonight, the one attacking the car to get at Diana was white and then the black one showed up and protected her. A thought had crossed my mind at the end of the show if the black one was George somehow and protecting his kids.
I believe in the first episode there were two creatures. The Shoggoths (eyeball covered tentacle puppers) and the vampire type monsters that attacked and turned the cops in the cabin.
Well, I can’t say I’m particularly excited for a season 2 but if they do have a season 2 I really hope they get someone in the writing to room to navigate the storytelling with a little more of a deft hand. The show has so much going for it but holy crap was the plotting an absolute muddled mess from episode 2 on.
Anybody know if this was a miniseries or if there will be a second season?Either way, I’m satisfied. This was a hell of a show.
It hasn’t been announced yet, but in interviews Green says she has plans for a Season 2. HBO just hasn’t picked it up yet.
Many thanks, outdoorcats! If it were up to me, I’d make you indoorcats!
Now that we’ve seen the full picture I think it safe to say this show was a fucking mess, but damn if it wasn’t fun.Also… maybe I’m reading something that’s not there but Tic got his copy of the Lovecraft Country book from a man with a robotic arm… and in that book (as well as the actual one) Dee is a boy named Horace. Is the implication that Dee will eventually discover that she’s trans?
That line keeps getting misquoted. Tic said he received the book from a WOMAN with a robotic arm.
Oh, in that case no queer implications are necessary, it most likely was just an adult Diana then.
WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS LEAVING DIANA ALONE!
In this particular case, because she has a pet shoggoth and badass robot arm.
She’s still a traumatized kid with abandonment issues. Kid needs to know she’s loved not alone (shoggoth not withstanding), not that murder is the answer. I do like the badass robot arm though.
I suppose they all thought that she’d be safe from harm with said shoggoth and robot arm. They didn’t think she would cause harm.
I wanted to see what the ramifications of taking away magic from white people would look like. Maybe that explains why David Copperfield and David Blaine exist?
What exactly was the point of anything Christina was going to accomplish again? For a second I thought it was immortality meets invulnerability but they seemed to give and take away that latter one with essentially no consequences and in hindsight they demonstrated she already had it multiple times. But I kind of got the impression based on how much Christina seemed to pointedly not lie to Ruby, that she had every intention of sharing at least some magic with her, and that her spell wouldn’t have been to further the ties of magic and whiteness. But who even counts as white in this context? It’s a very conditional state that evolved over times during we have very little sense of who knows how much magic or how much of a tie there is between magic and power/the majority. Comments have pointed out that the evil ghost doctor was very pointedly made Jewish, but not all Jewish people have light skin and it’s a bit hit and miss as to if people with historically hereditary ties to mysticism (Kabbalah, Romani, … Italians????) are rounded to whiteness depending on the times? (I assumed that they nominally have power in this show’s universe based on the African folk witch who may or may not have died, Ji-Ah’s witch priestess, or the dead two-spirit intersex character, which seemed to imply that all their cultural beliefs in magic are true and somehow all still stem from Christian-geared theology/origin stories?)How widespread was magic in this world anyway? Not all cops knew it and the evil cabals seemed to only have 3-4 representatives from their national widespread parties, but there’s the evil village where all the townsfolk outside the manor seemed to have a sufficiently vested interest in whatever Christina was doing to uphold the systems that did not seem to especially benefit them.
What exactly was the point of anything Christina was going to accomplish again?Pulling off a ritual that no male in her family, let alone history, has been able to succeed at doing.
