We all have a backstory. Everyone has a history that made us into the persons we are today, but sometimes that includes some not-so-acceptable moments. This week, we discovered Atticus Freeman’s history.
Cutting to before the storyline of Lovecraft Country, the audience finds itself in Korea just before the US enters South Korea in 1950. Our focus for the episode is stuck on one individual, a Korean military nurse named Ji-ah.
Ji-ah lives with her mother, who appears to be pushing their family or cultural customs on her. The audience believes this until Ji-ah actually does bring a man home and murders him. It turns out she’s actually a demon called a Kumiho; a creature with multiple “tails” that can be used to capture the souls of men that have sex with her. It turns out, when Ji-ah was a child, her stepfather sexually abused her leaving her mother with the choice to summon this monster. The catch is, in order to exorcise the creature, she has to capture the souls of 100 men.
So when her mother tells her to start bringing home men, she meant to kill them.
Trouble emerges when the nursing staff is put on their knees in front of US troops. They are shouted at, insisting that someone among them is a Communist spy. When no one will admit to it, they are executed one by one. When the gun is pointed at Ji-ah, Atticus is the one with his finger on the trigger. But Ji-ah’s friend leaps to her rescue, admitting to being a Communist. So Atticus executes the friend.
Though the rest are set free, Ji-ah find herself back in the hospital and soon caring for Atticus who is wounded. Later she admits to him that seeing him in the hospital filled her with rage. But they eventually bonded over shared trauma and fall in love. Atticus even brings her onto the US military base, under the guise of being a prostitute (something the soldier guiding her to Atticus reassures her is the only way to get Korean women onto the base), and they watch her favorite Judy Garland movie together.
So what happens when the two are hitting it off so well that they want to…”take their relationship to the next level”? Well, they do exactly that without Atticus losing his life. And Ji-ah’s mother becomes indignant, especially since she only needs one soul to get rid of the monster.
The episode is full of anxiety-inducing moments. If it’s not the relationship between Ji-ah and her mother, it’s the US soldiers being callous around Korean nurses the way the police are to Atticus and his colleagues in earlier episodes. It’s the scenes of Ji-ah caring for Atticus after he’s killed her friend. It’s the two of them acknowledging each other’s trauma and trying to find a way forward with both of them in each others lives. And it most certainly comes when the monster inside her claims another soul.
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