‘Lovecraft Country’ Season Finale Recap: Spellbound

Lovecraft Country: “Look what we’ve gone through to get here: monsters, ghosts, a magical treasure hunt, curses, the past, the future—we can’t stop fighting now!”

Also Lovecraft Country: [singalong to “Sh-Boom”]

I dunno, you tell me. When your group includes a woman who was killed and resurrected from the dead, the male heir to a bloodline of wizards (driving to his own certain death), a woman who spent two hundred years exploring the multiverse, a Korean fox spirit, a shapeshifter, a guy who just got back from time-traveling to a historical racial atrocity, and a little girl who lost an arm to evil racist demons summoned by a racist cop’s curse and now has a robot arm from the future instead, does singing along to doo-wop in the car count as stopping the fight?

That “Sh-Boom” singalong is a solid stand-in for Lovecraft Country and its season finale, “Full Circle.” I see what they’re going for—in this case a moment of levity before the horror and desperation of the final battle sinks in. I get it, in theory. But the delivery is just a bit off: The smiles feel forced, the shared connection too neat, the scene too much of a scene instead of something that feels like it emerged organically from the characters involved. Similarly, I get what Lovecraft Country wants to do; I just don’t think it did it.

The plot of this climactic episode is a breeze, really. A group consisting of Atticus, Letitia, Montrose, Hippolyta, Diana (along for the ride, not really a participant), and Ruby (secretly Christina in Ruby’s form) travel from Chicago to Ardham, Massachusetts. There, they will attempt to thwart the immortality spell Christina plans to execute using Tic’s lifeblood with a spell of their own, taught to them by their ancestors (including Atticus’s late mother) in a sort of Freeman family limbo. Everything nearly backfires when Ruby/Christina’s duplicity is uncovered, but Leti somehow survives a second brush with death and chants a new spell. With the help of Ji-ah’s goofy CGI tail-tentacles, she binds Christina to Atticus and short-circuits the immortality ritual, leaving Christina buried under a heap of rubble.

That’s when Leti delivers the coup de grace: She hasn’t just cut off Christina from magic, she’s cut off all white people on Earth from magic, which she says is “ours now.” By this I take it to mean it’s the exclusive province of Black people, though where that leaves a Korean spirit entity like Ji-ah, who seems just fine, is unclear.

(Also: You kind of have to assume the spell applies to people considered by society to be white, since otherwise you have to embrace the idea that race is not a sociological construct but the product of actual biology; this is not, I think, a road Lovecraft Country—or anybody else—ought to go down. At any rate, racecraft is itself a form of malign magic, so it would fit.)

Unfortunately, Leti is too late to save Atticus, who at least dies knowing Leti and their unborn child are okay. And though she leaves Christina for dead, Dee shows up with her robot arm and a monster in tow, and literally pulps the Braithwhite woman’s neck with her metal hand as the beast howls behind her.

I’m of several minds about all this, and none of those minds think the episode was very good. It wasn’t scary, for one thing, which has been true for nearly the entire run of the show; really only Dee’s pursuit by the monstrous Topsy and Bopsy qualifies. Its vision of magic was dull and prosaic, a bunch of CGI flames and clouds and tentacles with no muscle or even cleverness behind them. In theory this episode in particular is a testament to the power of family, chosen or otherwise, but it cuts itself off at the knees on that regard too by presenting Ruby’s rapprochement with Leti as a ruse by Christina, and by including Ji-ah, who is part of Tic’s family only by an extremely generous definition of the word that somehow includes “having tentacle sex with a psychic fox spirit who foretells your own death.”

And it makes you look back on much of what has gone before with a jaundiced eye. Did a finale this rote earn the use of the lynching of Emmett Till as an in-story plot point? Does presenting Tic as a straightforward babyface hero do justice to what we learned of his conduct in Korea, where we see him commit at least two war crimes? (Now it’s as if those are things that happened primarily to him, instead of the civilian woman he summarily executed and the communist spy in whose torture and murder he participated.) And is the transformation of Dee into an Arya Stark–style agent of vengeance cause for season-ending celebration or a dire development for an innocent child to undergo? I don’t care for the answers to all these questions suggested by the material.

Despite noble intentions, a game and accomplished cast, and the occasional flicker of compelling horror-fantasy storytelling, Lovecraft Country never lived up to its high concept, or to high expectations. That’s the real horror I see here.

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 the Lovecraft Country Season 1 finale on HBO Max

Watch the Lovecraft Country Season 1 finale on HBO Now