* Great run of entertaining and comprehensive recaps, Joelle, especially the entry for last week’s haunting penultimate episode. Your examinations of the show’s many historical and artistic allusions deepened my enjoyment and understanding of the narrative. Thank you!* For all of this season’s twists and turns, the finale conformed to a lot of predictions I’ve seen in the comments. The biggest surprise was Tic actually dying — I expected either Ji-Ah or Montrose to sacrifice themselves to save him or somehow bring him back—but his martyrdom was fitting, especially as it not only saved his family (spiritually and physically), but gifted magic to all POC (even though Leti said “magic is ours now”, only white people were banished). Ji-Ah did in fact save the day (though I don’t quite understand how). Ruby picked family, and it wasn’t surprising that it cost her life (we think). Christina died, as she had to, though I expected her demise to be a little more grotesque — like the Nazi’s in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dee getting a Luke Skywalker-like cyborg arm and applying the coup de grace was an unexpected, disturbing touch that imo was more satisfying than Ji-Ah entering the darkness.* The next season is probably going to have a time jump. How can a show like this resist going to 1968, a culmination point for all the historical and culture upheaval of that decade? And the Democratic Presidential Convention happens in their home city, Chicago, that year. Little George will be thirteen, a boy on the cusp of becoming a young man. Leti will still be relatively young, and Dee will a grown (and very dangerous) woman.In my head canon, white people are still trying to get magic back. Hippies maybe seeking it out through acid trips. The Cold War between Russians and Americans may actually be over trying to appropriate and control the magic people of the Third World. Along with all the horror and fantasy genres the show already explores, it would also be a perfect time to look into the world of Ian Fleming spy novels. While these areas might be a bit left field, I’ll put out there that the ‘60s are peak superhero Silver Age and 1968 was the year Carlos Casteneda published his first book about the shaman Don Juan (this show owes indigenous people better treatment). I fully expect Misha Green to thwart all these prognostications.
With the old school definitions of rich democracy as the first world, the second world being communist, and the third world being essentially anyone else and with implicitly less fiscal resources… doesn’t that mean that communist China would nominally have more power than the western/first world? I’m pretty sure this also all took place before the cultural revolution in China where that purge of religious iconography maybe would never happen if it grants connection to a resource that white America is locked out of?Depending on how widespread magic is—not a thing the show has especially clarified but it seemed to imply that every folk religion taps into some true well of power—then it seems like that should completely obliterate any recognizable sense of history.Alternatively the takeaway is that even with every resource at our fingertips that people of color cannot meaningfully change the course of the world. That may not be the message the show is going for when it keeps relishing a lot of these victorious, visceral moments of gore?
Magic doesn’t seem to be an overt easily accessible resource like oil or gold in the world of LC. Most people — black, white, Korean etc. — don’t know it exists as a real thing and I postulate that will continue. So the conflicts will be contained to small, select groups fighting across the tapestry of modern history. Or at least that is my pet theory. It would, however, be very intriguing to see how nations that are rejecting the mystical for science treat the existence of magic.
That’s kind of what I would have assumed too, but the show itself is not especially clear on the logistics or scopes of things.It seems like relative novices can interact with this magical world and sometimes escape mostly unscathed. (While I assume Leti only did a bunch of spell casting specifically because she carried the bloodline within her, Hipp has all that technology and lived experience from an alternate dimension that functionally makes her like more of a sci-fi hero than anything else we’ve seen.)Then if magic is so limited and they kind of use it to reflect societal power, then why does it seem to be in the power of a handful of relatively unambitious cops? Or what do the townspeople get out of fighting for this system when we don’t see them meaningfully benefit from it? (Though yeah I assume the followers of the cult self-selected and would condense themselves there.)It’s a somewhat muddled take for me that Christina reiterates “it’s nothing personal nor is it a dynastic battle” but those personal affronts are then met with taking magic from all white people, somehow. That seems to boil down to “this is generational reparations of what white people with power did to black history (and implicitly all other people of color).”A lot of times in that kind of role reversal narrative they take a somewhat simplistic “both sides” perspective that implies that our heroes or their sides would then become the very same oppressors they once fought against. (There was some YA series adaptation that tried to imagine what’d happen if Africa were to have colonized Europe that seemed caught up a little in controversy and it’s a super tedious and poor worldbuilding trope of if gay people were the majority and straight people had to envision a world where they were judged for who they love.)It just hit me that in any subsequent seasons all our main characters (+ Ji-Ah) will fall into that Magical Black person trope. In any case I can imagine another season with societal upheaval than I anticipated, as our empowered central characters still need to navigate and find their place in existing systems… but for a show that seemed to relish gory power fantasies it would be a little underwhelming if all these characters emerged from their journey and made little to no headway with their new advantages.
