(I was wrong)Lovecraft Country .....UPDATE: series is trashcan juice

[Edub]

Show wasn’t nearly as bad as expressed in their thread

 

[MIKE SPLEAN]

It’s a good b+

 

[invalid]

I can see how someone could like it.

• It is a great general premise
• Casting was A1
• Visuals & Directing was generally good

It just fails at pleasing my sensibilities also where the story went left it went left hard and certain direction choices didn't make sense in context.

• Them getting caught in the woods by the monsters a second time when tic knew they come out at night.
• Chic calmly walking through the street while not knowing how long the portal could stay open(not to mention bombs & folks getting shot everywhere)
• Chic standing in the fire even though she has no reason to believe her invulnerability will cover the book.
• Lil girl running up on killer police popping shyt and them not doing anything.
• Rescuing the he/she, killing it off, then the plot point going nowhere(I forgot what the point of going down there even was).
• Chic tries to kill the white lady with a sword, then mysteriously/conveniently leaves her under rocks instead of killing her ...so the lil girl can do it.
• They walking all sad and slow after being attacked while the girl is supposedly sitting in the car.
• All the modern music killing the mood

Again alot of this seems to be someone saying....
"oh it would be cool if [insert scene here] happened"

...problem is the "cool scene" they envision typically doesn't make sense in the broader context of what's going on around them. I can let alot of shyt go but that is one of my biggest pet peeve.



Generic example:
In starwars general holdo rams a ship using a hyperspace jump ....problem is, if thats all it took they could have just done that to the deathstar instead of letting the empire blow up planets, multiple ships, and frigates.

The "holdo maneuver" might look "cool" but makes no sense in the larger context
(not to mention it breaks the rest of the starwars world)

​

In light of Michael K. William’s death and admittingly never watching a show with him
in it, I gave this show a try (and will try to watch The Wire later this week).

I thought the show was brilliant and it definitely appealed to my sensibilities. There were definitely a lot of plot holes but I thought the way that it layered the black cultural experience with sci-fi, with literature, with Asian culture, with mythology, with science, with technology, it excelled masterfully.

I’m gonna take a second look to make sure I didn’t miss anything but from my first viewing I wanted to respond to some of the points that you made.

• Them getting caught in the woods by the monsters a second time when tic knew they come out at night.

Don’t remember the second time they got caught in the woods with the vampires. I remember the first with the sheriff. I think maybe the second time was when Tic was trying to escape Ardham, but that time gave Tic (and the audience) the revelation that the Braithwites controlled the vampires and that they were being used as a protective measure which Tic was able to employ in later episodes. If this was the scene that you were referring to, then it had a purpose as it was revelatory.

• Chic calmly walking through the street while not knowing how long the portal could stay open(not to mention bombs & folks getting shot everywhere)

This kind of irked me too as a viewer but that was because as a viewer we had the vantage point of knowing that Hypolita was having issues with keeping the portal open. Leti didn’t have that vantage point, and, also, experiencing first hand the death and destruction of Tulsa in real time, could have had her shell shocked. On top of having invincibility she was probably trying to process the gravity of what was going on as well as the murder of the entire family that she just witnessed.

• Chic standing in the fire even though she has no reason to believe her invulnerability will cover the book.

I think with the book being within her grasp, it shielded it from the fire. Even more, because the book was magical, I don’t believe the book was even destroyed in the fire as they thought. I think the book may have survived the fire in the rubble of the house afterwards and, over the course of time, the clearing of the house and the rebuilding of the black part of Tulsa, was just lost and could not be realistically nor justifiably located. I think the storyline works because they had a definite point in time of when the book was in the family’s possession (right before the Tulsa Massacre), so whether the book was destroyed or lost, they had a tangible point of when and where they could capture it. On another note, this was the high point of the show for me. That scene was so moving it brought me to tears in a way that I’ve never gotten so emotional over a film scene as it resonated with me on so many different levels.

• Lil girl running up on killer police popping shyt and them not doing anything.

The police chief had put a curse on Dee that was slowly killing her. There was no need for them to do anything as the chief knew the course of the curse would end in her death anyway.

• Rescuing the he/she, killing it off, then the plot point going nowhere(I forgot what the point of going down there even was).

