"Lovecraft Country" brings together sci fi monsters and actual monsters
Disclaimer: I haven’t read Lovecraft Country, the novel the new HBO series is based on, and for this post, I’m only going off the two episodes of the show I’ve seen so far.
The first episode of Lovecraft Country is excellent. The opening scene shows our main character Tic (Jonathan Majors) in the war trenches, but quickly expands into an intergalactic battle with Cthulhus and other Lovecraftian horrors. We hear the narrator speak the opening lines of The Jackie Robinson Story: “This is the story of a boy and his dream. But more than that, it is the story of an American boy and dream that is truly American.” Tic then wakes up from his dream on a bus; he’s leaving Kentucky during the Jim Crow era, going back to his home of Chicago.
As the show points out in the pilot, Black people are often excluded from science fiction narratives; or if they are included, it’s often as window dressing. It’s not that science fiction never tackles racism; it’s usually, something like “two very similar aliens with minor aesthetic differences have been a decades-long war over APPEARANCES” that land with the subtlety of a neon pink brick. Most sci fi stories aren’t written with the Black experience in mind, because the white lens is assumed to be the objective one. There’s almost certainly an unspoken view among many white sci fi writers that to include explicit references to Black experience would take away from the sci fi of it all; it assumes that the way white people move through the world is the default.
(In a slightly similar vein, I’m reminded of an early episode of Bojack Horseman that shows a businesswoman dog with her tongue hanging out and a strong breeze blows her tongue to the side and she accidentally licks someone beside her. Show creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg originaly wanted the dog to be a businessman, but production designer Lisa Hanawalt asked why it couldn’t be a woman. Bob-Waksberg realized he thought making the dog a woman was adding something extra and unnecessary to the joke, as if “man” was the default, and he admitted that there was no reason the dog couldn’t be a woman. This isn’t to say that Bojack was a perfectly woke show, of course, but it’s always good to examine what one thinks of as the default. ANYWAY.)
But this first episode really seems like it’s reinventing the genre, putting Tic, his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), and his childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) front and centre as they travel across middle America, facing down both literal monsters and the human monsters they encounter in sundown towns. This episode shows that the Black experience obviously doesn’t take away from the sci fi story; it dramatically enhances it. Not only has this point of view been missing from sci fi, we’ve also been missing this point of view. Even though the actual science fiction part is absent for most of the pilot, the first episode of Lovecraft Country is one of the best sci fi episodes I’ve seen. It’s a show that’s especially poignant following the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the shooting of Jacob Blake.
The second episode, however, I found a bit muddled, to be honest. While I give the show full credit for putting a season finale-worth event (the giant, mysterious manor in which our heroes are staying collapses in on itself, with all its evil inhabitants destroyed), it didn’t quite grab me the same way the pilot did. The common thread between science fiction and racism is there — KKK wizards being actual wizards is a natural place for this story to go — but it’s missing the forward momentum of the pilot. There seems to be a lot of “we go over here, now we go over here, now we’re back over here, and now we’re in another place again I guess?”
That said, the acting on Lovecraft Country is really, really good; Jonathan Majors is great as Tic, while Jurnee Smollett both acts really well and looks incredible in all the amazing outfits they put her in. Somebody please buy me all of her clothes from this show.
If you want to read a more detailed review of Lovecraft Country, check out Lawrence Ware’s piece on Slate.
While I haven’t read the novel, I know that its format is very episodic, which certainly seem to be the approach they’re taking here as well. I’m still going to keep watching Lovecraft Country, because the show has established its tone perfectly; it just needs to find its footing as far as pacing goes. I’m excited to see Michael K. Williams (best known as Omar from The Wire) show up as Tic’s dad, and I want to see how the whole group faces more spooky scaries, in all their forms.
Lovecraft Country is on HBO.
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Kat