* Yes, Leti and the Freeman family have magic, but as we’ve seen, all magic seems to have a price. They have advantages but its not something they can wield casually. * Yes, systemic racism and white supremacy is the monster in this show, and Leti is metaphorically striking against it when she bans all white people from magic. But consider the horrors they’ve experienced just for being black: they can’t even travel in the country without fearing for their life. And the entire white majority, if not individually complicit, has acquiesced to this system that oppresses and outright murders black people with impunity. It makes sense that Leti sees the totality as an enemy. Finally, its also a pragmatic choice for Leti. The order of magic users that Leti and the Freemans are in battle with is a vast, all white organization. It’s impossible for her to know who they all are, but a ban focused only on white people will also include them. It’s the Ripley option: nuke ‘em from space. It’s the only way to be sure.
I’m not sure the show really did successfully follow through on the costs of magic. While killing a goat seemed to keep Leti’s house safe from entry of people with bad magical intentions, it was just a couple of bloodless(?) incantations that could grant Lettie and presumably the others invulnerability, just they have had this knowledge systemically held back from them—despite a heritage on the Freeman side and apparently a birthright, even in the cult’s poorly drafted and chauvinist bylaws. Then somehow it only took a little drawn blood to summon a physical ancestor from either the afterlife or out of time?I was going to say that ending all magic for an entire ethnicity seems like it would call for a lot of sacrifice based on that goat blood exchange rate, but I guess I forgot or did not understand Tic willingly died for that cause, rather than just as a consequence of Christina’s failed spell. (Or I guess you’re implying Leti make an executive decision after seeing they failed to successfully save Tic? I got lost in the ending but if that is what happened somehow, it does explain how Christina didn’t know the plan the entire time despite taking Ruby’s place when they would have been setting up everyone’s goals.)
I was assuming Leti, Atticus, George Jr. etc, would not be able to use magic now because of their mixed blood. Really, all the main characters…maybe not Ruby or Hippolyta. I assumed Leti had a white dad. It was strange they had a full figured dark skinned black woman with a tiny light skinned sister and there was no mention that one might be treated better than the other in society. In fact, Ruby ended up joining the dark side…well rather lily white Christina side. If they still can use magic…I am also thinking Atticus and Ruby will come back, via magic, somehow…then the whole premise odd taking magic away from white people is lost.
I thought the whole family would be able to use magic. Under the One Drop Rule (created by whites) they were all black. Dark skin is not guarantor that both parents are dark or that there are no white people in your lineage. Conceivably this means even black people who are passing for white are now able to use magic.
OK. Why hasn’t anyone before reported that J.J. Abrams is a big-ass producer for this wayward show? I wanted so much to love this series. But this 10th ep. is the absolute messiest thing I have ever seen on ANY streaming series. If this program meant to elevate Black American narratives (of any kind) above the tired AF white world of fugly-dumb tropes, then it not only failed; it’s failure hurt my own heart beyond recovery. Thanks, Abrams, you cunt.Be you a Negro or not, there is nothing “Safe” – imo – about this most recent HBO subscribed ep. This Thriller/Sci Fi/ Horror, disaster wants you to test your internal mettle against the absolute WORST a Writer/Showrunner/Director can throw at us.But I’m looking at you, J.J. Abrams. you can’t save this series. The best you can do is pass it off to another producer who is Black and actually knows what it’s like not to be a white Jewish guy. In other words, fuck you.
Abrams is one of several producers, but he was not the showrunner or primary creative voice.
And, if one looks closely, J.J. Abrams is credited as a producer in everything. I’m sure he brags that in his lifetime he has produced more shows than he has watched.
