‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 4 Recap: I’m Shipping Up to Boston

It’s road trip time again on Lovecraft Country. In “A History of Violence,” the show’s fourth episode, our heroes journey once more into the shadowy land of the title, where secrets and terrors await. And just as before, the destination doesn’t feel worth the journey.

We pick up almost immediately after the confrontation between Atticus and Christina Braithwhite that ended the previous episode. Montrose is busy binge drinking, having unpleasant aural flashback to scenes from throughout his trauma-heavy life, and burning the copy of the Sons of Adam bylaws that George gave him before he was killed. Christina herself shows up at Leti’s house, looking for old Hiram Epstein’s solar-system orrery model (currently residing on Hippolyta’s desk) and revealing herself to be the true financial backer behind Leti’s purchase of the place—but unable to enter thanks to the spell of protection Leti’s sorceress acquaintance cast upon it. And Tic is at the library, unwittingly duplicating much of the research his father had already done in an attempt to discover how to protect himself and his family against further attacks by the Braithwhites and the Sons, whom we later learn have 34 more lodges in addition to the one destroyed in the second episode. (The racist Chicago police captain who provided SoA splinter-cell leader Hiram Epstein with victims? He claims to be a member of one of them.)

It soon becomes apparent to everyone (on the show, if not in the audience) that the only logical next step is to return to Massachusetts in search of SoA founder Titus Braithwhite’s hidden vault, which would contain pages of the Book of Names that Atticus might be able to use to conjure further spells of protection against Christina and company. So it’s another repetitive-feeling road trip out to New England for our heroes, this time including George’s widow Hippolyta, their daughter Dee, and local barfly Tree (Deron J. Powell), who just needs a ride out to the coast. It’s never explained why Hippolyta and Dee are so eager to return to the state where George was murdered; certainly Hippolyta doesn’t get the idea to travel to the rural area where it happened in search of answers until she’s already on the road back to Chicago at the episode’s end.

The bulk of the episode’s action (really everything aside from Leti’s sister Ruby’s despondency over the lack of jobs available to Black women and her subsequent, sweltering assignation with Christina’s minion William) takes place in a Boston museum. Well, under the Boston museum, is a better way to put it, and miles out to sea, and in a spacetime warp at the bottom of the elevator shaft that magically connects this slice of New England to Leti’s house. (That’s where the dead bodies of the white attackers killed by her house’s ghosts ended up.) Using various clues, Leti, Montrose, and Tic locate and explore Titus Braithwhite’s heavily booby-trapped and cursed vault in search of those pages.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

More pointed than its callbacks to great action-adventures of yore is the episode’s critique of museum culture, in which white-supremacist “explorers” are praised for their “discoveries” of stuff that belonged to the indigenous people they first plunder, then turn into learning experiences for others. If the design of the corpses were a little less Hollywood, and if director Victoria Mahoney exposed them as a monumental horror-image rather than staging them like something from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World, the slaughtered Native Americans staged at a banquet table by their killer, Titus Braithwhite, would have made for a vicious comparison with the dioramas and displays in the museum itself. They all depend on taking what isn’t yours.

But as I said, something about the staging of the scene flattens the point, even when one of the exhibited corpses comes to life and reveals herself to be a “two-spirit” sorceress named Yahima (played by cis female actress Monique Candelaria) once employed by Titus to translate the sinister Book of Names. It was her refusal to continue to do so after discovering the kind of person he was that led him to slaughter her people and curse her to an eternity in his vault, rendering her voice an unendurable siren’s wail should she ever leave it. The episode’s surprise ending shows Montrose taking matters into his own hands by cutting her throat from out of nowhere, ostensibly silencing her forever.

It’s a discordantly harsh ending for a show that trafficked in the cheesy sets and dodgy CGI of a syndicated action show from the ’90s for much of its duration. Nothing really felt lived in or particularly dangerous, and for once it was too much to ask of actors Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, and Michael K. Williams to provide replacement gravitas for the story’s shortcomings. It’s just hard to believe any of them are actually scared of the blank spaces on stage where the visual effects department will eventually insert something for them to be scared of. And in a way, I can relate. I want to be watching a show that lives up to the strength of its high concept and the richness of its source material. It’s just not what I’m actually looking at.

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 4 ("A History of Violence") on HBO Max

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 4 ("A History of Violence") on HBO