WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Lovecraft Country Season 1, Episode 9, "Rewind 1921," which aired Sunday on HBO.

The penultimate episode of the first season of Lovecraft Country included one of the strongest portrayals of the Tulsa Race Massacre ever recreated for television because of its focus on the sense of loss Montrose feels returning to the event. It’s in keeping with the show’s intention to subvert the horrific. Like the Matt Ruff novel it’s based on, Lovecraft Country reframes monsters. Viewers are supposed to be scared of the shoggoths, but the racial injustices the show portrays are much scarier. In the previous episode, it tackled the open casket funeral of Emmett Till. Then, in Episode 9, Lovecraft Country turned its attention to the lesser-known racial injustice of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Lovecraft Country’s portrayal starts with three of the main cast members -- Leti, Tic and Montrose -- using the time machine Hippolyta found in Episode 7 to travel back in time to 1920s Tulsa just before the Massacre began. While Tic and Leti are clear-eyed and mission-focused, Montrose stares a thousand yards ahead, glassy-eyed, often crying. Played by the incomparable Michael K. Williams, Montrose was the only character who was at the Massacre the first time around and his heart is breaking every second he’s back in Tulsa. Because of Williams’ excellent performance, the audience shares his pain.

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For the sake of the story, the show doesn't share much of the context for what caused the massacre. While Till’s murder was motivated by a racist reaction to an account he had whistled at a white woman, the seeds of the Tulsa Massacre were planted when a white woman ran screaming off an elevator she was sharing with a black man, who she claimed assaulted her. Both women recanted years later, but in each case it was too little too late. Dick Rowland, the man from the elevator, was arrested, and the Tulsa Tribune ran an article titled, "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator." A white mob was met by a group of armed black World War I veterans who had assembled at the courthouse to prevent an immediate lynching. The police managed to disperse the two groups once, but the second time they met shots were fired and all hell broke loose.

Lovecraft Country comes in here. Leti is the first to encounter the white mob as it marches into the affluent Black Wall Street neighborhood, where Montrose’s family lives. A group of white men chase her down the street, shooting at her. In reality, the guns the mob wield may have been given to them by the police, as multiple eyewitnesses who survived the Massacre saw the police handing out firearms to the white mob.

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Meanwhile, Montrose is forced to watch the murder of his lover a second time. Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s decision to focus on Montrose’s individual pain, showing his face in long close ups, makes his suffering almost tangible.

The episode’s writers -- showrunner Misha Green, Jonathan I. Kidd and Sonya Winton -- smartly use Leti’s magical invulnerability to show what it was like for the rest of Montrose’s family as their home is shot at, then burned by the white mob. It puts another set of human faces on the Tulsa Massacre while showing audiences who Montrose lost.

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The creators double-down on Leti’s invulnerability in the show’s closing image, in which Leti walks down what looks like Detroit Avenue in Tulsa while cropdusters drop turpentine bombs behind her. This detail is straight from the report aboout the event commissioned by the state of Oklahoma in 2001. The report also notes that those planes were requisitioned by the police.

Lovecraft Country never addresses the scale of destruction, but modern estimates say that at least 300 people were killed and 35 city blocks were leveled. Insurance companies refused to pay out the policies on the destroyed property, insisting the event was a riot, leading to the event’s original name, the Tulsa Race Riot. The city of Tulsa has done pitifully little in the last 99 years to help the survivors (the last of whom died in 2018) and their families.

It’s hard to grasp what it’s like to lose 300 members of a community, to have 35 blocks torched. It’s a scale above what most people are capable of processing. Centering Montrose's emotions grounds this portrayal.  "Rewind 1921" works so well because it narrows the focus from the event as a whole to the impact of the Massacre on one person.

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The saddest part may be that Montrose, Tic and Leti can’t do anything to change what’s happening. Although they have the physical power to fight back, they can’t for fear of altering the timeline, and Montrose has to witness his greatest trauma a second time. Author Victor LaValle, who knows a thing or two about introducing Black characters to Lovecraft’s mythos, says it best when he explains that in the episode, Leti and the other characters "could only see true history, and take us with them. Bearing witness to American atrocity as an act of ancestral love."

This is the second time the Tulsa Massacre has been portrayed on HBO in two years, as it was also the inciting incident of the network's Watchmen adaptation. That series did an admirable job of bringing the event into the public consciousness, and possibly played a role in getting the Massacre added to Oklahoma’s state curriculum. However, it failed in one key aspect: in Watchmen the white mob wore the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, but this is inaccurate. While the decision to have the attackers dressed as the Klan aided Watchmen’s interrogation of what the anonymity of a mask allows a person to do, it obscures a much darker truth. The Klan weren't solely responsible for the Tulsa Massacre. Klan members and white civilians alike -- unhooded, aided and armed by the city police -- did.

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By sticking with the facts of the event, Lovecraft Country once again conveys the message it has already communicated so well. Montrose feeling it and Leti witnessing it brings the Tulsa Massacre to life and painfully reminds audiences that the monsters aren’t the Shoggoth or even the men in the white robes. Monsters aren't scary things in the closet. Monsters are your neighbors, dressed in plain clothes, letting out their hatred.

Executive produced by Jordan Peele, Yann Demange and J.J. Abrams, Lovecraft Country stars Jurnee Smollett, Jonathan Majors, Aunjanue Ellis, Abbey Lee, Jada Harris, Wunmi Mosaku and Michael Kenneth Williams, with Courtney B. Vance, Jamie Chung, Jamie Neumann, Jordan Patrick Smith and Tony Goldwyn. The series airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.

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