Lovecraft Country takes a break from its main story to give us a hyper-focused flashback episode about Tic’s time in Korea, and it’s the best outing yet:
“Meet Me in Daegu” takes a break from everything happening with Tic and Leti and Ruby in the US to take us on a journey into the past, showing us what happened during Tic’s latest tour of Korea. It also pays off the mysterious phone calls to a mystery woman Tic made in the first and fifth episodes, moments that passed so fast I wondered if it wouldn’t shock viewers to get a whole episode designed to explain them. I hope not, because the singular focus of “Meet Me in Daegu” makes it the strongest episode of Lovecraft Country yet.
The main character of this episode isn’t Tic but Ji-Ah (Jamie Chung), a Korean woman with a dark secret. Clearly, the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn aren’t the only people in the world capable of using magic. When Ji-Ah’s mother finds that her new husband is raping her young daughter, she goes to a shamen and summons a kumiho, a nine-tailed fox creature from Korean folklore, to fix the problem. The kumiho possesses Ji-Ah and kills the husband, but the problem is that now it’s stuck in her body and won’t leave until it takes 100 souls in a twisted parody of a Disney story.
All of this happens before the episode even starts, by the way, and we learn it piecemeal throughout. The episode is well-paced, and as weird as it gets it’s never overwhelming. Much credit also goes to Chung, who plays the kumiho with grit and vulnerability. It’s such an interesting predicament she’s in: she’s not Ji-Ah, exactly, but she still wants to please Ji-Ah’s mother, who can’t decide if she loves or hates her. If she kills 100 men, she’ll turn back into the daughter her mother wants, but will she be her anymore? She’s fond of Judy Garland movies, wants a career as a nurse, and hates speed dating. “Meet Me in Daegu” does a terrific job of turning her into a sympathetic character very quickly.
It also gives us more of those sickening special effects the show has become known for. Basically, the kumiho kills its victims during sex, using its nine tails to wrap around them and absorb their memories. The tails come out of a variety of different orifices, each less expected than the next, and the scene ends with a squishy climax you’ll have to see to believe. I thought Hilary’s skin sloughing off Ruby’s body was the most disgusting thing I’d see this season, but the show keeps managing the top itself.
I say that in admiration, mind you. Lovecraft Country isn’t just saving its good horror imagery for the beginning and end; it’s giving us new nightmare fuel every week, and I salute the creativity, even though I’m getting kind of nervous every Sunday.
But as usual, the horror is only half the story. “Meet Me in Daegu” does a typically great job of marrying its genre plot with incisive social commentary, this time exploring American imperialism during the Korean War, where the quest to fight against the Communist led on-the-ground soldiers like Tic to commit heinous acts, like coldly executing one of Ji-Ah’s friends in an attempt to expose a spy, or orders from above. Tic ends up in the hospital where Ji-Ah works, and she has every intention of killing him, but stops once she gets to know him and learns that the war has twisted a basically decent man into terrible shape.
At some point, Ji-Ah literally says most of that in dialogue, and the precision of it all sounds off; not for the first time, Lovecraft Country could stand to go a little less literal with its dialogue and let the actors take on more of the load, because they’re more than up to it. All of this comes across much better when Tic and Ji-Ah are just staring into each others eyes, kissing while Tic arranges for a special screening of Summer Stock on his base.
Frankly, I kind of buy the two of them together more than I buy Tic and Leti. There’s a longing and a tension between Tic and Ji-Ah that makes their scenes come alive, including their sex scenes. The fact that Ji-Ah might destroy Tic body and soul at any moment, either because she loses control of her powers or because she decides he deserves to die, probably has something to do with it.
Speaking of Leti, you have to wonder how she’ll react when Tic tells her about all of this, because it’s looking like he’ll have to. The last time they saw each other, Ji-Ah accidentally absorbed some of Tic’s memories, but in this case she doesn’t see his past, like usual: she sees his future, and he’s going to die. She pleads with him not to return to America, but she just nearly sucked his soul out his face with fox tails coming out of her nostrils, so he’s not in the mood to listen and skedaddles as far away as possible.
All of this has me pretty psyched to see what happens next. Before, I was getting a little worried that Lovecraft Country was suffocating under the weight of its own mythology, but “Meet Me in Daegu” was exactly the kind of laser-focused, clear-headed episode I needed to remind me why I liked these characters, and to get me excited for the next leg of their journey.
Episode Grade: A
Bullet Point Country
- At the very end of the episode, Ji-Ah and her mother, who has come around to accepting her as her daughter, visit the shamen who originally helped summon her. The shaman seems to imply that Ji-Ah is going to become a force for evil. I hope not, but in any case, I bet she hops the pond to America at some point.
- This episode is less focused on racial politics than usual, but there are still some keen observations, such as Tic and the translator bonding over them both being other-ized in Korea, whether on the base or among the people.
- My dumb musical-loving brain really enjoyed Ji-Ah busting a move to “The Trolley Song” at the top of the episode, even if it was just a fantasy.
- Speaking of Garland, she’s used cannily as a symbol throughout the episode. We see her at her at her bright shiny best in Meet Me in St. Louis, glimpse her during her downward slope in Summer Stock, and finally hear her deliver a defiant monologue from later in her life, after Hollywood had worn her down and it was all she could do to hang on. I don’t know if showrunner Misha Green is just a huge fan of 1950s pop culture or if she and her team did a ton of research or what, but these sorts of counterpoints are always expertly chosen.
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