‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 4 Proves the Women are Better in the Show than Book

“Don’t let the men fool you into thinking it’s always about them.” – Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee) to Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) in Lovecraft Country Episode 4, “A History of Violence.

Up until now, Lovecraft Country has been a fairly faithful adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name. The first two episodes basically followed the book’s first mega-long chapter and last week covered Leti moving into the very haunted Winthrop House. However in Episode 4, “A Violent History,” Lovecraft Country starts to strike out on its own. While book Tic (Jonathan Majors) teams up with his father (Michael K. Williams) and a whole hilarious group of fraternal brothers on a Chicago-based museum heist, the show puts Leti right in the midst of the action. Furthermore, we see Christina Braithwhite bristle against the sexism of the Sons of Adam, Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) struggle with the confines of racism, and Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis) assert her intelligence in a major way.

Brazenly shifting the setting and context for the story is one thing, but tonight’s episode shows off the best change showrunner Misha Green made from page-to-screen. Putting women right in the thick of Lovecraft Country‘s action.

HBO’s Lovecraft Country is an intoxicating dream of a show, imagining a Black sci-fi nerd playing the part of a pulp fiction hero in 1950s America. Atticus “Tic” Freeman begins his strange journey traveling to “Lovecraft Country,” a part of New England associated with H.P. Lovecraft’s twisted horror stories, in order to find his missing father. The trip comes with revelations and sacrifices. Tic learns that his mother is a descendent of Titus Braithwhite, the founder of a cult called the Sons of Adams who are obsessed with white supremacy, immortality, and harnessing magic to reopen the Garden of Eden. Tic’s blood imbues him with power. But it also makes him, and his loved ones, a target.

Now the women of Lovecraft Country are no slouches in Matt Ruff’s novel. “Titia”, as Leti is called in the book, often comes to the aid of Tic, and whole chapters are told from the POV of Titia, Ruby, and Hippolyta. But when it comes to the more dangerous trials — like the Indiana Jones-esque tomb raid tonight — the ladies aren’t involved. Lovecraft Country, the show, changes that, giving them the same opportunity to live out their fantasies of heroism that Tic gets. Moreover, the women of Lovecraft Country the show get to be angrier. They get to be feistier. They get to speak out, push back, and express themselves more. And it makes the show all the better for it.

Lovecraft Country the show also plays with the inherent misogyny of the Sons of Adam in more literal terms than the book. In Ruff’s novel, the main puppet master pulling Tic along is Caleb Braithwhite. Misha Green gender swaps the character, making Caleb “Christina”. Doing so doesn’t radically change the younger Braithwhite’s ambitions. In fact, through Christina’s eyes, the struggle to claim leadership within the Sons of Adam becomes more visceral. Lovecraft Country the show is fixated on the horrors of racism, but it’s not ignoring other injustices that our culture is built upon. Changing Caleb to Christina, and showing a Chicago rival tell her to her face, “No c*nts allowed,” underscores the complex matrix of prejudice haunting all the characters.

Lovecraft Country uses its female characters to explore different levels of privilege throughout the series. Hippolyta reveals to her daughter Diana (another gender-swapped character from the book! — played by Jada Harris) that she named a comet Hera’s Chariot. But white academia pushed the honor to a Swedish scholar’s niece. Nepotism and racism were a one-two punch the young Hippolyta didn’t yet have the guts to stand up to. Elsewhere Leti’s sister Ruby has been working her ass off to shine up her resumé so she has a shot at a prestigious job at Marshall Fields. She has been led to understand that as a Black woman, her qualifications have to outshine the white competition. When Ruby visits the luxe department store and sees a newly hired Black salesgirl, her jaw clenches in jealousy. We don’t yet know how hard this young lady worked to achieve her new position, but she is thinner and lighter-skinned than Ruby. Was that more important than Ruby’s hard-earned professional qualifications?

When adapting a book for television, a showrunner has to make difficult calls about what details to keep, what to throw away, and what to utterly change. Misha Green has already shown that she wants to walk a path as perilously narrow as Leti does in Episode 4. She wants to be true to Ruff’s story, but she wants Lovecraft Country to be so much more, to boot. Lovecraft Country the show has already given us more thrills and more tragedy than the novel, but its biggest achievement is reframing the narratives of all of its female characters.

Where to stream Lovecraft Country