'Lovecraft Country': Season 1 Episode 3 "Holy Ghost" Recap
Episode three of “Lovecraft Country” focuses on Leti (Journee Smollett), a haunted house, and the fallout from the events at Ardham.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
“Holy Ghost” starts with returning to Chicago, where we see Leti (Jurnee Smollett) attending local church services. While this is a jubilant occasion for everyone, Leti is crying and looks as if the emotional toll of Ardham is hitting her hard. It’s clear from this moment the episode will focus on Leti, which is excellent because Smollett has been one of the series’ highlights so far. And as much as we’ve seen her vibrant strength throughout the first two episodes, it’s interesting to see her vulnerability in the church.
The screen goes black, with text about an event in Chicago where a group of Black men and women move into a house. Ten days after they move in, three people go missing. As we’re given this information, we realize this is the set up for the episode we are about to see unfold. Leti and her sister Rudy, arrive at a run-down house. Looking like something that could fall apart at any second, Rudy’s shocked when Leti tells her she’s bought the place to run together.
This seems like an offer with good faith and an olive branch between the sisters, who are looking to fix their rocky relationship. They agree to work together on the house, go inside and realize they have a lot of work to do. The design of the house is impeccable, feeling like a character within the episode. It even comes with an elevator, which almost takes off their head when the sisters try to use it for the first time. More on that later.
We go across town to see the Freedom family having breakfast and trying to move on with the passing of George (Courtney B. Vance). Tic (Jonathan Majors) has been staying with Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis) and Diana (Jada Harris), making sure they are all okay. It’s an awkward scene, as we can see Tic feels exceptionally guilty for his uncle’s death. Tic realizes he’s overstayed his welcome and goes to Montrose’s (Michael K. Williams) apartment, looking to crash for the night. But the pain losing George is still too real for the father and son to handle each other; therefore, Tic storms out without even staying longer than ten minutes.
Back the house, Leti and Ruby’s home is transformed into a boarding house, with tons of occupants vacating their empty rooms. You can tell the sisters have put a lot of work into making it look good and brought so much life in the houses. As Leti is letting everyone in, Tic arrives, and the two reconnect for the first time since Ardham. He tells her he’s going to go back to Florida in the next couple of days but needs a place to stay. She gives him a room, but as they walk back inside, they hear horns from the front lawn and realize its racist white men starring at their neighborhood’s newest members. Tic then tell Leti he’s not going anywhere till he knows everyone in the house is safe.
Later at night, Leti hears some noises from the basement. She goes to check on things, and as she gets closer to a bunker within the room, the more the noises become louder and louder. Scared to the bone, she gets Tic, but when they are entering the bunker, the space is empty, which could be a good room for Leti to use as a darkroom for her photography.
Flash to the next night, we witness a housewarming party where a ton of things happen. We see Hippolyta and Leti talk for the first time since George’s passing, trying to mask their pain in this party’s happiness. We see Diana and her friends messing around with an Ouija board, in which a spirit spells out her father’s name. But the most significant event comes when Tic and Leti confine to one another, making love in one of the boardinghouses’ bathrooms. It’s a quick yet tender moment between Majors and Smollett, whose chemistry continues to bubble throughout each episode.
This leaves Leti turned emotionally upside down. She’s struggling in keeping everything in from the last couple of weeks, clinging to anything to get her mind off Ardham. But her lust and sorrow turn to anger when a burning cross appears on her lawn. It’s in this moment she reacts by taking a baseball bat to the white men’s cars, smashing them into pieces. This leads her to getting arrested for the property damage, and she surrenders to the police without a fight. On the way to jail, the police captain berates her for information and how she got the house. He tells her eight people died in that house, and if she knew what was right for her, she would leave the house as soon as possible.
The next day, Leti is in her darkroom, looking at her photos. When she hangs her pictures, she locates a pattern of mysterious lines connecting. As she joins the lines, a spirit comes out, telling her to “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.” She runs upstairs, where Rudy is trying to assure the residents to stay. Leti’s antics with the police have led a lot of the tenants to move out. When talking about how they will pay the bills, Leti lets Ruby know how she afforded the house in the first place. She was given money from their mother to do something useful with it. Leti brought the house so she can get her sister and her back together. But Ruby doesn’t take the news well and leaves her sister and the place for good.
Alone and determined to uncover the truth, Leti does some research into her home, which is probably something you should do before buying the home. Discovering her at a restaurant, Tic approaches Leti, who has gone down a rabbit hole. She tells Tic the house’s haunted and the previous owner, Winthrop Epstein, made a deal with the police captain she encountered to experiment on African Americans the captain arrested. Tic takes her concerns as truth. Leti lets her guard down, talking to Tic, who seems to be the only person she can talk to about anything.
Tic tells Leti she needs to move out, but she doesn’t want to. So the two get a psychic, who performs séances, to come and get the ghosts out of the house. The three make their way into the darkroom. As they start the ritual, they feel the spirits of both Epstein and his victims come to life. As they are downstairs, the three white men, who antagonized Leti and her tenants, enter the premises, looking to take care of our heroes. But they some come to realize, the house is coming to life, with the black spirits coming to life and killing all three men. The special effects in this sequence are so well done, you can’t tell when they are ghosts, making it feel even more terrifying.
Back downstairs, the psychic gets consumed by Epstein and is knocked out. He then goes into Tic’s body and starts approaching Leti. But before he can get to her, the spirits surround both of them. Leti, knowing the words to get rid of this ghost, implores the ghosts to join her and stop Epstein. By working together, they’re able to get rid of the racist who killed them and find peace for themselves. It’s a beautiful scene showing the strength of the living and the dead uniting to destroy an oppressor that’s brought them misery.
This brings an end to the haunted house story, as we see days later, black tenants moving back in, and Leti doing an interview in the paper about her house’s success story. Its resolution is uplifting, with Leti finding purpose and strength through the whole ordeal. But while she takes the reporter on a look around the house, the elevator door mysteriously opens, and we see the camera move down the elevator shaft to find the bodies of the three white men and the bones of the house’s former spirits. Will they become the new ghost of the house? Only time will tell.
As the episode comes to a close, you could feel it had something extra to give us. This is a prime example of when a great episode loses a step or two because of its conclusion. Because “Holy Ghost” couldn’t end without connecting everything we’ve seen to Ardham and some old friends of ours.
As Tic is walking around town, he sees Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee). She is closing up shop at a business she owns when Tic reveals he knows she had a part in all of this. Epstein had a connection to the society Tic destroyed in the previous episode. She tells him he’s correct, and it’s all discovered that Christina was secretly endowed Leti with the money from her mother. Tic, tired of listening to her, pulls a gun, and threatens her if she comes around anymore. But she uses her “powers” to freeze him and lets Tic know, when he is ready to join her in opening to door to Eden, she will find him.