Lovecraft Country took a different turn this week. Picking up from the demolished Braithwhite mansion from episode two, our protagonists for this episode are Hippolyta (Atticus’ aunt) and her mother. And rather than monsters in their normal sense, Hippolyta is teleported through time and space.
After a short moment of revelation at the Braithwhite mansion, Hippolyta is tinkering with an odd machine in her room. After some trial and error, and maybe some abuse of the machine, it whirs to life to reveal a numerical code and a key. She later discovers the “code” is actually coordinates to a specific location that holds another machine that the key she found slips into. With the arrival of police, something goes off the rails, and tears in space and time open around them.
Hippolyta finds herself on an alien planet, surrounded by ice. A being approaches her, bipedal and very human-like, only to have everything go white and waking up inside a cell. In her wrists, Hippolyta find purple, glowing implants with no answers. And once anything resembling another living being makes contact, appearing as a black woman with a large afro, little else is made clear. The being answers “I am” when asked who she is, digging up imagery of Moses and the burning bush. Her captor pressures her; “Who do you want to be?” “Where do you want to be?” Laughing, Hippolyta says she wants to be on stage with Josephine Baker in Paris.
Hippolyta, once again, experiences an envelopment in white and comes to…on stage with Josephine Baker in Paris. Confused and thrown off guard at first, our protagonist appears to spend months with Baker and her dance crew in Paris. She parties, she learns from her now-fellow-dancers, and enjoys a life she couldn’t in her own time. After being capable of finding more freedom, she admits that the white people from where she’s from made her feel small and would find a noose to put around her neck, no matter the reason.
Once again, Hippolyta flashes into a new scene, being trained in a woman’s combat group (the appearance of Confederate soldiers later gives a better idea about the time frame when this is supposed to take place). Her skill grows, and Hippolyta eventually becomes a leader among the women she trains with. With some small victories overtaking the Confederate soldiers they face, the implication that they fall in battle is made all the more obvious when a hoard of grey-clad southerners storm the small tribe of women warriors.
With another flash, we are brought back to the very scene where we are first introduced to Hippolyta; in bed with George in their apartment in Chicago. With some accusations thrown at George that he helped Hippolyta feel inhibited in her abilities, and an apology from George for his influence, they travel to an alien planet, acting as a new Adam and Eve. They provide names to all the living things, as Hippolyta said it was all she wanted to do before she felt the set back from her social position.
Ultimately she decides to return home, discovering that the world she had imagined where she was brought on as mother to the world was “too small” for what she had become. And we are left for another week to wonder about the beasts that await us in the next episode.
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