Welcome to Multiversity Comics’ coverage of Lovecraft Country! This week, the show wraps up in an incredibly 2020 fashion.
1. Doing Too Much
After the first episode of this show aired, I didn’t know where to start my review because I had so much praise for it. Now, 9 weeks later, my struggle is rooted in the almost stupefying sloppy, overstuffed finale. It’s an episode of television that manages to wrap up about half a dozen plot lines in unsatisfying ways while also bringing a tone that fails to bring anything that made Lovecraft Country so appealing at its start. Really, I guess it’s hard to find the words because they’re deceptively straightforward. “Full Circle” is not a good episode of television. It is not a good finale. It’s bad.
2. Let’s Get This Over With
There’s a lot I have to say that isn’t about the actual plot of the episode so much as its mechanics but it would be a dereliction of duty not to address it so let’s do it all here. The fact that “Full Circle” has as much going on as it does means that its almost impossible to connect with any of it. We’re whisked from an ancestral realm to a standoff with a briefly revived Titus Braithwhite to a road trip to three protagonist deaths (one of which is off screen and one of which is a fakeout) to a major final battle and it none of it has any time to breathe. There are some points in there where I saw glimmers of what the show can be. Ruby and Let’s tense moment, Tic coming to terms with his impending death, the INCREDIBLE road tip singalong, Hippolyta making amends with Diana, and Montrose’s mourning are all genuinely moving and strongly constructed. In a good finale, those would be all of the major plot points in the episode but here, for some reason most of them are brief asides, treated as distractions from the culmination of a narrative that has entirely too much going on.
3. Where’d the Politics Go?
Now, it’s not a necessity for a good show to have perfect or even mostly good politics and it’s not necessary or even prudent to base your criticism solely on its implicit or explicit political messages. However, Lovecraft Country is a blatantly political show and even if that’s led to mixed results sometimes, the commentary is generally important if nothing else. With the finale, the acute social awareness in the narrative of the show is hard to find. There’a a moment where a Black family moves in across the street from Leti; it’s the first sign of white flight in Chicago and a promise that while our narrative continues, so too does racism. It’s also a far cry from what we’ve come to expect. The end of the episode gestures at politics when Black people become the keepers of magic after a big group of People of Color kill a white supremacist witch but the scene is staged far too much like the final act of a blockbuster to land as much more than that. Then there’s the actively awful decision of killing off Ruby- a dark skinned Black woman who had just realized she was queer- off screen! In a show that’s been so thoughtful about representation on not only an aesthetic level but a narrative one, it was an appalling choice. None of this erases the good commentary the show has done but man did it disappoint in its finale.
4. The Saving Grace
This cast really is really something and each and every one of them truly has something to offer. They’re also the only reason that anything in this episode lands at all. There were innumerable times that I rolled my eyes at a plot point but somehow got wrapped up in Jonathan Majors or Michael K. Williams or Jurnee Smollett (much love to everyone else but these are the three that kept me invested). All season long, these people have been bringing their A-game and made this whole thing work beautifully in moments where it shouldn’t have. The main trio is fairly well established so I want to show extra love to the talents of Wunmi Mosaku, Abbey Lee, Aunjanue Ellis, and Jada Harris, who all stood toe to toe and sometimes even outshined some of Hollywood’s finest talents. The road trip singalong scene really says it all; this is a charismatic cast with oodles of talent and chemistry and while I’m definitely a sucker for sing along scenes, I also think it was a showcase for what the show should’ve been striving for more often- simplicity, focus, and groundedness.
5. What’s in a Legacy?
Taking in the show as a whole, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It opened with some tour-de-force entries that made it one of the most exciting, promising series on television. It moved at a pace like very little that’s ever aired, played the groundwork for a great season arc, and made powerful, smart social commentary. Soon, it got messy and not in a way that felt like it was in pursuit of something worth being messy over. What started as a supremely well focused show became sprawling and unwieldy. By the time we reached the end, Lovecraft Country the imagery and breakneck pacing that were such strengths at the beginning seemed to be at odds with one another. It’s a shame because I was ready to have a new favorite show. All of that being said, this was not a waste of airtime or money. For many who watched this, things stayed powerful and meaningful for 10 weeks straight. Stories were told that Black people rarely get to see validated in the mainstream and that’s absolutely an important thing. Even more than that, though, there’s something to be said for letting a Black woman make a messy, ambitious show even if it doesn’t end up meeting the mark. Countless white dudes get to make actively bad, boring series over and over again without anybody questioning their worthiness. Plus, the line between ambitious and messy and ambitious and successful is more thin than you’d imagine. Misha Green has a ton of raw skill and even if this didn’t end up being the best manifestation of that skill, she proved that she deserves at least as much backing as any given showrunner moving on. I also hope that this show gives its cast a boost because like I said before, they’re superstars who deserve the world. On the whole, this isn’t a show that was its best self all that often but it did succeed in being unlike anything else I’ve ever seen and that counts for something.
