‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 3 Recap: The Haunting of Her House

So, it’s a monster of the week show.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose. Episodic storytelling has been a mainstay of genre fare since television’s early days. You can rattle off a perfectly respectable list of shows ranging from watchable schlock to deliberate camp to proto-prestige that used this format: Lost in Space, the Star Trek franchise, Batman, Kolchak, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural….Some have more connecting tissue between their adventures than others—The X-Files famously vacillated between the long-term storytelling of its mythology episodes and the short-term payoffs of its one-offs—but that’s the deal that fans of genre TV have made for decades.

I just expected Lovecraft Country to be something more, is all.

I mean, the concept is so rich! Black people, already subject to the depredations of a thoroughly, violently racist society, uncovering a secret world of sorcery and monstrosity beneath the already monstrous surface, using the work of problematic fave H.P. Lovecraft as a cornerstone? That’s a high concept that’s hard to beat. Now imagine if this was a show that took its time in unveiling its terrible mysteries, and one that let us get to know its characters with gradual reveals instead of concentrated bursts. That would be something to watch.

Instead, we get…whatever “Holy Ghost” is, I guess. Weeks after the death of George Freeman and the bizarre events surrounding it in Ardham, Massachusetts, Leti Lewis uses an unexpected windfall of cash from her late mother to purchase the most haunted-looking house imaginable on Chicago’s emphatically white North Side. Setting it up as a boarding house, she sees it as a chance to provide people from her community with an inexpensive housing option, and also as a place to throw one hell of a house party.

Unfortunately for her, the house is already occupied. In a series of clunky expository scenes scattered throughout the episode—a racist cop asking pointed questions here, a mountain of newspaper clippings collected by Leti there, and finally a surprise appearance by the house purchase’s real backer, Christina Braithwhite—we learn that the house was once owned by one Horatio Winthrop, the founder of a Sons of Adam splinter group who stole pages from the group’s unholy text and attempted to use them on his own. The house passed to an acolyte named Hiram Epstein, who conducted experiments on living (Black) subjects provided to him by the racist cop. Both Epstein’s spirit and those of the people he killed live on inside the house, doing half-assed jump scares and pounding on trap doors and yelling “get out” and shit like that.

Things come to a head after Leti goes ham on her white neighbors’ cars in response to a cross burning on her front lawn, leading to an arrest of her and several other houseguests that seems to cause them no prolonged inconvenience whatsoever. (Seriously, she’s back in her darkroom developing photos the next day, with no information provided as to how she escaped the racist cop’s brutal wild ride in the back of a paddywagon or made bail or anything like that.) After an encounter with a ridiculous CGI ghost head manifested from her photographs and the aforementioned research, she and Atticus—to whom she loses her virginity in an admittedly very hot sex scene—and an unnamed mystic who slaughters a goat on the front porch confront the ghosts within the house, rallying the victims in order to exorcise Hiram Epstein’s malevolent spirit. The benevolent ghosts also execute three white assholes who break into the house with baseball bats and ill intent, which is nice of them to do.

The episode wraps up with Atticus confronting Christina at the quickly vacated office of the real estate agent who helped Leti purchase the house. It was all part of Braithwhite’s scheme to recover the stolen pages from the Book of Names, though how she knew Leti was in the market for a house in the first place and thus vulnerable to a real-estate swindle isn’t clear. Atticus attempts to kill Christina, but she magically stops him from pulling the trigger, reminding him in one last bitter retort that he can’t go around killing white women. (White men, on the other hand, are getting piled up like cordwood at this point.)

I think there’s a lot going for Lovecraft Country, I really do. The contrasting temperaments of the two leads—Jonathan Majors as the stoic Tic Freeman, Jurnee Smollett as the tempestuous Leti Lewis—showcases two fine actors with genuine romantic chemistry. I still don’t forgive the show for killing off Courtney B. Vance’s George before he and his brother, Michael K. Williams’s Montrose, could really interact, but hey, Michael K. Williams is in this show now, and that’s a good thing. Wunmi Mosaku is dynamite as Leti’s rock and roll singing sister Ruby, and making her the more grounded of the two sisters is an unexpected and rewarding choice. I found myself moved by Aunjaune Ellis’s performance as George’s widow Hippolyta, a woman who knows she’s being lied to about the circumstances of her husband’s death but has no way to find out the real truth. Leti’s method of rallying the good spirits to her side—she literally says their names, in the parlance of this year’s BLM protests—hit home hard, too. And if you’re a sucker for sexy dancing, as I am, they’ve got sexy dancing for you.

But if Lovecraft Country is just going to race from one supernatural menace to the next, forcing the characters to sprint along in their development just to keep up, it’s never going to have real storytelling power. It’s a sad irony for a show that’s all about who gets to tell these kinds of stories, who gets to be the protagonist of reality, that the story provided for the characters is such a ramshackle one.

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 3 ("Holy Ghost") on HBO Max