‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 6 Recap: The Korean Gore

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” So runs the advice of James Bond novelist Ian Fleming’s villainous Auric Goldfinger on how to tell the difference between random chance and an actual pattern. If we can apply this advice to another slice of pulp fiction, Lovecraft Country is now two episodes into what could be a hot streak. It’s a bit too early to say, but after this installment and the one before it, I’m more hopeful than ever.

Not only is this week’s ep (“Meet Me in Daegu”) an extended flashback to events before the start of the series proper, it’s not even a flashback from the perspective of one of the main characters. Indeed, Atticus Freeman is just a supporting player in a drama centered on one Ji-ah (Jamie Chung), his local love interest during the Korean War. Only she’s a lot more than meets the eye.

A lot more.

In a backstory that unfurls slowly throughout the hour, we learn that Ji-ah is in actuality a kumiho, a nine-tailed fox spirit that can be summoned to dwell in the form of a beautiful woman to avenge the crimes of men. In Ji-ah’s case, she was called forth by the mother of a young woman who was raped by the older woman’s husband in order to stop the abuse. Unfortunately for them both, she must kill 100 men in total for the daughter’s spirit to return to her body and for the kumiho to return to the supernatural realm.

Much of the interpersonal drama focuses on the two women’s tempestuous relationship, as their growing love for one another is perpetually overshadowed by the spirit’s unfamiliarity with the concept—she has a hard time understanding why the rapist’s form of “love” was wrong, and she gets many of her ideas about love from watching subtitled Judy Garland musicals at the local theater—and the desire of the mother (Cindy Chang) to have her actual daughter back. The dozens of murders the pair conspire to commit are largely brushed past…until Ji-ah encounters Atticus Freeman, and develops real-deal feelings for him.

But these feelings are complicated immensely by the manner in which they first meet. By day Ji-ah is a nurse who treats wounded American soldiers, and one of her friends during her shift, a woman named Young-ja (Prisca Kim) is a communist sympathizer. One day the whole shift is hauled out to an American base and lined up on their knees; someone from their shift has been leaking information to the enemy, and the Americans intend to find out who it is even if they have to shoot and kill every one of them first. After the first nurse is executed in cold blood, the soldier’s gun jams, and Private Freeman strides forward to carry out the second execution himself. There’s no hemming and hawing on his part, no overindulgent retreat into whatever guilt he might feel, and refreshingly little consideration for how what he does might makes us feel about him in the future. He just walks up and commits a war crime, end of story.

Only the story doesn’t end there. Months later, Atticus finds himself in the same hospital, recovering from his own wounds. Ji-ah befriends him with the intention of seducing and killing him. In the process, though, she discovers they share similar interests—debating the relative merits of The Count of Monte Cristo and its movie adaptation, emerging from under the thumb of a controlling parent, and so on. Thus is their romance kindled. Atticus even secures a print of Summer Stock from his Uncle George back home to arrange a private screening, just for the two of them.

When Ji-ah attempts to take the relationship to the next level, she learns that Atticus is a virgin—and that he harbors a lot of guilt over what he’s done, in the name of a country that treats him like dogshit. “I’ve done horrible things,” he says, “things I’ve tried to forget. And when I’m with you, that seems possible. It’s like because you see the good in me, I know it’s there.” She winds up expelling him from her house before they consummate the relationship, for fear that her more monstrous side will take over.

But then she does something unexpected: She comes clean about her intention to kill him to avenge her murdered friend, a plan she abandoned when she realized her feelings for him were real, not just feigned. “We’ve both done monstrous things, but that does not make us monsters,” she insists.

So their relationship continues. They have a lot of sex, during which Ji-ah manages to control her tentacle-like “tails” from extruding and impaling him…until she lets her guard down a little too much.

When her “tails” insert themselves into a man to consume his soul, Ji-ah also absorbs the victim’s memories. In Atticus’s case, she sees his abuse at the hands of his father Montrose, and his role in torturing Young-ja to death. But she’s also able to see his future—his strange, strange future, which ends in his death. She begs him not to go back home to the States to his own certain doom now that his time in Korea is up.

The episode concludes with Ji-ah and her “mother,” with whom she has reconciled, returning to the shaman who helped summon the kumiho in the first place. “Your mortal concerns are meaningless,” the shaman sneers. “You have not even become one with the darkness yet. You will see countless deaths before your journey is done.”

It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I still have my gripes: the CGI remains shaky, and while the horrific visuals here are memorable, I wouldn’t call them scary exactly. But this is a much better show than it was even two weeks ago during that treasure-hunt episode. Will next week prove that the third time’s the charm?

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.

Stream Lovecraft Country Episode 6 ("Meet Me In Daegu") on HBO Max

Stream Lovecraft Country Episode 6 ("Meet Me In Daegu") on HBO Now