Hey guys, Pete here. today i'm gonna recap
and review the first
episode in hbo's new series Lovecraft
Country.
it's based on a book with the same name
by Matt Ruff which i've read. the
premiere episode is titled sundown
it was written by showrunner Misha Green
and does a pretty good job of
introducing us to the characters
while building up the world where the
series takes place.
before we get into all of that this is
your spoiler warning. i'm going to talk
about everything that happens in episode
1 of Lovecraft
Country. i'm also going to make some
references to the source material but
this video won't include any future
spoilers about how things play out in
the book.
things open up with Atticus Freeman, who
goes by Tic,
on his way back to his hometown of
chicago. we'll learn that he received a
letter from his father about his mother
and a secret legacy that set things into
motion
but not before we get this amazing
opening dream sequence
that gives us some insight into who he
is and a sense of what we can expect
from the series.
Tic is a veteran of the Korean war and
that's where we find him
in the black and white opening of the
dream. as he's fighting his way through
trenches
we see some planes overhead drop a bomb
in the distance.
as things shift from black and white to
color we hear movie narration from the
Jackie Robinson story saying,
"this is a story of a boy and his dream.
but more than that
it's the story of an American boy in a
dream that is truly American." from there
the dream morphs from a war movie
to sci-fi with flying saucers and what
looks like
tripods from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.
a new character drifts down from one of
the flying saucers
a red skinned alien who i presume is
connected to the book that we see Tic
reading -
"a princess of mars" by Edgar Rice
Burroughs.
she embraces Tic but that gets
interrupted by a winged creature with an
octopus-like
head this is one of hp lovecraft's best
known
fictional cosmic monsters known as
Cthulhu.
Cthulhu is momentarily dispatched by
Jackie Robinson himself
using his baseball bat the narration
from his biopic had continued in the
background throughout the scene but as
the monster
reconstitutes itself to take a second
run at them Atticus wakes up.
we see him flip off the jim crow south
as they enter Kentucky
only to quickly be reminded that
crossing state lines
doesn't solve all the problems black
americans are confronted with. their bus
breaks down
and Tic and the other black passenger
are left to walk back to town as the
white passengers are shuttled into the
back of a pickup truck. on their walk the
woman asked him about his book and is
surprised that he chose one
with the main character being a
confederate captain who fought for
slavery. he responds telling her that,
"stories are like people. loving them
doesn't make them perfect. you just try
to cherish them.
overlook their flaws." this serves as a
great setup for his return home to
Chicago and his reunion with his family.
we meet his uncle George who publishes
the safe negro travel guide
which is a guidebook that helps black
americans find businesses that will
serve
them as they navigate the country. George
is a fellow fan of horror and sci-fi
literature
and we meet his wife Hippolyta and their
daughter Diana.
while we'll discover that Tic's
relationship with his father
is complicated and somewhat messy we get
the idea that the neighborhood he grew
up in
and things with his extended family are
generally pretty good.
particularly in comparison to the areas
of the country they'll travel through
when they go looking for his father who
we learn has been missing for two weeks.
Tic had returned to Chicago after
receiving a letter from his dad Montrose
which he reads to his uncle
he mentions the past and his mother
trying to forget about it.
George had previously mentioned that
Tic's mother's ancestry was a mystery
and according to the letter Atticus has
a secret legacy, a birthright that's been
kept from him.
this leads to a road trip to find
Montrose with uncle George and the
childhood friend
Leticia Lewis, who goes by Leti/ we get a
brief introduction to Leti as she
reunites with her sister Ruby who is
performing on stage during a block party.
there's tension between them
that we'll inevitably learn about but
for now it serves to have Leti hitching
a ride to her brother's house which
happens to be on the way to Ardham
Massachusetts.
this is the town where Tic and George
think Montrose will be found based on
the letter.
Atticus initially misread the name as
Arkham which is a fictional town from
H.P. Lovecraft's writing which is how the
series gets its name.
while Ardham has nothing to do with the
idea of "Lovecraft Country"
that he was thinking about that doesn't
mean that there won't be cosmic horrors
in store when they find it
during the journey we get a direct look
into the real-life horror that our trio
of travelers are up against
we see billboards warning a sundown
towns barking dogs apparently trained to
be aggressive towards people of color
white teenagers acting like monkeys to
mock them
and a segregated ice cream stand all of
which exist in the north
rather than the explicitly segregated
south
things get turned up a notch when the
travelers decide to stop for lunch at a
place that was in the guidebook the fact
that the name has been changed doesn't
deter
them but inside it becomes clear that
the previous owner had been burned out
in an act of arson the kid behind the
counter dips into the back room where he
places a call
which leads to a high speed chase with
the presumed arsonist
with the help of a mysterious blonde
blue-eyed
white as you possibly could be woman
driving a silver bentley
our travelers are able to make it out
alive it's not immediately clear how
she's able to cause them to crash
but there does seem to be something
supernatural going on
she arrives precisely at the right time
and their truck flipped over without
actually hitting her car of course Tic
Leti and george aren't going to stick
around to find out who she
is they flee the scene and make their
way to the home of Leti's brother while
there we learn more
about all three characters we see that
george cares for his family as he talks
to his wife and daughter on the phone
we learned that tic's father was abused
as a child but also grew up to be an
abuser himself
and we learned that Leti's past has
strained her relationship with her
brother
in the same way it had with her sister
while all this is in the background of
what's to come in the rest of the
episode
i thought they did a nice job of weaving
it all together seeing george stop
tic from going inside to try to help
letty while she was fighting with her
brother because it was family business
and then that leading to them discussing
their own family's dirty secrets stood
out to me
back on the road the next day the gang
can't find their final turn to artem
they pull over to try to get their
bearings and a racist sheriff that leti's
brother already warned them about
arrives on the scene he explains that
they're in a sundown
county and if he'd found them after dark
it would have been his sworn duty to
hang them from the trees