I didn’t initially understand this either. But since this show is a social critique things started to make sense a bit with respect to Montrose’s back story. Montrose being black and a repressed gay man was two times oppressed. The social critique was that even the oppressed can be oppressors. When you look at the current day situation of black trans women being killed by black men who primarily have been identified as former or current lovers wanting to protect their secret, this appeared to be symbolic of that, as killing the two-spirit (transvestite) may have ignited his own trauma and fears and demonstrated how vulnerable the lives of trans-people are, that result in their lives being taken because of these fears. The fact that that storyline did not progress or that there were no consequence to Montrose’s action was also a critique in that nobody cares about trans lives and because of that, they are also forgotten.

They initially go down into Titus’s vault to retrieve pages that he had taken out of the Book of Names, of which they retrieved with the two-spirit.

• Chic tries to kill the white lady with a sword, then mysteriously/conveniently leaves her under rocks instead of killing her ...so the lil girl can do it.

They weren’t trying to kill her initially. Their initial plan was to transfer Christina’s power to Tic and to bind her from magic. After their plan appeared to fail from being given a fake vial after Ruby got caught, Leti was just trying to stop the killing of Tic. When she slammed the sword into Christina, Christina was already immortal (which is a plot hole for me.) This gave them a moment to realize that they could still try to bind Christina with the help of Ji-Ah connecting the different elements (the body of Christina to the body of Tic) thus in effect transferring her power (Tic was already dead though) and binding her from magic. I think the rocks were a part of the ritual to bind her, again, as they weren’t trying to kill her. I think Dee killing her was not something they had planned but Dee doing of her own volition. The plot hole for me was, even after succeeding in their original plan, the original plan took place at a point after Christina became immortal, so how does an immortal end up dying? You’re immortal, so it doesn’t matter what comes after, you’re not suppose to die. How do you transfer the power of an immortal. How do you make an immortal vulnerable. That goes against being immortal so that didn’t make sense to me.

• They walking all sad and slow after being attacked while the girl is supposedly sitting in the car.

I mean, they put a protection spell on Dee and thought that she was safe. The protection spell manifested her own guard vampire that was conjured when she was being threatened by the Braithwhite’s vampire. And they were carrying the body of Tic back to the car which is why it was very solemn for them. Probably trying to process that he was really dead even after all the things they went through to circumvent that from happening. They held out hope of there being parallel universes with alternate endings. And since what they were trying to avoid, having come to pass, they were grieving and trying to process.

• All the modern music killing the mood

I loved the music. I’ve seen many movies that are period pieces that layers modern music into the film and it’s an artistic touch that alludes to the fact that although this time and place may be the distant past, it is very much alive in the here and now, and these people could very well be us. It’s a stylistic element that puts people in the past within contemporary society and puts contemporary society in the past.


=======

Again, I have critiques but most of the points you raised, I don’t have a problem with. I loved the series and neither did I feel like it was disjointed as some other critics have complained. That is the genre of sci-fi.

Your initial post has many of the facts wrong. Maybe you wrote it before the show came out? Like where you say they were traveling down south? Atticus was coming up from Florida to Chicago. And their trip to Ardham was in Massachusetts. Which was also a critique on racism being so embedded in American society, that all the instances of racial violence and aggression that they experienced took place in the North.

It is one of the best black series I’ve seen embodying the ideas behind “post-blackness” and “Afro-futurism”.

 

[invalid]

...problem is the "cool scene" they envision typically doesn't make sense in the broader context of what's going on around them. I can let alot of shyt go but that is one of my biggest pet peeve.

Not sure what scenes you’re referencing but the “cool scenes” for me were the recreation of black historical photos layered against black literary or poetical commentary.

Scenes like the recreation of the famous Gordon Parks “Colored Entrance” photo layered with the James Baldwin monologue from his debate with William F. Buckley.

Or the recreation of another of his photos of a black family getting ice cream.

Or the recreation of the Margaret Bourke-White photo of black people lined up to get relief after the Louisville flood against the caption “World’s Highest Standard of Living.”

Or the recreation of Emmett Till’s funeral crowd.

Or the reimagining of the Tulsa Fire with the voice of Sonia Sanchez’s “Catch The Fire” poem narrating the scene, which was the most powerful scene in the series for me.

 

[Uncle Baby Billy]

The book was dope and a sequel book came out this week:

The Destroyer of Worlds (Lovecraft Country, #2)

“Another virtuoso blend of horror, action, and humor. .…

www.goodreads.com

 

[1thouwow]

shyt was trash af

 

[CreepyMcCreeperson]

I liked it. I would have tuned in for season 2. But I have no idea what was happening.

 

[Hey_zeus]

I made it 3 episodes.

 

[TheKongoEmpire]

Lovecraft was a scathing racist. Fuxx him and his work.