'Lovecraft Country' Episode 7: Glorious technicolor fantasy used to explore reality of Hippolyta’s selfhood
The first half of Episode 7 slowly trudges along but it more than makes up for it in the second half. After figuring out how to work the orrery with two suns, Hippolyta Freeman, the math geek, finally puts to use the skills that didn't have a place in her sheltered and thus limited existence.
Just like Ruby, snarling over lost opportunities in the last episode, and Leti in her 'baseball bat moment', Hippolyta is angry. Only she didn't know it. But when Tic, Leti and Montrose think it fit to treat her like the 'lil' old lady' from whom the truth of her husband's death has to be hidden, she unravels. Underestimating her is all everybody has ever done, causing her to shrink her identity into smaller and smaller boxes to fit simpler and simpler, linear descriptors.
In the second episode of the show, the importance of names is underlined when Samuel Braithwaite talks of Adam "naming" things to slot them in their place in the system and give them their identities.
We become our labels, scrunching to fit into boxes designated for us, and are defined by them. Those who name thus hold power because they decide what those boxes will be. Hippolyta calls this sort of naming a form of lynching where she does not know that the noose is around her neck. If she is labeled a helpless Black woman who isn't adult enough to take her own risks and is infantilized, who is she? A helpless Black woman who cowers in fear when she first meets the humanoid beings of light in an alien landscape.
The mysterious machine thrusts Hippolyta into a situation where she has to confront the cosmic nature of reality. She is thrown into a vortex which is an expansion of reality where "Every beginning is in time and every limit of extension is in space". Every possible variation of her self, which is infinite, exists. She only has to name herself and say "I Am That" to know it, to experience it.
The time-space coordinates that keep flashing at the bottom of the screen show that each of her 'selves' or identities exist -- they are all the possible permutations and combinations of time and space coordinates that become 'real' when she defines herself with the words, "I Am...". Whether intentional or not, this episode of 'Lovecraft Country' draws heavily on the Vedic concept of "Sohum" or "I Am That", which means identifying oneself with the ultimate, all-encompassing reality, both its inert potential and its active manifestation -- in other words, God.
We don't see the entire extent of this idea taken to its conclusion though Hippolyta does converse with a God-like entity and wonders how she will again become "so small" defined with just a few labels after she has technically been (and identified with being) everything in time and space.
But of those labels, one is significant enough for her expanded consciousness to decide to go back to her small existence -- her role as a mother with a daughter named Diana. And it is a relief she is coming back with a renewed, expanded sense of self because on the Earth plane of things, her daughter's hand-drawn comic is trapped under a dead White cop and soaked in his blood. If anything needs cosmic intervention, it is the Freeman family.
The next episode of 'Lovecraft Country' airs on October 4 at 9 pm on HBO.
