‘Lovecraft Country’ Recap Episode 2: The Black Lodge

Courtney B. Vance is one of the most watchable actors on television. And listenable, too: His voice is a mellifluous thing, waxing and waning with his emotional tide. Lovecraft Country boasts a compelling lead in Jonathan Majors, and a high-energy co-lead in Jurnee Smollett, but Vance is where the show’s gravitas and its primary human interest comes from. You believe this guy is a guy, a fully dimensional person. You want to see what happens to him.

So naturally, they kill him in the second episode.

Alright, so this is Lovecraft Country, and we’ve already seen a resurrection; it’s entirely possible that Vance will return. I certainly hope so, especially now that Michael K. Williams has been introduced as Atticus’s lost and found father Montrose; “Courtney B. Vance and Michael K. Williams acting together” was a big reason why I bought a ticket to this particular dance in the first place. But if all is as it seems, we’ll have to settle for a couple of brief scenes putting Johnnie Cochrane and Chalky White together before we plow forward.

And plowing forward seems to be the show’s next move. In this episode (titled “Whitey’s on the Moon” after Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which is played over the climactic scene), Lovecraft Country quickly introduces and then dispatches a secret lodge full of cult members trying to open a portal to the Garden of Eden using Atticus as fuel, because he’s a descendant of the cult’s founder via his rape of a slave and thus has magically empowered blood. The whole building is rubble by the time Atticus and Letitia escape with his father Montrose and the badly wounded and dying George, that’s how completely the show races through this storyline.

There’s a herky-jerky, stop-start rhythm to the storytelling that makes it hard to stay on board for more than a few scenes in a row. Take the memory-loss subplot, for example, in which George and Leti’s recollections of the monster massacre from the night before are magically erased. First they’re acting so happy with their lush new surroundings that the audience is left wondering if they’d forgotten about the monsters. Then you find out that yes, they have, which explains that. Then you find out their memories are being erased via a spell. Then the monsters show up again and George and Leti (obviously) believe they’re real. Then their memory gets wiped again. Then it gets restored and they freak out. And somewhere in there we find out that the car that was totaled during the battle the night before has been returned largely intact, which doesn’t square with the erased memory bit at all. See what I mean? It’s all over the place.

The same can be said about the Braithwhites, our heroes’ saviors turned captors. In one sequence they’re treating them like guests of honor, in another they’re torturing them with traumatic visions, eg Letitia making out with a fake Atticus with a snake for a penis or a vivid flashback that gives Atticus a chance to feel really bad about killing a Korean woman during the war (I bet she’s pretty sad about it too), next they’re guests of honor again, then they’re getting shot by Samuel while trying to escape, then Atticus is a failed human sacrifice.

It’s impossible to find your bearings, even before you factor in the different motivations and temperaments of cult leader Samuel Braithwhite, his dutiful but resentful daughter Christine, Christine’s somehow-unrelated male doppelgänger William, and the racist yokel lady who does their bidding but seems about to kill the “guests of honor” out of racist animus when given the slightest opportunity. It’s hard to be scared of these people when the show gives you so little to hang on to for any length of time.

And that’s the biggest problem facing Lovecraft Country: its failure to live up to the basic standard of its genre. Horror is supposed to be scary. I don’t mind dying on this hill any more than I’d mind dying on a hill that reads “Comedy Should Be Funny.” The purpose of horror is to horrify, to terrify, to frighten, to make you wish you weren’t watching but compel you to continue.

Racism, of course, is a scary thing, most especially for those on its receiving end, as Atticus and Letitia and George and Montrose clearly are. But the monsters, the magic, the evil cult, the arcane rituals, all the stuff that makes Lovecraft Country a horror show rather than a drama—none of it is frightening, not even on a mere jump-scare level. It’s a bunch of dull and obvious CGI standing around where actually frightening things ought to be. One need look no further than films with comparable stories, from The Wicker Man to Get Out, to see how much scarier this stuff ought to be, and can be when done properly.

Now that Atticus and company appear to have escaped from the Braithwhites, another question emerges: Is this going to be a Monster of the Week show? In the premiere, they battled the racist sheriffs and those big white monsters. In this episode, the cult was their primary antagonist. Will they continue to run into offshoots of that cult, or are we watching an episodic horror TV show that’s just gonna throw new beasts and baddies at its heroes over and over, sweeping them away just as quickly? Couldn’t it be so much more?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 2 ("Whitey's On The Moon") on HBO Max

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 2 ("Whitey's On The Moon") on HBO Now