Lovecraft Country – Whitey’s On the Moon Review

Well, that was a hell of a lot of plot to churn through in a single hour of television. And to remove two of the show’s most recognizable actors from the gameboard this early in the run of a series (that would be Courtney B. Vance – who certainly could still come back from the dead next week, considering how death appears to be a semi-permanent state on the series thus far – and Tony Goldwyn, who I really don’t see coming back from turning to stone, disintegrating, and then being burnt in a house fire) is absolutely not something I would expect from the second episode of a series. No matter how you slice it, “Whitey’s On the Moon” felt far more like a penultimate episode of a season and not a table-setting exposition dump early in a season. Just another quirk that makes Lovecraft Country different from so much of what’s out there currently on television.

So, let’s dive into all of that plot that was thrown our way before getting into what made the episode truly special (and it was not the rather unwieldy plot machinations of the episode). So, Tic’s ancestor was, unsurprisingly, a slave owner. But he was also the head of a (pretty insane) secret society that wanted to bring back the Garden of Eden (which is the second time the Garden has been a plot point on a series in the last month – one more time and we can call it a trend). On its face, that’s just plain weird. But, drill down a bit more and you get a white man obsessed with making sure everything (and everyone) is in their place – and a desperate desire to go back to the “good old days” when things were “better” than they currently are. And the revelation that the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree with his great great great grandson Samuel Braithwhite (Goldwyn, doing all he can with a very limited character)? Yeah, not a shocker there.

It’s an attitude that has existed for centuries, especially whenever a traditionally marginalized group begins to gain any sort of foothold in the world: “We need to return to the days when things were simpler” is really just code for “We are scared at the changes and want to assert our power over this group by returning to a time when they lacked the political and social power they now have.” And, naturally, that group (and, let’s be real, it’s almost always – at least in America – straight, cis white folks, usually men, who are the ones pushing back against progress) can’t wrap their heads around why others don’t seem to want to return to the idyllic past, since they cannot grasp that such times weren’t as idyllic for all (or, the cynical read, they know exactly what they are doing on a conscious level and just plain don’t care). It was also a nice touch to have the secret society decked out in black pointed hoods, signaling that yes, they weren’t part of the Klan but they might just be even worse (they were willing to let a Black descendant eat with them, and take orders from him, but they still espoused all of the same hate and anger as their poorer and less educated Klan brothers).

Now, outside of its symbolism, did much of the episode’s plot work? Not particularly. I’m certainly intrigued about the seemingly magical abilities of the Braithwhite family members (and the creepy pale, blond, and blue-eyed Aryan esthetic of Christina and her weird boyfriend/henchman William), and I would like to know a bit more about the oddities of the town as a whole (and the Shoggoth breeding program Christina is apparently running), but the trappings of the supernatural within the story remain less interesting than the real world issues and implications encountered by our main characters – which is a good thing. Too often, supernatural shows lean into the weird and forget the humanity that is necessary for the audience to relate deeply to the show’s characters. As I often find myself writing: If we don’t care about the characters, we cannot invest in the stakes of the show. If I don’t care about them, I don’t care if they live or die, and that destroys the show in the end. But here, I find I deeply care about Tic, Leti, and George.

Which is what made that final tableau of the episode all the more heartbreaking. Seeing George lying dead in the back of the car wrecked me. I know there’s every chance he’s back in the game next week, as I mentioned above, but I genuinely felt crushed at the thought that George might be out of the story – and that Courtney B. Vance might not be around for the remainder of the series. And that’s a testament to two things: the strong character building showrunner and writer Misha Green did with regard to George’s character in the first two episodes and the strong performance Vance put together. It’s rare that two episodes into a series a character death can hit with the power of this one, but boy, did it.

We know how much Tic loved his uncle (who was far more of a father to him than his own father – who we got to meet this week in the form of the great Michael K. Williams, who you might remember as Omar on The Wire), but I didn’t realize just how much I had grown to love George in such a short time. But that’s the product of great writing and a great performance meeting in the middle. Each scene with George (and Vance) in it felt just a touch more lived in that those without him. As someone who constantly harps about shows needing stakes (not being afraid to kill main characters if the story calls for it – looking at you, Game of Thrones), I find I would be perfectly content to have George return from the dead a la Leti (especially if we are shown the harrowing effects of that return, as we were shown through Jurnee Smollet’s chilling performance when Leti returned from beyond the veil).

So, was “Whitey’s On the Moon” the same tour de force as the series’ premiere? No, there was too much plot stuffed within the episode that made things a bit clunky – and it was hard to follow the intricacies of the secret society and just how the plan to bring back the Garden worked. But the performances remained strong. The character development continued to be some of the best on television. And, if you didn’t get too bogged down in the strange Garden of Eden plot, the episode moved us along to where it wanted us to be. What comes next, once you’ve run through a season’s worth of plot in two episodes and saved the character your heroes set out to find just an episode prior? Well, I don’t know. But I’m excited to find out what more Lovecraft Country has to show us – and tell us – about the darkness that lives within us all.