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