I’m dead positive that Abrams contributed not one word or idea to the making of this show. Producers aren’t writers or directors. Very often they do basically nothing on the creative front. And seeing as this was adapted from a book that Abrams didn’t write or adapt or even option… well.Here is a list of all the things Abrams and Bad Robot have had production credit on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Robot_ProductionsYou’re kidding yourself if you think he was a big creative voice on most of those TV shows, barring the ones he is explicitly listed as (co-)creator for.
Producers wrangle money, a distributor, etc. Steve Mnuchin has producer credits on several big movies. He had nothing to do with the creative side of them. He probably invested and brought investors. . If you write on the show you might get a producing credit, and sometimes it’s just a method to give a star more money in syndication, ie Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, the stars of The Office got producer credits the last 3-4 years of the show. I’m gonna say JJ may have helped Jordan get this picked up by HBO, provided funding, etc. This has Jordan’s fingerprints on it much more than JJ’s. It was confusing at times, but the last couple episodes I really enjoyed, if that’s the right word. I’m sad Tic is gone.
Neither J.J. Abrams or Jordan Peele had anything creatively to do with this show. An amazing and ridiculously talented Black woman, Misha Green, has been consistently listed in the credits every single episode for developing it and either solely writing or co-writing every single episode (she even directed one for good measure). Her name has been right there at the beginning of the credits every time. She has been the one doing press and giving interviews. This is her second critically acclaimed show.Please stop minimizing her achievements in favor of arguing over two dudes who didn’t write a single episode between them and aren’t listed as anything but executive producers (meaning: they helped fund it).
Exactly, all of that. If Abrams’ involvement as a producer says anything at all, it’s mainly that he might have seen it as a good extension of his creative brand. Not that he wrote the damn thing.
They get royalties as well for becoming producers. It’s all monetarily motivated 99.9% of the time. I used to think it was because the leads believed in their show so much that they wanted control to protect and guide it as they would their child…. Wow I was a stupid kid….
I’m not a big fan of J.J. Abrams but this is absolutely uncalled for. There were several other executive producers (including Jordan Peel!) and the show runner was Misha Green, not Abrams. A Black woman ran this show, even if you didn’t like it.
Wow, that’s the most unhinged and confidently stupid thing I’ve read all day and I just had a run in with MAGA Twitter.
Congratulations. This is one of the most truly pathetic rants ever seen on this site.
What was the point of the baptism stuff? Were they really saying that Tic deserved to win because he had gone through a baptism ritual and Christina had not?If so, what a load of horse shit.
Oh yeah, that annoyed me to no end. Leti rediscovering hardcore faith felt forced too. If only because the Christian god really has no place in a Lovecraftian universe, especially from the point of view of those who already lifted the veil of reality and discovered the horrors that hide beneath.
Leti rediscovering her faith is a cultural thing. Also, the magic that makes up this particular universe is steeped in Christian myth so a Christian god has more of a place here than it does in other lovecraftian works.
Impressive, given she lived in the 1950s, a time period well documented for trying to shove women back into the kitchen.While technically true, this does not apply to Christina. This attitude you describe was more for the low and middle class. The wealthy women, or in this case the super wealthy women that come from old money were different. Theirs was a “seen but not heard” idea, they were expected to be educated, but not to the point of making white men feel inadequate in comparison. They were still expected to be a homemaker, but they had a staff to take care of the day to day work a low/middle class wife would be expected to take care of. She on the other hand still needed to be the socialite that needed to make her husband look good (hence the phrase, behind every great man is a great woman”. A phrase that did become popularized within this time period.Christina rails against the expected gender norms of the time. She is an allegory for White Feminism. This final episode is Black Feminism vs White Feminism, and even I understand those two things are not equal, not by a long shot. Something that frustrates me, even on this network of sites, is seeing white women talk like their plight is on the same level as that of the black community. Again, these two things are NOT the same.Moving on….The last scene between Leti and the Real Ruby really resonated with me. To keep a very long story short, I had a complicated history with my adopted mother. She was abusive as I was growing up, but only when she didn’t need anything from me. When she did, she became the best mother around. Even as I became an adult, if it weren’t for my younger sister being the rubber band binding us together, I don’t know if my mom and I would’ve interacted very much. But again, it was only when she didn’t need anything from me. But the moment she needed her rent paid or a “loan” to buy something, then she became super interested in my life and wanting to be apart of it. When my younger sister died in 2000, mom and I did the best we could in her absence, but it wasn’t the same. And that pattern reemerged. When mom died in 2014, I felt not that I lost a mother, but that someone I had known most of my life would no longer be around. Family is a helluva word.
