‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 9 Recap: Going Back to Tulsa

There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

The opening of the episode in which the journey takes place (“Rewind 1921”) is a bit disorienting, given the ending of the previous one, which saw Atticus calm a giant eyeball monster down with a touch of his hand after the beast slaughtered a phalanx of racist Chicago cops. Neither the monster nor the deaths of enough police to trigger a nationwide crisis is mentioned, beyond Leti’s cover story that there was a gas explosion at her house. (I’m not sure that the autopsy reports will reflect this, given that half the cops were partially devoured.)

But the show brushes past all that, and we’re left with Montrose, Atticus, Letitia, and Ruby tending to an ailing Diana. Dee was apparently contaminated during her long cat-and-mouse game with the demonic Topsy and Bopsy; her arm is rapidly aging and decaying, and her face is transforming into the ghastly Topsy image. With Ruby’s help, the group convinces Christina Braithwhite to reset the curse, which she does in exchange for Tic’s promise that he’ll participate in her upcoming immortality ritual. But resetting the curse is all she can do; to eliminate it entirely, they need the whole Book of Names, which burned up in the Tulsa Race Massacre decades earlier.

(I’ll note here that Ruby makes a separate peace with Christina, demurring from preventing her from killing Tic during a ritual on the autumnal equinox in exchange for the witch’s promise that Leti will go unharmed. For her part, Christina presides over the gruesome death of Captain Lancaster, whose stitched-together body begins bursting at the seams.)

While Tic, Montrose, and Leti debate what to do, Dee’s mother Hippolyta returns from her jaunt across the multiverse. And she’s got a plan: They’ll all travel to the observatory that houses the evil cult’s time machine, which she can use her science-fiction powers to reprogram and power up, enabling the others to travel through time and space and retrieve the Book of Names from Tulsa. But the key is that they can’t intervene in any way that might alter the future. If this means Montrose must confront his painful memories of being beaten by his father for being gay, and dumping his soon-to-be-murdered young boyfriend out of shame and self-loathing, and watching everything he ever cared about get destroyed by rampaging white racists, so be it.

It’s painful to see scenes of the Black residents of Tulsa going about their business—shopping, strolling, playing, getting ready for the prom (the cancellation of which is seen as an early warning sign)—not knowing what is about to befall them. And it’s terrible to watch the massacre unfold—the sheer wanton destructiveness of it all, the cruel work of racism’s engine of hatred, fueled with human blood. You desperately want Montrose, Tic, and Leti to escape before it’s too late, because you desperately want anybody to escape before it’s too late. You understand why Montrose had to get blind drunk to go through with any of it in the first place. And when Atticus steps in with a baseball bat to beat off the attackers threatening young George and Montrose and his own mother Dora, it’s a time paradox that’s easy to get behind.

The problem—and it’s the kind of thing that sounds obvious once you say it, though in my case it took a while to formulate in my brain—is that time travel and race-against-time plot devices don’t mix. Time travel should cancel the race against time out! Why would Hippolyta, for example, travel to a time when her daughter Dee was cursed when she could have gone further back and stopped it from happening? Even more crucially, why would Tic and Leti and Montrose travel to Tulsa mere hours before the massacre, when they could have gone there at any time at all up until that point and still retrieved the Book of Names they were looking for?

There really is no answer that works. There was nothing about Dee’s condition that prevented Hippolyta from seeking a workaround to it deeper in the spacetime continuum. There was nothing about the massacre that necessitated retrieving the Book of Names while white rioters burned the city down around it. Leti never needed to stand and watch the family matriarch, Hattie (Regina Taylor), burn alive in gruesome closeups after handing over the book. The only thing that required the travelers to travel to these times specifically was the show, which needed the race-against-time device to propel the plot.

Normally I go pretty easy on these kinds of logic holes. After all, genre work—horror, fantasy, science fiction—largely depends on stuff that doesn’t make real-world, logical sense. Provided you’re getting enough material that has compensatory value, it usually pays to overlook this stuff; otherwise you become Neil deGrasse Tyson complaining about BB-8 not being able to roll in the desert (despite the fact that the droid was a physical prop that, you know, actually rolled in the desert), or one of those insufferable “Why didn’t Gandalf just ride an eagle to Mordor and drop the Ring in the volcano” people.

But Lovecraft Country made it too difficult to ignore. Not when Hippolyta returns saying she’s spent 200 Earth years in an alternate dimension, armed with all the knowledge she gained during that time. Not when Montrose is so obviously traumatized by the very massacre into which Hippolyta’s portal sends him. Not when they have to perform a sort of exorcism on Dee when they could have prevented her from being cursed entirely.

There’s only one episode of Lovecraft Country to go this season, and possibly at all, since the show has yet to be renewed. It will no doubt be centered on Christina’s ritual, with all the wonky CGI you might expect to come with it. Will it retroactively justify the show’s weak spots and narrative cheats? Will it live up to the impassioned performances of the cast, despite the limitations of the material they’re working with? Moving though this episode often was, I don’t think it offers enough evidence for optimism.

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 9 ("Rewind 1921") on HBO Max

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 9 ("Rewind 1921") on HBO Now