Review: Lovecraft Country Episode 3, “Holy Ghost”

The third episode of Lovecraft Country may have clunky exposition, but the characters, period detail and performances still make it can’t-miss TV.

After the two-part epic of “Sundown” and “Whitey’s On The Moon,” the third episode of Lovecraft Country cuts it down to a more manageable size, and if the show keeps having (mostly) standalone adventures like this one, I’ll keep watching. I think this was the episode that officially made me a fan.

We pick up several weeks after the events in Ardham. Uncle George has been buried, Tic is wearing out his welcome with Hippolyta, Montrose spends most of his time drunk, and Letitia buys a new house in a white neighborhood, using money she mysteriously inherited from her combative mother, even though they had a terrible relationship.

Or maybe she didn’t inherit it. I’ll say up front that the weakest thing about “Holy Ghost” is the plot mechanics. Letitia’s money actually came from Christina Braithwaite, who wanted the house bought for reasons unknown…or maybe just reasons unclear. It’s also unclear whether Leti knew where the money came from. She certainly seems to believe it was from her mom — she and Ruby have a blowup over Leti keeping the cash for herself — but it’s also hinted that Christina advised her to buy this particular house, so I dunno.

Leti’s struggles with the house are the real focus of the episode, and the reason it’s so good. The house is haunted, of course; you can tell that from the first look we get at the gothic money pit at the top of the episode. “Holy Ghost” is Lovecraft Country’s take on a haunted house story, and it’s a good one! Boilers creak ominously, jawless figures appear at the foot of beds, and an in-house elevator goes up and down with unnatural speed. It’s classic stuff.

But Lovecraft Country puts a twist on it. This house poses two dangers: the spirit of the racist scientist who used to live there (who killed several Black people in his experiments) is trying to harm Leti and her boarders from within, and her white neighbors are trying to harm her from without. As with the first two episodes, “Holy Ghost” presents our heroes with problems both supernatural and ordinary, and it’s hard to tell which is worse.

Showrunner Misha Green, who wrote the episode, ties the problems together in some cool ways. The centerpiece of the episode is Leti’s hopping housewarming party. The camera flows through the house as Leti pours drinks and people dance and talk with Ruby at the mic, but the fun is ended when the partygoers discover a cross burning on Leti’s lawn, the latest step up in a harassment campaign that began when Leti’s neighbors parked their cars outside and tied bricks to their horns, blasting her and her renters with constant noise. Fed up, Leti grabs a bat and smashes in the car windows, her rage set to a high-energy gospel number. It’s a thrillingly satisfying scene, with Jurnee Smollett selling every inch of it.

It also plays with expectations. When Leti grabs the bat and it becomes clear that something’s about to go down, Tic tells some of the men to gather all the guns in the house. Is there going to be a standoff? No; Tic wants the guns gathered so they can be ferried away from the house, because everyone — including Leti — knows that when the police come, they’re going to arrest the woman who stood up for herself against her neighbors’ harassment, not the neighbors who lit a cross on fire in her yard.

The other great scene comes near the end, when Leti and Tic draft a mystic to help them exorcize the vengeful ghost of the previous owner from the house. Things get weird, and Leti ends up calling on the spirits of the Black people the previous owner killed to cast him out for good. Once again, it’s set to a gospel song, and once again, Smollet had me believing every part of it. Tic may be the lead character, but Leti is becoming the heart of the show.

So that’s the main thrust of the episode, but there are a few other things going on. Leti and Tic have passionate, extemporaneous sex at the party after he sees her dancing with another guy. The scene is playful and fun and then turns very serious immediately after, but I’m not sure if I buy them as a couple. Smollet and Jonathan Majors are both excellent actors, but I feel like their chemistry could have used more time in the lab before it combusted.

Basically, I’m not shipping them…yet.

Attention must also be paid to some of the inventive special effects in this episode, most of them coming during the exorcism. A couple of Leti’s neighbors pick that moment to take their terrorism to the next level and just break into her house, but the spirits of the former owner’s victims have other ideas. The ghost of the basketball player with the baby’s head? So weird and wild and great. And then one of the terrorists dies when he pokes his head in the elevator shaft only for it to rocket straight up and decapitate him. We spend several solid seconds watching as his heart pumps a few last spurts of blood out of his neck stump. It’s gross and I love it; you can tell the special effects people were proud of that one, for how long they held on it.

The episode ends on one of its worst scenes, as Tic figures out that Christina gave Leti the money to buy the house and confronts her. Abbey Lee is hypnotic as Christina, but she can’t save a long boring monologue about the magical macguffin she’s after: I think she wants pages from a magical book that will help her translate a magical language that she can use to perform magic, and buying the house somehow helped her get closer to achieving that goal…? The show has a lot of strengths but I get bored whenever it slows down to explain its mythology.

But overall, “Holy Ghost” is a terrific episode that’s as bracing and subversive as it is fun. I just hope the show keeps its focus on what makes it good rather than getting sidetracked by the lore.

Episode Grade: B+

Bullet Point Country

• I liked the historical crawl at the top of the episode (“Pioneering is dangerous”) and The Shining-like day counter that popped up throughout.
• I like how the show is slowly building out Ruby as a character. She clearly doesn’t think much of Leti’s artist pals, and is talking to folks at the party about how hard she’s willing to work to get ahead.
• Speaking of the party, there were a lot of fun “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” moments, like a couple of people talking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s white girlfriend.
• Apparently Tic did the dishes like George did them, which is part of the reason why Hippolyta didn’t want him to keep staying with her and Dee: she reminds her of her dead husband. It’s also another “Tic is George’s son” hint.
• Speaking of Hippolyta, Montrose was bold-faced lying by omission to her about what happened in Ardham. That’s going to come back around to bite them, isn’t it?
• I also loved the special effect when the ghostly face rose out of the photographs on the floor.
• The show doesn’t have especially crackling dialogue, but I liked Tic finding Leti studying the history of her house. “What’s all this?” “My house is haunted.” Short and to the point.

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