I actually wish they explored more about white feminism and white queer liberalism etc, within the context of Christina. I don’t think Christina coopted black pain or actually ever thought she had it worse, she just was so power corrupt that she was completely selfish. It’s true her gender was the one thing really holding her back from becoming an individualistic powerful entity on her own, but I think she was more representative of the uber powerful in America, who are completely aware of the plight and suffering of Black Americans and choose not to lift a finger to change it. So far removed from their humanity.I do think there were hints of it, I just wish it was explored more.
I think Christina was trying to empathize with Ruby’s pain in trying to live the pain of Emmett’s death since Ruby said Christina would never understand. This is a sci fi series…Christina or anyone could come back a number of ways…yet it seems odd to kill off a character that seems gender fluid and representative of both white feminism and that before the character are settles in. With the killing of the two spirit for no reason, I wonder what point here the writers were trying to make. Ugh.
I found it hard to watch Diana become a cold blooded killer, but the more I think about it, she is Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her innocence was forcibly stripped from her by white supremacy. And what better way to establish the coolest possible spin-off from this show than the adventures of Diana the cyborg, and her wonder-demon-dog, crushing white supremacy one neck at a time. It’s fitting that the writer of comics should receive an actual superhero origin moment at the closing of the series, plus a nice full circle nod to the pulp dream sequence of the first episode.
Overall, I think the series was a bit uneven. Some of the stories felt rushed, and some of the characters weren’t quite given enough room to develop. Still, I unapologetically loved it and the way showrunner Misha Green made the source material her own, both as a creative force and as a woman of color. The things that worked easily overcome any of the show’s occasional rough edges.
I honestly feel like they could extend this show for another season if they wanted. There’s no end of genres tropes to anthologize, and while I would miss Jonathan Majors, there’s still a killer core cast and so much more potential for weird and wonderful.
Sad to see it come to end, but you know, all good things… 🙂
This was an okay finale.Lots of stuff happened when I know is their thing but lots of stuff REALLY happened lawd. Wasn’t feeling how Tic was getting his Issa Dee user on, on some “SORRY I SAID I DIDN’T LOVE YOU WHEN I WAS WITH NEW BAE BUT NOW THAT I REALLY NEED YOUR HELP I WAS JUST PLAYIN’ GIRL!!”Also I don’t think Ruby is “dead”, just comatose like Dell and William were and I think they can look through that spell book and find some spell to bring her back. Same with Tic.I don’t understand why the Mark of Cain was suddenly back on Leti, some have said it was because as she was falling Christina put it back on her because she promised Ruby she wouldn’t hurt her but if that’s the case, I would have liked to see that more explicitly, and honestly it doesn’t quite make sense because you’ve already killed Ruby for trying to betray you, who cares about keeping a promise at that point?I did like all the ancestors standing in the circle, that was cool. I thought the “one last secret” was that Montrose was the shoggoth so I was way wrong on that one, it being a letter was very meh to me lol.
Christina giving Leti back her invulnerability was shown in the flashbacks of Ji-Ah’s powers reviving everyone’s life but there was so much going on I had no idea what was supposed to be important (I feel like there was some footage of stuff that didn’t need to be explained nearly as much).
I did not get where Leti got the Mark of Cain either. It was confusing.
Ugh, Towns People are the WORST!
If I remember the second episode correctly didn’t they just ignore the new black people in town, aside from that single eventually dead gamesperson Ruby wears?While it seems like Christina bonded with the family that let her birth a shoggoth cow thing, I don’t get what she was trying to accomplish or how any of those townsfolk would benefit from upholding her system when it seemed pretty clear none of those people would have been high enough status to be part of the Sons of Adam.
