'Lovecraft Country' Episode 6 takes unexpected risk by showing Tic's monstrosity and kumiho Ji-ah's humanity
In standard pulp fiction horror, the hero can do no wrong as he battles monsters and spirits. Even if has some demon tucked away in his psyche, he never lets it out and instead outruns it with his heroism. Tic, no doubt, with his magic bloodline is the male hero of 'Lovecraft Country'.
Yet, the series doesn't favor only his POV. In Episode 4, when he was being a bit too hero-like for his own good, herding Leti to safety, she snapped at him to clearly underline the fact that he was not the only one going through the horrors unleashed on them and thus couldn't be the only one making decisions for all of them, especially her.
Episode 6 further dulls the shine on Tic's hero cape. Up till now, we have only seen Tic being treated as a war veteran, a hero returned from war, and his uniform acted as a shield protecting him somewhat in tense situations that a Black man in America invariably faced. But in the latest episode 'Meet Me in Daegu', we see flashbacks to the time Tic spent in Korea as the oppressor, torturing Communists or shooting them point-blank because those were his "orders".
To escape the horrors of home, he volunteered for the army, signing up for a tour of a "foreign land to go and kill the yellow man", as that famous Bruce Springsteen song goes. From victim, he becomes a killer. When he tries to escape into the refuge of books again, he can't because now he has blood on his hands. He is no longer an innocent.
In Ji-ah, the Korean nurse in love with Judy Garland movies, he finds his redemption. If she sees the good in him, maybe he can see it too. Ironically, Ji-ah is a real 'monster' -- she is a "Kumiho" of Korean legend -- a nine-tailed fox spirit summoned by the desperate woman, whose daughter (born out of wedlock) is raped repeatedly by the woman's husband, who she married to protect her honor.
Once summoned, Ji-ah, the kumiho, occupies the body of the daughter and kills the rapist husband with her nine tails (which make her look more like a spider than a fox). She is then told that she has to drain 99 more souls before she can leave the body. But having grown up in a human's body, she is a monster who has learned how to be more 'human' in the positive sense.
She doesn't really want to kill men but is pressured by her 'mother' (and the only maternal figure she has ever known) to do so because the woman wants her to leave the body so that her OG daughter with her memories is restored to her. Ji-ah, fits the 'Born Sexy Yesterday' trope as she is a curiously innocent being, not of this world, stuck in the human realm.
In a sense, she is Tic's counterpart. Just like he is a stranger in a strange land fighting a battle not his own, Ji-ah too had been recruited to fight a battle not her own in the human realm and now she is stuck here doing more monstrous things, again on someone else's behest. She tells Tic that they have both done monstrous things but they are also more than just monsters.
Even though Tic flees when he sees her nine-tailed fox transformation, Ji-ah is a part of Tic's story even more than Leti. This episode ends on a fairly unambiguous note -- Ji-ah, because of her attachment to Tic, will kill on his behalf to save him, if the shaman's prediction is true, before she can free herself from the human realm.
'Lovecraft Country' Episode 7 will air on September 27 at 9 pm on HBO.
