This week's episode of Lovecraft Country, Meet Me in Daegu, covers the backstory of Atticus' past and centers on the story of his mysterious Korean lover Ji-Ah, who Atticus meets during his tour in the Korean War.
Meet Me In Daegu is a major win and restores what's been missing from Lovecraft Country: heart. Very much like the show's pilot, this episode respects its own story, taking the proper time and focusing on building its pathos and spending time building its characters.
Jamie Chung has landed an Asian-American part in Hollywood that puts her front and center, a rare statistical occurrence made possible by those infinite monkeys typing out all of life's possibilities. In the part of Ji-Ah, Jamie Chung plays her best and most complex part to date that she is specifically correct for, playing her own ethnicity (she often plays marginalized Asian roles; she's done Chinese, Japanese, or an unidentified Asian girl with a white name) and being fluently bilingual onscreen.
Ji-Ah earns the audience's sympathy. From this episode alone, I am already more captivated by Atticus and Ji-Ah's love story than Atticus and Letitia's current relationship, which remains as a progression-resistant love plotline that just sits there. Maybe Atticus doesn't even end up with Letitia at all at the end of the season. Maybe he ends up with Ji-Ah. Part of me is rooting for that to happen now.
If you don't like reading subtitles, too freaking bad. 80% of the episode is in Korean. I applaud HBO for having the nerve to put up an episode like this and letting the world deal with it. I am sure someone who is born and raised in Korea can watch it and find historical inconsistencies or factual errors or some kind, but in terms of Asian representation, consider it a win.
Meet Me In Daegu being such an effective episode highlights my disappointment with the show overall. There are just too many cooks in this kitchen. What is happening in this writer's room? The show feels like a constant tug of war between J.J. Abram's ADD versus Jordan Peele's social topic horror. The show is now past the point of any kind of meaningful recovery. I hate to be a broken record when I say I still in awe that Atticus, the main character, is the least developed of all the characters.
What will the finale to this show be? What will the grand finale between Atticus Laetitia and the Sons of the Adam look like? Between magic, monsters, force fields, and metamorphosis potions, there are more than enough story devices than I can count on my fingers. The setup is akin to a kid placing a hodgepodge of all his favorite action figures, each one of different sizes, from different franchises and from a different toymaker, on the living room carpet. Please let it be great...