What was up with using cows to create monsters? It was never mentioned other than that scene. One of my problems with he show is that they write in characters just to have CGI, like the kumiho woman or write sex in just for the nudity…they drop it like it’s hot without it really being part of a deeper storyline. Where did the monsters come from originally? Space? Experiments? No explanation. Ugh.
Lol. “Black motherhood”. I’ll bet Joelle also uses terms like “lived experience” , “my truth” and “autoethnography”
I’m sorry but this was a mess. A convoluted mess.
Yes, really bad, poorly written, incomprehensibly directed, reminded me of the old She-Ra rather than an HBO product.
Everyone is assuming Christina didn’t kill Leti (or gave her back the spell) because she owed it to Ruby or something. Perhaps she just wanted to preserve Leti’s baby (the last of the bloodline) in case the spell with Tic didn’t work.
There was no indication that Christina ever knew that Leti was pregnant. That’s part of the reason why she was conflicted about perhaps killing her only remaining family for nothing.
Now all they need to do is cast Jada Harris as Iron Heart.
This deserved to be a longer episode, or two episodes. The plot was fine, but everything was rushed and the writing suffered for it.
Joelle — thank you for 10 great weeks of in-depth write ups. You helped me see things I missed or didn’t think deeply enough about. The show, AND your writing, were not only good “ally training,” but the show was damn entertaining with fantastic production value. Can’t wait for more, and given the buzz around the show, I have to believe it’s brought back, no?
Overall, I give the finale a “B/B-” and the series a “B.” The finale definitely had a “we need to wrap it up” vibe where other episodes were more able to take their time. The details of the ultimate plans and schemes got a little hard to follow as well, although the big double-cross was unexpected and effective.Series-wise, they tried to do a lot in 10 episodes and succeeded more often than failed. The weakest part of the series was the main plot, which struck me as unfocused and confusing most of the time. But at the same time, the sub-plots (the horror movie without monsters in episode 1, Ruby’s Twilight-zoneish experience as a white woman, Hippolyta’s Ultimate Self-Actualization trip) mostly ranged from excellent to transcendent.While the whole doesn’t quite add up to the sum of the parts, congrats to the excellent cast and HBO for making something like this.
Why does it seem to me that Christina survived that and was scheming in the future? Cos Future Diana said “you STILL haven’t learned”.Its like Terminator style she came back to kill her to avoid some future calamity that Christina attempts.
My closed caption said “they never learn”. I’m wondering if she meant her family who stupidly left Christina alive?
I assumed the ‘they’ meant ‘white people’
That makes sense.
I wanted to love it. It had some nice moments. But overall I thought it was terrible.
This was reasonably entertaining but not up to par with the best episodes or what the show deserved. I was really upset that they threw a commercial for christianity into the middle of this. Hey asshole, it’s fine that you’re superstitious but why do you have to fucking always foist it on people? The only thing people should be worshipping here is Cthulu or maybe Azathoth the Blind Idiot God.At least Green copped to fucking up with Yahima, hopefully season two will do better on that front.
Foisted!
Poor Ruby and Tic. There better be a season 2 and remember,
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
I guess two good episodes is better than nothing.
“Black motherhood”As if that’s significantly different enough from motherhood that other humans experience to warrant it’s own category. You all think you’re so brave using phrases like “Black love” and shit like this, but all you doing is heralding in a new age of segregation.
This show was a pretty big disappointment for me. It was a collection of moments that never became fully cohesive. Having that many main characters in a show so short was a problem, and Christina was just a weak villain. It might have worked better to make Ruby the main villain – she was an awful sister pretty much until she had her redemption… off screen. Christina made things so impersonal, and she was just evil for evil’s sake.
Ruby didn’t seem especially bad? I thought they set up a fair point about how Ruby stayed home while her bohemian sister got to be skinny, more traditionally photogenic, pass paper bag tests (I think???), travel then take all her glory the moment she swings back in town, gets a bunch of press, attention from men, and hypothetically all of their mom’s inheritance despite not even being there. It seemed like their brother was also a bit sick of Leti’s transactional history and not communicating important details that could kee them all safe.
