Welcome to Multiversity Comics’ coverage of Lovecraft Country! This is the buzziest HBO series since last year’s Watchmen but this have been getting rockier as time has gone by. This week, the show takes us to Korea in the uneven “Meet Me in Daegu.”
1. All is Fair in Lovecraft and War
“Meet Me in Daegu” isn’t quite the episode I wanted it to be. As far as critique goes, that’s not quite fair given that you judge something based on what it is not what it’s not but this episode is trying to get at so many things at once that it doesn’t fully live up to any of them. What could’ve been a focused episode and interesting departure from the rest of the series is instead a treatise on what it means to be human and American imperialism and what it means to be moral and the messiness of parental love all of once. It’s not out of the question for one episode of television to tackle more than one of these things and maybe given the right foundation it could even pull off being about all of them. But the episode also functions as an introduction to a character and her world and that, my friends, is simply more than one episode can bear.
2. Meet Ji-Ah
Ji-Ah has been something of a phantom in this show. She was an apparition in the second (best?) episode and later called Tic to warn him of his impending death. In Lovecraft Country’s sixth episode, we finally get to know the mysterious woman from Tic’s past. What we get is a “Meet Me in St. Louis” loving nurse who makes kimchi with her mother and also happens to be host to a kumiho (Korean nine-tailed fox spirit that eats humans). Her background is a lot but the basics go like this: Ji-Ah’s mother, Soon-Hee had her out of wedlock, then married a man who went on to sexually abuse Ji-Ah, only to have Ji-Ah’s spirit replaced with the Kumiho after being promised that after having sex with and killing 100 men, Ji-Ah’s spirit would return. There’s a ton going on here and as a narrative in its own right, its foundation works. It leads to an interesting exploration of personhood and Ji-Ah’s longing for the experience of being human. She latches on to Judy Garland as a figure whose emotions she can emulate though she never actually knows what it means. Jamie Chung more than delivers in the role and she holds down the fort in an episode that simply couldn’t work without her. She brings an energy that feels at once separated from humanity and familiar with the motions of being human. It makes that longing all the more palpable and Chung communicates it well. She also communicates a certain desperation for her mother’s approval, though that aspect of the episode feels like it isn’t as well thought out as most of the other material.
3. A Different American Evil
Thus far, Lovecraft Country has been laser-focused on the Black experience in America and all of the horrors that come with that. This week, the show takes an opportunity to interrogate America’s impact abroad, exploring the idea of American imperialism to mixed results. It’s not that this is a bad theme to explore by any means; it’s something we think about too little, especially with regard to Korea and this is the perfect context to introduce it in. It also feels like the episode was less interested in these themes than it was in Ji-Ah’s humanity and her relationship with Tic. There are a few strong moments: Soon-Hee gets a monologue against America, the military’s arrival is framed as sudden and scary, there’s obviously a horrifying public execution scene, and, of course, the whole scene where the military attempts to find the Communist spy among the nurses. It’s just all very fleeting and in a show that’s so good at delivering acute and powerful indictments of the United States, it just didn’t deliver in the same way it might’ve.
4. Tic and Ji-Ah 4 Ever*
The exploration of Tic and Ji-Ah’s relationship is, of course, one of the major threads of the episode and it mostly works. Ji-Ah first meets Tic when he murders her best friend, who takes responsibility for American secrets being leaked to save Ji-Ah’s life. The next time she sees him, she’s his nurse. Soon, they move from adversarial to friendly to actively in love. Jonathan Majors does a great job portraying Tic’s dissociation when he’s doing his job as a soldier, showing us his capacity for darkness once again and convincingly pivots to the more jovial, charming Tic in the span of just a couple of scenes. Majors and Chung have strong chemistry and they sell the romance with gusto. Late in the episode, it briefly seems like things are going to fall apart when Ji-Ah tells Tic that he killed her best friend. Instead, it turns into a moment of bonding, as Ji-Ah speaks to their shared capacity to do evil and to grow and change and love. For Ji-Ah, Tic is her anchor in a real human experience. For Tic, Ji-Ah is a road to redemption. All of this is genuinely beautiful stuff. No notes.
*Last week my fourth thought was titled “Tic and Leti 4 Ever” which is very much where my heart lie but I had an opportunity and I would’ve been remiss not to take it.
5. Where Are We Going?
For the first couple of episodes of this show, it felt like we were burning through plot, working our way toward some unknowable but likely thrilling conclusion. Over the last couple of weeks that promise of a grand vision has seemed a bit more flimsy. There is one sequence that makes moves toward a larger plan. Toward the end of the episode, the nine-tails spirit starts to do it mystical memory murder thing while Ji-Ah and Tic have sex. This time, Ji-Ah stops the killing part but in the process, she begins to have premonitions of Tic’s death and warns him not to go back to Chicago (as fate would have it, it’s hard to be convincing when you’ve just had tails come out of every orifice). Hopefully this is more than just the premonition we’ve heard about already because it would be great to see Ji-Ah show up in Chicago and get involved in this fight against the Braithwhites. As a one-off episode it would certainly be fine- but as the show gets messier and shows more weak points, we’d be more fortunate if this were a table-setting episode.
