‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 7 Recap: Otherworldly

Listen: Hippolyta Freeman has come unstuck in time. And space.

In this week’s solid installment of Lovecraft Country (“I Am”), Aunjanue Ellis’s Hippolyta Freeman takes center stage—literally, at one point—like Ji-ah last week and Ruby the week before that. Once again this is weird to say, considering how strong the performances of series leads Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett are, but the show benefits from this side trip. And it is a trip.

It takes a while to get started, however. First, Hippolyta has to unlock the mystery of Hiram Epstein’s orrery, unlocking a hidden compartment that contains a key. This key will switch on machinery in an observatory in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, which…well, more about that in a moment.

Majors’s Atticus and Smollett’s Leti have some business to attend to as well. Through an ill-timed visit to his father Montrose’s apartment, Tic discovers that his dad is gay (it seems he’s at least heard rumors to this effect before), and recoils in disgust, not so much for his old man’s sexuality itself but for the way he overcompensated by mercilessly beating Tic as a young man to keep him from being “soft.”

Tic then sets out to track down a cousin of his mother’s, in whom the Braithwhite bloodline might be traceable, and who might possess the missing copy of the Book of Names. Leti stays home to reconcile with her sister Ruby, who’s learned how the shape-shifting sausage gets made by Christina—she’s kept the corpses of William and Dell in the basement, turning their blood into magic shape-shifting potions. In the process, she discovers the orrery, and the coordinates to which Hippolyta must be traveling. She calls Tic to tip him off, and he arrives just in time to fight off some cops in the service of the sinister Captain Lancaster.

Then a portal to other worlds gets opened, sucking Tic and Hippolyta in. That’s when things get really strange. And, alternately, funny and endearing and just plain cool.

Hippolyta arrives in some kind of sci-fi alien-planet wasteland, as robotic being descend from a spaceship made from Lovecraftian “non-Euclidean geometry.” She then wakes up inside the craft, naked, with some kind of pinkish-bluish energy stored in panels surgically implanted in her wrists. A towering cyborg woman with an enormous afro—she’s played by Karen LeBlanc, and her name in the credits is listed as both “Seraphina” and, cheekily, “Beyond C’est”—tells Hippolyta she is not imprisoned, despite appearances to the contrary.

It takes some failed escape attempts and a partial dismantling of her surroundings for Hippolyta to figure out what her…captor? Benefactor? Well, whatever she is, it takes Hippolyta a bit to figure out what she means. When the alien being demands Hippolyta name herself and where she wants to be, Hippolyta says she’d like to be dancing on stage with Josephine Baker in Paris. And just like that, she is.

So she’s not the quickest study in the world when it comes to dancing—sue her! But she takes to Josephine’s bohemian demimonde like a fish to water, carousing with the best of them. In a heart to heart with the famous performer, she speaks with bitterness about how her newfound freedom has shown her just how un-free she was back in her old life. “They found a smart way to lynch me without me ever noticing a noose,” she says of the white people who boxed her into her limited life. She hates them—and she hates herself for “letting” them make her feel so small.

One cry of “I am Hippoylta” later, and she finds herself in a sort of Night’s Watch swordfight training circle, surrounded by warriors who are all Black women. Her dueling technique is a bit more advanced than her dancing technique; before long she gets the best of her trainer, and is crowned by a queen with a golden helmet.

The next thing you know, she and her cadre of soldiers are slaughtering an entire platoon of Confederate troops. “We are here,” she proclaims after a quick but only temporary victory over the racist rebels, “because we did not beliee them when they told us that our rage was not ladylike, that our violence goes too far, that the hatred we feel for our enemies isn’t godlike.” If she was free to love and lust in Josephine Baker’s world, she’s free to hate and kill here—two faces of the same liberatory coin.

Hippolyta’s next journey, though, is one closer to home. She names herself “Hippolyta, George’s wife,” and just like that, she’s back in bed with her now not-so-late husband. (It’s good to see Courtney B. Vance back in action, albeit briefly.) There’s a funny little time jump that reveals Hippolyta has told George everything that’s happened to her in her jaunts between worlds—no pretending that everything’s status quo ante for her—and it’s all he can do to keep up. Hell, he’s not even sure he’s real, based on what she’s saying.

But he does take to heart her remonstrance that wittingly or no, he helped her “shrink” during her life. Even though he fell for her because he saw a “discoverer” in her insatiable curiosity, he allowed or encouraged her to become a mere support system for his work creating the traveler’s guide book while she stayed at home. This leads to her final transformation: “I am Hippolyta, discoverer.”

Then she and George find themselves in, basically, a No Man’s Sky planet, or a world from one of the Star Wars prequels, communing with adorable aliens and cataloguing the far-out day-glo flora and fauna. Only after this does she decide to return to her original life, to be there for her daughter Dee.

Only it’s Atticus, not Hippolyta, whom we see fall back to earth through the portal in the observatory. Fleeing the oncoming cops, he grabs a copy of a mysterious book called Lovecraft Country, written by his uncle George—but he doesn’t notice the handmade comic created by Dee wedged partially under the slain cop’s corpse. That can’t be good.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

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 7 ("I Am") on HBO Max

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 7 ("I Am") on HBO Now