Not happy with the final scene. Why Diana did the killing? It seemed very odd.
One of the points made somewhat not well (see Montrose’s murder of Yahima) is how those oppressed can become oppressors.
I had hopes for Dee to become heroic like her Amazonian namesake. Her becoming a racist killer disappointed me.
She saw Tic as family and her offer to find another way with the book, her promise to let him be. … she has been shown to be true to her word. Not only was her sociopathy acquired, she is self aware of it and tried to learn empathy in her own way (see her arranging to be treated as Till had been). Maybe her magic was bound but her past invulnerability spell still applied? She was an interesting and complex character.
The show runners have taken great pains to demonstrate not. Tic was a monster in Korea. Montrose murdered Yahima at least partially out of self hate. Ruby was going all evil with her “I was always imagining myself as a redhead”, Dee is now a cold stone killer acting on her mother’s early “I am” admission of wanting to kill white people.
Ruby did get a little too carried away as a white woman, didn’t she? I was shocked at how critical she was of the black sales associate, but I really shouldn’t have been. Ruby didn’t just want to have job at Marshall Fields. She wanted to experience power. She and Christina are similar in that way.
Most of the show is concentrated on the black side of town or in Leti’s house. It is very possible that there are magical things going on all the time that the main characters just aren’t aware of, being that they lived in a segregated city with very little interaction with rich, powerful, magical whitefolks.
Also, I’m guessing magical folks try to keep their magic on the downlow as much as possible. They can also wipe the memory of anyone who has witnessed their magic, like what happened to Leti and George after the monsters-in-the-forest debacle was over.
“Racist killer” is pretty damned strong. If anybody earned a death it was Christina.
Summary
Oh others in the show “earned it” more but be that as it may, to the best of our knowledge Dee doesn’t know much about that. Her comment as she killed her was about “they”. Dee was not acting out of revenge for actions of Christina against her family, but Christina as one of the “they” - whites - at least to my read of it.
Nevermind, changed title instead.
I hope Monstro doesn’t think I was trying to fight her, just a slight disagreement is all.
The fact that Tic was apparently randomly chosen by the kumiho suggests that either magic is stupid common, or the writers aren’t trying that hard.
Agreed about the attempts at memory-wiping. They would happen. But if magic were widespread, there would evidence that couldn’t be covered by tampering with memory. The effects of “proof” that the supernatural is real and being used widely would change any culture–including American culture of the 1950s–on a fundamental level.
A society in which many people can do magic wouldn’t look as much like the actual 1950s as what we saw in the show did. The difference would be far more radical. To give but one example, a world in which a lot of people can do magic would have entertainment that differed profoundly from what we saw in the show. Comic books, movies, books, etc. would focus on the getting and deploying of magic.
Instead, what we saw was pretty much the actual moving-image and textual entertainment of the actual 1950s: a mix of non-supernatural adventure, science fiction, romance, horror, etc.
If magic were widely wielded, the supernatural would be part of every brand name, every place name, every everything, really.
Although I suppose that you only need the ‘donor’ in a coma if you plan on needing a steady supply of the potion; for a one-off transformation there’d be not much point in keeping them alive.
As for the finale, I think that in the end, both narratively and thematically, it just didn’t hold together. It was much too exposition-dumpy, for one: first the long scene of flashback to the backstory explanation, then Ji-Ah’s mind-reading—sort of seemed like we got a digest of the final three episodes crammed together.
I also didn’t care much for killer Dee. Plus, why was she even with them in the first place? And then left all alone randomly in the woods?
But I think what I found most galling is the legitimization of the concept of ‘race’ with barring ‘all white people’ from magic. I mean, how white is white, there? Or how black is black enough to be able to use magic? Would Atticus still be able to do magic?
The fallacious idea that there are hard-and-fast lines between different human races is the key starting point of all racism. That the show should just so casually reinforce that notion is disappointing.
We don’t how “legitimate” that spell was, do we? For all we know, Leti’s spell binds the people who are in possession of the magic at that point of time–and all of those people just happen to be self-identified as white. Her belief that she’s taken magic from white folks is powerful to her (and the audience sitting at home who are sympathic). But I don’t think that is an objective legitimization of race as much as it is portrayal of a mindset that existed at that time. Everyone in the story believes that race is real since we’re talking about 1950s America. It would be crazy for Leti to have not cast a spell she believes snatches magic away from white people after seeing the hell that white people have inflicted on all the characters in the story. That would have been super unrealistic, IMHO.
I actually like Killer Dee for the same reason. Killer Dee is an inevitability, the same as Leti casting a spell on whitefolks. I agree that it is weird that they left Dee in the woods all alone (even though she was being protected). And I was shocked that Christina would be the character she would go after. But I am not surprised that she killed someone. She was damn near resurrected from death. We all know that when people get resurrected from death, they never come back the same person. Plus, she had her innocence stolen from her in so many ways. It wouldn’t have made sense to have Dee be anything but a girl full of rage after all that.
