Of the several nits I have to pick with Watchmen—a show I am still infatuated with—the most prominent (and also the pettiest) is that the murderous racists didn’t die violent and painful enough deaths.
One (Senator Keene) was literally liquified because of his own ego, and the other racists were zapped to oblivion by Lady Trieu. Sure, they were dead and shit, but they didn’t suffer or even have much space to experience fear and dread. Basically, their deaths weren’t proportionate to the harm they caused.
It also subverted the cinematic expectation of the biggest bads dying the worst deaths, which I find myself looking forward to. In The Matrix, Neo kills Agent Smith by literally jumping into him. Beatrix kills Bill in Kill Bill with the five-point palm exploding heart technique. My favorite example of this is the end of The Equalizer 2 when Denzel kills dude like eight different ways in 30 seconds. He murdered the fuck out of that guy.
Anyway, while whether the rest of the season meets this expectation is yet to be determined, Lovecraft Country’s premiere met every hope I had for it—and even some hopes I didn’t realize I had. (When was the last time—on TV or in a movie—that you saw an older Black couple making love onscreen...and it wasn’t comic relief?)
One of these hopes was that if murderous racists are killed on screen, they would be killed as fuck. Lovecraft Country’s premiere didn’t disappoint. The racist-est racists die in the most terrifying and gruesome way imaginable. It’s so terrifying and gruesome that it literally had to be imagined for it to happen because it couldn’t happen that way in the world we exist in.
Anyway, if you’re into watching murderous racists be killed as fuck, this is the show for you!