what's more is they only have 7 minutes
until sundown
after an excruciating back and forth
about which way they could go to make it
out of the county in time
and whether or not they can legally make
a u-turn a low-speed chase to the county
line ensues
this is without a doubt the most intense
and terrifying sequence
of the episode it's a distance that they
can't be sure they can cover in the
amount of time they have left
and the sheriff rides their bumper while
promising to pull them over if they go
over the speed limit there's a brief
moment of relief as they make it in time
but we learned that they never had a
chance in the first place as the road is
blocked by deputies on the other side
it turns out the whole thing was a ruse
since they were planning on arresting
them for an unrelated string of
burglaries in the area
at the end of the day sheriff hunt is
just looking for a reason to murder some
black folk and he's about to get his
wish as the cops walk them into the
woods and force them to the ground
as they're getting ready to execute them
things take a turn a pack of shoggoths
arrive on the scene
and start attacking the officer these
are fictional undead creatures
from lovecraft's writing which tic and
george might recognize
either way the thing that happens here
is that george's love of fiction and
horror stories gives them an idea
these things could be like vampires they
didn't see them until after dark so
perhaps they can use light to keep them
away
this will turn out to be enough to save
the trio but not before things devolve
into full-blown gore while leti makes a
run for the car
the sheriff turns into a shoggoth after
being bit
and rather than shooting him his deputy
decides to keep the gun aimed at tic and
george
it's a pretty fitting ending when he's
torn to pieces just before
leti returns to run over the
transformed sheriff
the episode comes to an end as they make
it to their final destination after
sunrise
covered in blood they walk up to a giant
home nestled beyond the woods in ardham
there's a silver bentley parked out
front that we've seen more than once in
the episode but a different blonde
this time a man opens the door just as
they're about to knock
strangely he greets them by telling
atticus that they've been expecting him
and finishes with welcome home it fades
to black as we look at the
trio of travelers who are definitely
surprised by this turn of events
so all in all i think this was a pretty
good episode as far as setting up the
story
it actually covered a lot of ground in
the book and it stayed pretty
true as far as being an adaptation with
just a few minor changes
i suppose we can't really talk about the
series without talking about Lovecraft
himself
fans of his work may not realize that
this is based on a book that
doesn't really have a lot to do with him
if you're unfamiliar
for what it's worth h.p lovecraft is an
early 20th century
american writer whose work became famous
after he was already dead
he basically wrote horror or what was
known as weird fiction during his
lifetime
and most of his work was published in
pulp magazines
he died pretty young at age 46 and then
went
on to become regarded as a significant
author
of supernatural horror fiction you'll
hear people refer to contemporary works
as lovecraftian
or put things into the subcategory of
cosmic horror which would be
similar to what he wrote the other thing
to know about him was that he was
a crazy racist even in a time when
people were generally more racist he
stands out as being
super freaking racist and so when i read
the book lovecraft
country what i thought about it and what
i'm sure will come out in this series
one of the first things that comes to
mind is there's a parallel between
the paranoid sort of horror that h.p
lovecraft lived with
in his fear of the other which included
people of color immigrants generally
people outside of the white anglo-saxon
protestant
ideal in his mind that's paralleled by
the freemans
in their fear of the other who actually
do want to harm them so that does work
pretty well
i think it's not a bait and switch in
like oh well there's all these monsters
but the real monsters are the white
people it's not like that
it's more of a this guy who wrote about
all these monsters
he spent his life consumed by fear of
the other in this story we have
characters who are fans of his stories
despite the fact that his racist beliefs
would lead him to see
them as less than human so in a way what
he feared was happening to him in his
life as a result of the existence of the
racial other
happens all the time in Tic and the other
characters lives
like i said i think that mostly works i
think the biggest potential for
disappointment would be for people who
love
cosmic horror and they're expecting this
to be in that vein where
i think this first episode shows us that
while the execution was good while the
creatures look good and the cgi is
fine it's more of a story about the
family connections rather than
a straight-up horror story i mean for me
it's like there's no build up for it
there was no lingering hints that
there's this scary thing out in the
background
waiting to discover what it is it just
showed up
with that said though i did like the
story my biggest gripe with the book is
that it is a collection of stories that
are all related but i didn't think they
tied them together that well
the strong points for me were the
opening dream sequence
and the low speed car chase i thought
both of these came off really well
the dream gives us great insight into
what goes on in atticus's head more or
less
and the car chase really gave you a lot
of things to think about as you're
watching them agonize through it the
line where he talks about
stories being like people loving them
doesn't make them perfect
was the thing in the book that kind of
hooked me in
and it's where you really see the
connection to his experience
with everything he encounters and how
that's all connected to the family
relationships
and you'll see how that all plays out as
things go on
i do think the execution came together
pretty well
the music the acting the little bit of
changes they made in the adaptation seem
to be
still true to the spirit of what i read
and there's really no glaring
shortcomings here
in the finished product so i'm gonna
leave it there
let me know in the comments what you
think had you read the book
do you think they did a good job of
adapting it so far did you go in blind
with no
ideas were you surprised by the fact
that it's not an adaptation of an hp
lovecraft story
what are your ideas about where things
are headed
what are you hoping to see i'm
definitely gonna do recaps for every
episode so definitely subscribe if
you're watching along
i may do some extra bonus videos
throughout the week we'll just see how
popular it is and
how much interest there is i thought
this was a very good start
and i'm excited to see where it goes i
have a feeling that this is going to
turn out to be a really good season of
television
so let's watch it together please like
this video if you enjoyed it
please subscribe to my channel if you
haven't already thanks for watching i'll
talk to you soon
