Recap of “ Lovecraft’s country ”: night at the museum

A review of “A History of Violence” this week Lovecraft Country, to come as soon as I have a love song for my wife …

“It looks so much like me Journey to the Center of the Earth–type shit. “-Tic

Lovecraft Country continues to play with the genre, reinvigorating old tropes by making heroes black and villains racist white. Last week’s episode has turned into a haunted house, while “A History of Violence” is more in the vein of the Indiana Jones movies (or, if you’re a Philistine youth, the National treasure movies), with a long, gripping streak where Tic, Leti, and Montrose negotiate a series of magical death traps under a Boston museum to gather ammunition for their ongoing war with Christina and William.

It takes a while to get there – although this episode avoids showing us more examples of how dangerous black people were to travel to 1950s America – since the first half of the episode is mostly about doing advance various subplots that have been played down or put on hold. during “Holy Spirit”. We find out that Christina, for example, wanted to access Hiram Epstein’s house because her orrerie is the key to completing a time machine. (Is she hoping to go to Eden herself? Rewrite history to empower women? As a New Englishwoman, maybe she just wants to see the Red Sox win their most recent World Series in 1918?) Ruby goes to apply for that department store job she was talking about, only to find out that Marshall Field had already hired a black woman, Tamara – who applied on a whim, no less. Discouraged by the impossibility of the store employing two black sales assistants, she goes to bed with William, having no idea that he is in cahoots with the crazy magical white woman who wants her sister dead. There is a continuing tension between Leti and Tic about the secrets he has been keeping from her – “You are not the center of the fucking universe!” she would later complain to him – and between Tic and Montrose about the very advisability of continuing the tradition of the Sons of Adam or trying to resume their pre-magical life.

This is all perfectly fine, and in part it’s quite funny, including Ruby’s skeptical reaction to the Whiter-than-White William that got her moving, as well as the tension between Hippolyta and the rest of the family during the road trip. in Boston. These early passages are especially helpful in getting us acquainted with Montrose, who has appeared briefly in two previous episodes. We open with him by reading the book George gave him before Ardham collapsed, and being so scared of the thing – and its implications for his son – that he burns it in a trash can.

. But he also talks to himself, and hearing echoes of his past, including some of the abuse (we hear the voice of an older man ordering him to “Pick a switch!” To be beaten), he s ‘then returned and perpetrated on Atticus. It’s not quite in his common sense, and his attempt to make up for past sins by protecting Tic from the Braithwhites – first with the Burning Book, then with the murder he commits at the end of the episode. – seems more likely to hurt her son than to keep him safe.

Looking at the flames, he mumbles, “It smells like Tulsa. It may sound like a nod to HBO’s latest racism drama in America, which began with the Tulsa Race Massacre. But of course, a black man, especially one who was said to have been a teenager by the time Tulsa burned down, would know the incident all too well.But the episode goes to another level during the Goonies – style shenanigans under the museum – especially for the sequence where the trio attempt to cross a rickety, disintegrating plank through a seemingly endless gorge. It’s, like a lot of what Lovecraftfact, a familiar situation in broad strokes, combining bits and pieces of a few death traps from the climax of

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

, among others. But the execution by Misha Green (again on a screenplay assignment, with story credit for Wes Taylor) and director Victoria Mahoney is just a joy to see.

The setup is much less visually impressive than, say, Ardham collapsing around Tic and Samuel: just a plank of wood in a dark, empty space, with a nose-down pendulum weapon moving too fast to be seen clearly. The bridge that begins to crumble in front of our heroes is a bit more chic, but for the most part all the thrills and dread must come from the actors and the way they react to the situation. As the smallest of the group, the Leti, tied to the others by a long rope, must go first. Jurnee Smollett sells hell out of worry, and later has a hilarious, exasperated delivery of “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON THERE?” while Tic is busy catching a leaping Montrose. And Michael Kenneth Williams, who we’re so used to being unperturbed cool in his other HBO roles, is just as plausibly terrified of it all.

, even though Montrose has his superhero son there to keep him from falling. The whole sequence is put together so well that I had to pause the episode to politely clap at the end. A nice touch: As they prepare the rope to help them cross, Montrose is able to pretend to be calm long enough to talk to Leti about his slave ancestor who made special knots to keep his master’s horses from rolling. escape. It’s a lie – as Tic notes when Leti is out of earshot, Montrose’s family side has never been enslaved – but it’s clearly the lie Leti needed to hear to begin to walk, so why not?

After various other puzzles and near-death experiences – as well as the discovery that Leti’s haunted house elevator somehow descends into this place 1,000 miles away – our intrepid treasure hunters find this they were looking for: the old, submerged lawnmower ship of Titus Braithwhite, who preserved Yahima (Monique Candelaria), an intersex figure taken by Titus to translate some ancient symbols, and then imprisoned after refusing to continue helping a man who was so obviously a monster. After an intense swim to return to the elevator (and then for Leti to collect Titus’ wayward roll), the three travelers and their new friend Yahima all meet up in Leti’s house, with Tic and Leti sharing a deep Hollywood movie. and classic. -style kiss to celebrate their survival.

Lovecraft

to explore how other minority groups (whether Yahima is indigenous to our dimension or another) have been exploited and subjugated by men like Titus, and also to explore how someone of old would react to the fact to be Rip Van Winkled in the 1950s. Instead, Montrose cuts their throats, as he remains willfully blind to Tic’s commitment to follow this path wherever it leads.

Yahima’s murder sounds like a missed opportunity, but the rest of “A Story of Violence” is so vivid and entertaining that I’ll be confident Green and his company know what they’re doing in the big picture.

Eli Joshua Ade / HBO

Some other thoughts:

* Tic and Leti’s conversation in the library provides a bit more clarity on what happened during the climax of Episode 2: Christina used Tic (presumably by putting the ring on her finger) as a Trojan horse to destroy her father’s Eden spell, and her father, for conspiracy reasons, had to deactivate her usual invulnerability spell in order to perform the new one. It would have been nice if all of this were clearer at the time, but late exposure is better than none at all.

* Captain Lancaster, the racist Chicago PD creep who gave Leti a hard time last week, turns out to be the man in charge of the Chicago Lodge of the Old Order of William.