When we last saw Tic, George and Leti, they were standing, bloodied and beaten, on the threshold of the Ardham mansion, mystified by their welcome from William (Jordan Patrick Smith), the house’s apparent butler, who had been expecting them. As this episode begins, they’re in sumptuous surroundings and clean clothes, generally appreciating the hell out of their unexpectedly luxurious lodgings. That’s a pretty jarring tone-shift, but perhaps a point is being made about the carpe diem attitude adopted by people who live in constant danger? Or perhaps something altogether more sinister is going on …?
Tic is the only one still brooding on the shoggoth-sherriff attack and is already deeply suspicious when William gives them the house tour, pointing to a portrait of “Ardham’s founder and the original owner of the lodge, Titus Braithwaite”, an unnervingly KKK-looking chap in a hood. William explains that Titus made his fortune in “shipping”, which, as Leti hisses in George’s ear, is clearly “code for slavery”. More suspicious still, the car that Leti totalled last episode has turned up looking brand new in the Braithwaite’s garage, and there’s no possibility of calling Montrose to verify his whereabouts because, apparently, present owner Samuel Braithwaite never installed telephone lines.
So while Leti and George seem content to enjoy some respite after their long road trip, we’re surely with Tic when he insists the whole thing is very, very hinky. “When have you ever shown up to a white man’s house uninvited and he didn’t try to get you out in 2.5 seconds?” It’s like, guys, have you not seen the Oscar-winning 2017 movie Get Out or something? Seriously, just get out!
They do, eventually, but only for a preprandial stroll around the village. It’s a creepy little medieval-style settlement, complete with children-of-the-corn types dancing round a maypole and a stone tower filled with pigs heads, which – George deduces – is where Montrose has been imprisoned. It’s guarded by a woman in a straw hat (Jamie Neumann, whom viewers of The Deuce will recognise). She informs them that the tower is used not as a prison, but to secure the town’s food supply. “No grizzlies, just black bears. But the blacks are bad enough …” she says, before embarking on the most cutesily extended racist metaphor since Enid Blyton put down her pen.
On their return journey through the woods, George recalls that Dora’s “great ancestor was a slave named Hannah” who “escaped her master’s house after a fire”. A fire. Y’know, like the one William told them burned down the original lodge house in 1832, killing “almost” everyone in it? The same Titus who was “notoriously kind to his servants”, ie raped them, possibly impregnating them (“Why is my mother telling you stuff that she never told either me or my father?” Tic wants to know. Good question Tic, good question).
While they’re stood there, shoggoths attack and Christina Braithwaite (Abbey Lee) comes riding to the rescue on horseback. This is the same willowy blonde last seen driving to the rescue behind the wheel of silver Bentley. Back at the house, Tic is finally introduced to Samuel Braithwaite (Tony Goldwyn) who greets him with the words: “You’re darker than I expected,” thus proving there’s always time to squeeze in an extra lil’ microaggression, even during the commission of your macro-aggression.
Is Christina any better than her pops? She’d certainly like Tic to think so, telling him: “You should think about making some friends; not all us white folks are out to get you.” (Christina definitely just posted a black square on her Insta in June and called it a day, didn’t she?) Tic responds by sharpening up her loose definition of allyship: “You want to be friends, fine, but that’s gonna take actions, not just promises.”
With George and Leti’s memories returned, Tic is no longer out on his own. Not that this fosters much solidarity in the short term. Each is confined to his or her own quarters having their own Solaris-style encounters with projections from their own psyches. (This episode is titled Whitey on the Moon after Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken-word poem, and that’s not the only nod to space exploration.) George slow dances with his old flame Dora, AKA Tic’s mum (Erica Tazel); Tic engages in hand-to-hand combat with a female Korean soldier and Leti gets intimate with Tic – or-is-it?
Slowly the pieces are coming together: Samuel is a cultist, a “Son of Adam”, who intends to spill Tic’s Titus-descended blood as a means to attain eternal life. The three manage to orchestrate an escape, rescue Montrose (Cooeee, Michael K Williams! Glad you could join us!) from the tower and speed off in the silver Bentley only to come crashing into an invisible wall. The Braithwaites then drag them all back to the house once again, with both Leti and George sustaining potentially fatal gunshot wounds. (Christina again does diddly squat to help. So much for your allyship, babes.)
It’s not really clear why Leti is miraculously healed, while George is left to die? Nevertheless, a deathbed George is a chatty George and his passionate pleading with Montrose all-but confirms what’s already been hinted at: he may be Tic’s real father, a secret known only to the brothers – and Dora of course, but she’s dead. Soon George is dead too, but is he dead-dead? One of Lovecraft’s most famous stories is about a “reanimator”, so here’s hoping Uncle George finds his way back to us.
Additional notes
In the comments last week, genlob used the Whovian “companions” to refer to Leti, Tic and George, which made me realise we’re lacking a collective term. The Scooby Gang is already taken, any other suggestions?
Christina should offer a short course in shoggoth husbandry. Evidently they make good guard dog-like family pets, but do they always gestate in a cow’s uterus? Is a shoggoth bite always fatal?
The last thing Dora’s ghost says to George before she disappears is: “You could actually fly with your children.” Interesting choice of plural …
The Prince Hall Freemasonry branch that George says he belongs to was founded in 1784 and survives today. Notable members have included Al Green, Jesse Jackson and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Reading list
“[Algernon] Blackwood, [William Hope] Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith …” These are the authors that George finds in his personalised library, all good additions to your post-Lovecraft reading list.
The House on the Borderland (1908) by Hodgson is the book that opens the secret library to George.
Necronomicon, or the “book of dead names” that Montrose refers to isn’t actually a real book – unless you count the 2008 collection of Lovecraft’s short stories published under that title. It’s a “grimoire” invented by by Lovecraft in his 1924 story The Hound.
Listening guide
Movin On Up, by Ja’net DuBois, the jubilant song that Leti and George dance around to while “freshening up”, has a particular resonance for US TV viewers of a certain vintage. It was the theme tune to the groundbreaking African American sitcom The Jeffersons.
Morning Ritual’s 2014 cover of Bad Moon Rising appears here, but the Creedence Clearwater Revival original was released in 1969 (the year of the moon landing, of course) and was supposedly inspired when John Fogerty watched the 1941 film adaptation of the 1936 short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Lovecraft contemporary Stephen Vincent Benét.
Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon critiqued the US space programme in the context of black American poverty back on Earth. Is there a comparison with the Sons of Adam spilling a black man’s blood to make their own bid for immortality?
River by Leon Bridges provides the moving soundtrack for this episode’s final scene. A Bridges-performed cover of Whitey on The Moon also appears prominently in the 2018 film First Man.
Tic & Leti lovewatch
Ever since Tic frolicked by the burst fire hydrant and Leti bent over in her pink peddle-pushers, it’s been obvious these two hotties are gonna get it on. But when? Tic and Leti shippers got close this episode, but then Leti let a little case of viper-penis put her off. That and the fact that Tic wasn’t actually Tic, but rather a demonic apparition. Fussy, or what?
Quote of the week
“It seems the KKK aren’t just calling themselves ‘grand wizards’ any more.”
