'Lovecraft Country' Episode 8 Review: How Emmett Till's brutal murder manifests in Diana, Ruby and Tic's lives
Spoilers for Episode 8 'Jig a Bobo'
The gruesome reality of Emmet Till's death became a rooted reason behind the Civil Rights Movement in American history. The 14-year-old boy was murdered brutally on his trip to Mississippi, where he was beaten, shot, tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire before he was dumped in the river, all the way back in the year 1955. And HBO's 'Lovecraft Country' uses that as the prime focus spurring its characters to act in its most recent Episode 8 'Jig-a-Bobo'.
What the show has been lacking in terms of consistency, it tries to make up for with graphics, but eight weeks into the first season, and it looks like the HBO horror based on Matt Ruff's book has finally found its balance when it comes to tying loose plots, loose ends and abrupt character appearances throughout the hour-long episodes.
As Tic's past and present collide in the backdrop of his family and close ones coping with the aftermath of Till's death, the show's mythological lessons go for a toss, for good reason as racial horrors receive the limelight that 'Lovecraft Country' has been trying to build since the beginning.
However, magic still has a forefront in the latest episode. Not many might have noticed or cared enough, but Till has already appeared on the show before. In Episode 3, where Diana and her friends are playing with the Ouiji Board, there's a young boy called Bobo who asks the board if his upcoming trip will be good and the board answers no.
Bobo was a nickname the real-life Till went by, but this Eureka! moment is drowned by the horrors that happen to him, and subsequently to Diana and those close to him. Till is shown as a friend of Diana — this tragedy befalling when her mother is not around only propels her further into a depressed state but that is the least of her worries.
The sinister officer Lancaster is out looking for Hippolyta and threatens Diana in the process, before casting a magic spell on her that leaves her voiceless every time she tries talking about the incident. Harris does incredible with the material and the weight of it all dumped on her.
Screaming at kids in a panicked outburst and struggling to breathe with the now infamous proclamation "I can't breathe" — 'Lovecraft Country' sprinkles her journey with real-life horrors that the African American community still on a regular basis, more the 50 years after the Jim Crows era that the show is set in.
However, Diana isn't the only one impacted by the gravity of this deplorable crime committed against Till, whose murderers were acquitted all those years ago after the jury deliberated on the incident for exactly an hour and nothing more.
Ruby is struck with the horrid realization of what these White folks can do to them, so she copes with her feelings by turning into Hillary, her own White avatar. She has sex with William in a scene where the skin melts down Ruby's body the way the potions' waning effect does and that is most possibly as gnarly as primetime television is going to get this year.
The gore and horror of this scene is matched by what happens to Diana in terms of getting cursed by Lancaster as she starts seeing zombie-like little girls with long fingernails and creepy dances approaching her at a train station and terrorizing her, chasing her throughout the episode.
When her story gets a little too gritty, the show offers respite in the form of Tic's ex-flame Ji-Ah arriving at Leti's doorstep while the faux-man of the house is busy learning protection spells from Christina, perhaps for the very same reason. Tic confronts Christina about the Autumnal Equinox where the Braithwaite heiress claims she will achieve immortality, also foreshadowing Ji-Ah's predictions for Tic where she saw his death.
The previous episode had ended with Tic returning from Hippolyta's Orrery-induced wormhole with a copy of Ruff's original book which turns out to be a story written by his and Leti's son from the future. And ironic as it might be that Tic discusses all of this first hand with his own abusive father in the middle of a non-violent conversation where the two work out their issues, there's no ignoring the future that talks of a past where Tic is murdered by none other than Christina.
As Ruby and Christina's relationship continue to escalate into newer levels of complex with every epsiode, this time Ruff's original work also gets acknowledged in that journey, where Cristina is revealed to be a man and Diana is a boy called Horace. Still, racial injustice remains at the forefront of this story as we see Christina test her Mark of Cain (that stands for invincibility) by paying men to brutally murder her just the way Till was.
In the exact same process, 'Lovecraft Country' takes the real-life horror and spins it into a story that evaluates what would have happened had Till's barbaric death happened to a White woman at the time.
Till's death also inspires the final climax, which again, might have just made television horror history. Lancaster and his men open fire at Winthrop Manor but Tic's protection spells makes Leti's skin impenetrable. And when fatal risks zoom around Tic, one of the Eldritch horror beasts from earlier in the season erupts from the ground to take the bullets for him.
The sequence of action in these scenes are pivotal and unique where it looks like the beast is going to add to our protagonist's list of horrors, but not quite. Bloody and gory to levels of perfection not easily achievable, the scene is frenzied, made better by the fact that these monsters are a result of the spell cast by Tic and his father together. Did someone say character development? We're here for it!
A little boy's brutal murder not only spurred a real life movement but also all the leading characters on the show in its latest epiode. 'Jig-a-Bobo' is a befitting honor to Till's memory, that was unfurled once again when Bronna Taylor's killers were let go free on the same date — September 23 — 65 years apart.
As a glaring reminder of how nothing has changed, 'Lovecraft Country' signs off with the perfect little cherry on top of a magnificent cake and that is Diana confronting her demons with a metal pipe in her father's garage. The worry for Hippolyta prevails, but let's have this one moment of justice.
'Lovecraft Country' airs on Sundays at 9pm only on HBO.