So I’m just watching the newest episode and I wanted to go in order but this episode intrigued me.
Let’s start with the funeral. In watching it, I knew immediately what was happening. The look and the feel of the scene was the same as the pictures I’ve seen over the years of the viewing of Emmitt Till’s body. It’s a painful story that still hunts all of us because it continues but with different faces.
Where to start….let’s start with Ruby and Christina AKA William and that ugly lady with the dog whistle. The conversation between the two of them was dynamic! I agree with what Christina said about Ruby’s intentions but I also have another theory. If you recall, pain is involved in changing into and out of the person you turn into when you take the potion. Pain and relief is what I think Ruby wanted to feel. Having sex with William/Christina did that for her.
These two girls following Dee….interesting. So Dee and Bobo were friends and I think they were trying to allude to the “safe negro” image. Here’s what I mean and hear me out. In doing some mild research, I found that the girls, Eva and Topsy, were from the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which surprisingly I never had to read in high school. In my opinion, Topsy, and characters like her, were portrayed as mischievous, dirty and uneducated; however, if you notice, white people are more at ease when these characters smile and dance. As creepy as it was, Topsy was always smiling and dancing. I got the impression that if black people just danced and smiled, that they would be ok. Sound familiar? “If he would have just did what the officer said the officer wouldn’t have reacted like that.” Not how that works but I digress. If you think about it, Dee spends a good bit of this episode yelling.
Let’s talk about Montrose now. Montrose is a black gay man in the 50’s who cannot be his full self in publish and it boils him up. Every day of his life, he presented himself to the work as someone he was not and Montrose doesn’t not like his boyfriend, George or Tic. He hates himself but it was how he had to live in order to survive. The conversation between he and Tic needed to happen and I think Tic got the answers he was searching for. Now to figure out what happened in the future….that’s what I want to know.
Lastly, true love was shown in this episode. A black woman will protect her black man at all costs. She didn’t know if that spell really worked or not but she ran, pregnant and all, into danger in order to protect her love. If you, right now, don’t have a person who would run into a hail of bullets for you BEFORE they knew a monster would rise from the concrete, pick again.
BLACK WATCH 