I never thought much of the alleged resentment against her more conventionally attractive sister – some reviewers pointed it out but I don’t think the show necessarily leaned that way – but I don’t think this makes Ruby look less evil; quite the opposite, in fact. Lettie is not responsible for this, and it would be very unfair to be blamed for her popularity with men.As for Lettie’s sins, they were real but she didn’t stop apologizing for them. And even if she hadn’t, it was pretty clear that Christina was wrong to want to murder Atticus. This was not a morally grey situation and Ruby should have sided with Lettie immediately, even if she was still mad.
I actually thought both characters were fairly sympathetic, though Ruby sexually assaulting that manager went appallingly far. Also on the whole I generally preferred Leti up until when her journey seemed a little stagnant and less driven by her own interests (maybe the episode after she smashed the car windows?). That said, they set up Leti as having a flakey past because she was so engaged in pursing her own interests over other peoples’, so I get why Ruby as a character would tire of that and not have much reason to believe anything had changed. (Even as they hardly had that much screentime together.)It kind of makes sense that Ruby would be somewhat lulled by this other woman who was also using her, but she believed she was actually getting any positive experiences out of it and the fact she knew she was being used would make her safe. I forget how present Ruby was for any of the conversations where it was clear that Tic would die, but by the end she did try to make a decision in light of that.
I’m still not clear what Christina was trying to do though, since she seemed to think there was still some other way of accomplishing things with the book, and ultimately the lead team of heroes allowed tons of other people to die in the pursuit of their goals as well.
Why didn’t Christina just steal Leti and Tic’s baby and raise him specifically for her purposes? Realistically, little unborn George is the last living relative now.
Nowhere can I recall Christina ever being made aware that Leti was ever pregnant.
Now that we’re done, I don’t think I saw anyone say this all season (maybe we’re not allowed?), but I’ll say it- Christina was a great character and the actress who played her was spellbinding.
I agree, they left a lot unexplored too about her developing empathy for Ruby while also seeking her white power.
My read on her, was that she was playing a type we would easily code as The Devil (I could write an essay about how similar their traits and tactics are), but then there would be those moments with Ruby, her status in the family as a woman, or the Emmett Till thing, and there was complexity that made her more mysterious. An utterly fascinating villain!
The show was disjointed as all heck and I still have trouble forgiving it for glorifying that stiletto rape scene, but its highs were tremendous, and episode 8 will go down as the most frightened I’ve ever been by a tv show, right up there with Hill House. It’ll be a while before I shake the image of those ghost girls from my mind.
Yep, everyone got screwed and lost a piece of their soul at best, appropriately Lovecraftian.
Ruby really deserved better than this. From the moment we see her arrive as a talented musician annoyed with her sister, it’s all downhill. First, Christina rapes her by deception. Then Ruby herself is turned into a rapist with the store manager, eroding her dignity (having a sympathetic character sexually violate someone is so much worse than having them kill someone). Then she gets betrayed and possibly killed right after having queer sex for the first time. This last detail is especially strange given that they did a relatively good job exploring Montrose’s experience with homophobia and the Dead Lesbian trope is well known by now.
I honestly didn’t have the slightest clue what they were doing when they were fighting the ghost man. This episode and especially the ending felt very early 2000’s fantasy film.Definitely some stand out episodes, but the show really struggled with connecting Leti, Tic and Montrose’s overall arc into the more engaging side characters stories. I think having Ruby the main character would have worked more cohesively and told a more interesting story.
I felt Ruby was given the most depth. She was my favorite character.
