Review: Lovecraft Country Episode 4, “A History of Violence”

The Lovecraft Country gang goes on some Indiana Jones-esque hijinks in “A History of Violence,” which is a lot of fun as long as you don’t bog yourself down in the details.

I’m getting into a rhythm with Lovecraft Country: I really like the show when it’s focusing on its characters or devising eye-popping horror set pieces, and get kinda bored when it gets into its byzantine mythology. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of mythology in “A History of Violence.”

Lemme try and break down exactly what the characters are after here: so there are a set of pages from a magic book hidden along ago by ancient racist and actual wizard Titus Braithwaite, founder of the Order of the Ancient Dawn. If found, someone knowledgeable can use the pages to translate the Language of Adam, a magical language that will give that person access to a vast catalog of spells they can then use for whatever.

Christina Braithwaite, Titus’ descendent, wants to find the pages so she can achieve her dream of being a wizard like her father, despite the fact that the Order doesn’t admit women. She’s using Tic, Leti and Montrose to retrieve the pages, which are hidden in a vault in a museum in Boston, under an exhibit showcasing all the artifacts Titus was “given” during his many expeditions, aka his imperialist sticky-fingered joyrides of indigenous cultures.

Tic and Leti go along with it because they think that if they get the pages, they can learn the Language of Adam and cast some spells to protect themselves from the racist wizards of the world. And Montrose, who already knows how dangerous magic is, comes along to try and stop them. At the end of the episode, he kills Yahema, a two-spirited Native American apparently turned into a siren by Titus so they couldn’t speak if they ever left his vault, although that last bit of information is tossed off so casually you may miss it. Even without speech, Yahema can help them translate the pages, which is why Montrose decides he has to kill them.

All of this is, to put it lightly, convoluted. You know, in fiction, there’s a reason a big bag of money makes such a good MacGuffin: we all know immediately why someone would want a big bag of money, and can understand why they might go to extreme lengths to get it. But here, disentangling exactly why everyone is after these pages, and what they can do with them once they have them, is so complicated it almost distracts from what is at heart a pretty fun heist caper of an episode, with a horror twist.

But the fun still shines through. To get to the pages, and to Yahema, the gang must traverse a series of obstacles that resembles nothing so much as Indiana Jones meets Edgar Allen Poe. First there’s the light puzzle they have to solve to get into the vault itself, which seems plucked right out of Raiders of the Lost Arc. Then they must traverse a Last Crusade-like bridge across a gaping chasm while bladed pendulums swing back in forth. Finally, they have to use Atticus’ blood to open a door to a shipwreck stranded in time, and make it back before they all drown.

That last part was giving me serious Pirates of the Caribbean vibes. “This is some Journey to the Center of the Earth-type shit,” Tic says. See, I’m not the only one thinking of pop culture references.

And it’s all a great time! I particularly loved the bit towards the end of the journey when the camera was half in water and half out, and the special effect where Yahema transformed from a desiccated corpse to a flesh-and-blood person, again giving me Last Crusade, but in reverse:

This was a good old-fashioned adventure tale, underlaid with the sense of history and social consciousness that Lovecraft Country always brings. It was an episode driven more by plot than character, which is fine every once in a while. I just wish the plot was a little easier to follow.

Not that there weren’t character beats. Hippolyta and Diana join the gang on their road trip to Boston, and I loved the bonding moment mother and daughter shared in the observatory. Although I’m not officially very afraid for the both of them since Hippolyta has decides to take a detour to Ardham to find out exactly what happened to her husband. I knew Montrose’s decision not to tell her the whole truth would come back to bit them.

Speaking of Montrose, Tree (Deron J. Powell) suggests to Tic that he may be having sexual affairs with men, both with the bartender Sammy back in Chicago and with the museum security guard who gets them in at night. I’ll look for follow-up on that next week.

And back in Chicago, Ruby has a rude awakening when she walks into Marshall’s and finds that they’ve already hired a Black girl, and apparently one who just applied on a whim whereas Ruby has been grinding trying to make it happen for years. Depressed, she ends up going home with Christina’s lackey William, who clearly wants something from her, even if we don’t know what it is yet.

Overall, what we have here is a bridge episode. It’s fun but kind of choppy, but hopefully is setting up better things ahead.

Episode Grade: C+

Bullet Point Country

• The little kid shushing Tic and Leti in the library is fun.
• Speaking of Tic and Leti, I’m still not really buying their romantic chemistry. In one scene, they have a schoolyard-style “I-hate-you-no-I-hate-YOU” thing happening, and then later they kiss passionately after narrowly surviving the vault. It all plays kind of middle school romance.
• Christina, who wears awesome pants and closes the doors to police captain’s offices with her one foot like a boss, is at the Winthrop house early in the episode looking for Hiram Epstein’s orrery, which is a model of the solar system. Hippolyta found it during Leti’s house party and must have taken it home, cause it’s at George’s bookstore now and she’s trying to get it to work. That’s yet another plot point that’s just kind of blasted through without much explanation, although I don’t know if it ends up being important.
• When Christina is talking to the police captain, she says of the orrery, “That is the key to unlocking his time machine, isn’t it?” Interesting.

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