I don’t think there’s any reason given within the show to believe anything else. If there was meant to be a disparity between what she believes and what was actually the case, then any competent storytelling would’ve had to give some indication that this is the case; as it is (if I haven’t missed it), it’s solely your imputation. But this puts the onus of making the storytelling work on the viewer (which is different from simply expecting a competent audience: you can expect the audience to try and understand, but as soon as they need to invent additional elements not provided for within the narrative framework—i. e. fanwank—, you’ve missed the ball as a storyteller).
I don’t think there’s any reason given within the show to believe anything else.
All we know at this point is that Christina is no longer magical. We don’t know anything else about the outcome of Leti’s spell.
The spell could work without it legitimizing the biological realness of race. It doesn’t require “fanwanking” to explain this. Just a mind that can divorce the natural from supernatural. Take a spell that kills all Christians. “Christian” is a construct–there is no “realness” to it. But there’s nothing stopping the magical forces summoned by a spell from using a basic analysis to identify individuals with a high probability of being a Christian. The spell might kill anyone whose brain lights up a certain way at the thought of Jesus, who have a memory of being baptized. Leti’s spell might bind up anyone who has no recent African, Native American, or Asian ancestry–since magical forces can readily find out that kind of stuff. It might also target individuals who have “I am white!” in their consciousness. And the spell probably doesn’t even work that hard, since the story makes it clear that at least in America, magic is a thing possessed overwhelmingly by people who have “I am white!” in their consciousness.
You’re the one projecting your own individual beliefs into this unnecessarily. As I said above, having Leti go after whitefolks, who are portrayed as the villain in this story, was inevitable–the same as Dee being a killer. Leti’s spell no more legitimitizes race than the 400+ years of racial oppression that is referenced in every episode. To expect Leti to be especially enlightened is to make Leti a magical negro in the metaphorical sense of the word. I can watch a literal magical negro all day long. But I’m sick of metaphorical magical negroes–who are victimized and oppressed but always forgive and do the “right thing” at the end. I want to see some bad-ass magical negros who act human thing for a change. Which is probably why Killer Dee did not disappoint me one little bit. I liked Christina (and I was actually rooting for her…because I liked her more than I liked Tic), but having Dee walk right past her with her pet monster like everything was just fine and dandy…no, they would not have been realistic. Having her kill a white person is. The fact that she didn’t know the person she killed and the fact that the person she killed was completely helpless fits in with the theme of the show.
It appears that the ratings for the Finale were pretty high:
So if they are thinking of a Season 2, this will definitely help.
I’m not expecting Leti to be enlightened; I was hoping the show would be. As it is, it’s saying ‘there’s such a thing as white, as opposed to black, people’, without giving any hint that this is just a misguided belief of its protagonist. At least that’s how it reads to me. That means sentences of the form ‘all white/black people are x’ properly refer, and may be either true or false, when actually, they simply fail to pick out some unique group. For that, it doesn’t matter how they refer, merely that they do.
But anyhow, I have no strong feelings about this issue. You disagree; that’s fine by me.
Sorry, but I cannot relate to your “hope” at all. The story is about a racist society and how its characters respond to it. Race is very much real to the characters in this story. It is very much real to the black people who created the show, and it is very much real to the black people watching it. Just because it is an abstraction doesn’t mean it isn’t real. If people believe it is real and act like it is real, then it is real.
Maybe it would help me to understand your POV if you could share your ideal alternative ending? Does Leti cast a spell binding only Christina? Doesn’t that seem like a lost opportunity…the kind of decision that a gentle, meek person would make rather than someone strong and no-nonsense like Leti?
Just because Leti is the protagonist doesn’t mean she’s perfect. Pretty much all modern dramas have a flawed protagonist. Their story lines are often about how their understanding of the world leads them to certain choices and how those choices ultimately end up making things worse rather than better. So I see no reason to think that anything has been “legitimized” (at least no more than any HBO drama does…did The Sopranos legitimize the Mafia?). We watched a flawed heroine make a choice that was completely rational considering all the shit she’d been through and her own understanding of the world. Hopefully we will get see if she made a good choice. I’m guessing we will see that she didn’t make a good choice, since good choices are ultra boring.
Again, it’s not about Leti. It’s about the show, uncritically, throwing out the notion that there’s something like ‘white’ or ‘black’ people in an objective sense. I get that you want to argue that that’s only Leti’s belief, due to growing up where and when she does, and that’s fine, but the show doesn’t make that point, it’s something you bring to the table. And for me, that’s dissatisfying.
As for my ideal ending—well, there’s a reason I don’t write TV shows, but merely bitch about them on tze internet.
Again, the show isn’t “throwing out” anything. It’s just showing us the world that existed in 1950 (with some magic thrown in). In this world, race is very much real.
It’s like watching the Game of Thrones and being disappointed that the show didn’t make a statement against tribalism.
But anti-tribalism was never really an important theme of GOT, whereas anti-racism is a theme of Lovecraft Country. I can see why some would be disappointed in the perpetuation of this myth in that context.