I found this episode a pretty big letdown compared to the rest of the series. It felt really rushed, like we got 2/3 of one episode and then the last third was a mishmash of two half-finished episodes. It feels like a lot of stuff was glossed over just to set up the reveals when Ji-ah connects Tic and Christina, and those reveals were really hard to follow in the moment and just confusing in general. Ji-ah stepping up also really felt like a deus ex machina. We got a lot of backstory and development with her, but almost nothing that explains her participation in the ending. It really feels like a leap how we get from what we’ve seen with her before to her using her tail-tentacles (in a way we’ve never seen them active before) to do a thing we didn’t know was possible to save the day. (not worrying about spoilers, anyone digging through the comments on a post like this knows what they’re getting into) And in the end, the reveal as to what Hannah’s spell was for feels a lot more ‘gotcha’ than any sort of triumphant victory. Like the point of it wasn’t to reclaim magic but just so Leti could mock Christina with it, if that makes sense. Like with Ji-ah, it feels like they kind of skipped a step — we see all the rigmarole of gathering the flesh from Titus (which feels like something that somebody else could have done before if they’d needed his blood for a spell, but okay) and the conversation between Leti and Ruby about getting what they need from Christina, but it feels like actually casting the spell just went by really fast with not a lot of fanfare (to preserve the surprise factor, maybe?).
There were things I liked about the episode, but I don’t think the finale comes anywhere close to living up to the intense moments and occult phantasmagoria of prior episodes.
I agree with this. Why was Ji-ah so in love with Atticus, a man who shot her co worker in front of her and her best friend offscreen? Because CGI hentai? She obviously could not kill the 100th dude and just set herself free…because so in love with the dude who murdered her friends…ugh. I wish she would have shown her fox face or used trickery…it was like they plopped the kumino there without adding any deeper Asian mythology. Like…isn’t this CGI cool? But why is it happening? Oh like…isn’t this CGI cool?
“Christianity played a huge role in enslaved life…” Sure. Like this, you mean:Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ – Ephesians 6.5
When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free because of his tooth. -Exodus (etc, etc). Ad infinitum…Christianity can go jump in a deep, sulfur lake where this is concerned.
what a shitshow of a show
I don’t think I liked this show. Watched it, enjoyed it, the episode where Ruby is a white lady had me bouncing up and down it was so awesome, but then there’s “Oh, Hippolyta is just back ok and she’s a USB superwoman anyway TIME TRAVEL!” and … well, basically everything bad about the second episode didn’t stop with the second episode. So many good moments but, is this a show? Not really, not any more than a full season of Breaking Bad with every other episode missing can be considered a show.
I read the AV club reviews so I can gather a better understanding of what I just watched because I’m not that smart. So I like to be able to confirm things that I think are happening are actually happening or if I’m completely wrong. With that being said, I just finished this show and came right here for these reviews because you guys are my #1 guys for reviews and recaps and I have to admit I did not care for them at all. You really meandered around things that were really important personally to you, which is totally fine and invited into my world because I love perspectives and believe it helps my understanding… But you also completely ignored huge chunks of dialogue or exposition that really needed some clarity, at least for me, and you usually get all that on this site. I understand Lovecraft is problematic at his core, but even just minor explanations on what the hell I’m looking at would be appreciated. Normally don’t have these issues with the A.V. Club reviews. A few other minor quibbles not really worth mentioning aside, I was really left wanting after reading 10 articles in a row and that is Just a bit disappointing, is all.
I read the AV club reviews so I can gather a better understanding of what I just watched because I’m not that smart. So I like to be able to confirm things that I think are happening are actually happening or if I’m completely wrong. With that being said, I just finished this show and came right here for these reviews because you guys are my #1 guys for reviews and recaps and I have to admit I did not care for them at all. You really meandered around things that were really important personally to you, which is totally fine and invited into my world because I love perspectives and believe it helps my understanding… But you also completely ignored huge chunks of dialogue or exposition that really needed some clarity, at least for me, and you usually get all that on this site. I understand Lovecraft is problematic at his core, but even just minor explanations on what the hell I’m looking at would be appreciated. Normally don’t have these issues with the A.V. Club reviews. A few other minor quibbles not really worth mentioning aside, I was really left wanting after reading 10 articles in a row and that is Just a bit disappointing, is all.