Lovecraft Country 1.1: Racist Police Get Horror Comeuppance

Finally had a chance to watch the debut of Lovecraft Country on HBO.   I was pulled away this past week by the Democratic National Convention, televised and virtual and truly inspiring.  And it was oddly appropriate that I did not look at Lovecraft Country until just a few nights before the upcoming Republican convention, which begins on Monday.  Creepily appropriate, because Lovecraft Country is a tableau of racism and horror, and that's pretty much what I expect to find in the Republican National Convention.  Would be nice if that meant I didn't need to watch any of those four blustering nights.

I know, it may not be good style to mix real politics and popular culture, but times have changed.  H. P. Lovecraft was a real author of horror, and a real racist.  Since I'm no fan of horror, I've never read much of Stephen King, whose progressivism is in an accord with mine.  So I certainly didn't bother with Lovecraft, and always found mentions of his Cthulhu at science fiction conventions mildly annoying.  

To make matters worse -- worse for my being anything like a knowledgeable reviewer of Lovecraft Country -- I haven't read Matt Ruff's 2016 novel by the same name, which explores the mix of horror and racism in a narrative whose hero Atticus Turner is an African-American devotee of pulp science fiction that flourished along with racism in the first half or so of the 20th century.  But I've always held that reviews of television and cinema by people who haven't read the novels are a necessary part of the critical process, because they can evaluate the movie or TV show on its own terms, rather than in comparison to the novel or short story.

So what did I think of the first episode of Lovecraft Country?  I liked it a lot.  It was fun seeing the racist murderous police get their comeuppance by another H. P. Lovecraft monster, the Shoggoth.   That was a fine metaphoric fulfillment of Atticus's appreciation of bug-eyed monster science fiction.   The genre is intrinsically a celebration of the unlikely hero, and it's a cool twist to make the genre itself a component of the heroism in this story.

I was asked a few weeks ago by Elizabeth Yuko, writing an article for Reader's Digest,  to offer an example of a science fiction novel that accurately predicted the future.  I offered Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (to see why, here's the Reader's Digest article).  If Reader's Digest ever asks me to choose a horror novel that got the future right, I might well choose Ruff's Lovecraft Country, as a strong metaphoric example of racist police getting just what they deserve.

But I'll try to watch the rest of the HBO series first, which by the way has good acting by Jonathan Majors as Atticus, and Jurnee Smollett and Courtney B. Vance in other lead roles.

See also Lovecraft Country 1.2: Malleable Dreams

 

Drunk FlashForwarding in 1.5

Well, the Yankees lost tonight, after coming back and gaining the lead, and that was frustrating, but FlashForward 1.5 came on strong after a talky middle and posted one of its best endings since the premiere, and that was good to see indeed.

The crux of this episode is the reliability of Mark's flashforward vision. Why does he recall only a part of the 2 minutes and 17 seconds, when others seem to recall the full course of their flashforward? The answer is that Mark, off booze for seven years, was drunk in his flashforward.

Courtney Vance puts in his best performance so far as Mark's boss Stan Wedeck. He at first is furious that he's risking his career on a drunk flashforward, but he doesn't pull back the investigation, and in fact just tells Mark to keep his mouth shut as Stan takes the project funding he has pressured the President to provide.

There's a sharp 24-ish flavor to this (likely from Brannon Braga), as we see a President wheeling and dealing with dangerous political adversaries, and a Chinese team of assassins who almost take out Mark, Demetri, Vreede, and Stan, and in a parallel attack badly wound Janis. She looks as if she could be dying in the street - but given the truth of the flashforwards so far, someone is bound to come and save her.

She has a provocative story, too - a lesbian lover, Numb3r's Amita (Navi Rawat), in Washington, DC. It looks as if not only Heroes but FlashForward is picking up on The L Word this year, which risks making this theme a little trite, especially when brought in out of left field. But in Janis's case, it has the benefit of making the pregnancy she saw in her flashforward even more interesting.

Janis also discovers some strange towers in the area of the 1990s blackout ... Lloyd Simcoe will likely know more about ...



6-min podcast review of FlashForward

See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost and 1.2: Proofs and Defiance of Inevitability and 1.3: Conficting Visions and Futures and 1.4: FlashForward Meets Shaft and House

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

FlashForward 1.2: Proofs and Defiance of Inevitability

A powerful second episode of FlashForward tonight, which pulled all the right emotional strings, and bodes well for the continuing success of the series.

Boding - for well or otherwise - is what FlashForward is all about, and the single most riveting story of foreboding tonight was Demetri's - Mark Benford's partner. Demetri, as we learned last week, had no flash forward. And although that might well only mean that he was sleeping six months from now - as pointed out by Janis (pregnant in her vision of the future, no relationship now) - it could also mean that Demetri doesn't survive. Demetri would therefore like the visions, including lack of visions, to be meaningless hallucinations rather than glimpses of the future.

But he gets wrenching proof tonight that they're not, when another agent, in Utah, tells Demetri and Mark that she had no vision during the blackout either. She's shot to death minutes later.

Mark is struggling not against death, but the death of his relationship with Olivia, who is with Lloyd Simcoe in her future vision. But his work, in particular the case he's investigating tonight, is inexorably filling in the pieces of his vision, putting them literally up on his board. Tonight the same action that kills the Utah agent provides Mark with a photograph of a burned doll which was right up there on his future wall.

Why doesn't Mark just refuse to put the pieces of the puzzle up there - why not just throw the photograph away, rather than use it to flesh out a future he doesn't want to occur? Mark can't bring himself to do that - so far - as an FBI agent. But he can try in his personal life, and in a powerful moment tonight he burns the friendship bracelet his daughter gave to him.... It will no doubt turn up, or another bracelet that looks just like it, before this season is over....

Not everything in the visions is profound. Courtney Vance's Stanford, head of the FBI LA Office where Mark, Demetri, and Janis work, found himself on the can six months from now, which is where he was in our present when he had his vision.

But the deft kaleidoscope of philosophic puzzle and human touches, action and agonizing, humor and hints of conspiracy, means that the can is the last place FlashForward is likely to land.

See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer

6-min podcast review of FlashForward

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