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There aren’t a lot of things from Michael Jordan’s career that are unknown to the majority of his fans, particularly after so many books have been written on the legendary figure — and, most recently, The Last Dance recounted a number of those stories to millions of viewers.

However, the internet is full of surprises and occasionally unearths something that people have never seen, and late Sunday night a Twitter user stumbled across something truly ridiculous: a 1988 charity basketball game between Michael Jordan and…Elliott Gould.

There are, best as I can tell, two YouTube videos that have this “very rare” footage, neither of which show Elliott Gould taking a shot which is a real crime against humanity, but you can see him egging Jordan on as Mike hits ridiculous shots while they play HORSE and Around The World. They also feature Jordan lying to Dick Van Patten and the entire world by saying he only plays golf in the offseason when we just saw video of him playing golf with Danny Ainge in the middle of the playoffs two years prior to this.

I beg of the internet to find full video of this so we can see Gould hoisting shots, because according to Gould — who recounted this afternoon to Rich Eisen a few years ago — he actually beat Jordan in the Around The World portion and gave him a letter to start HORSE.

I don’t know if this is a LeBron-Jordan Crawford situation where Nike took and burned the tapes, but I demand the Elliott Gould Cut be released ASAP, because I need to see this man hitting two-handed set shots against Michael Jordan like I need air to breathe.

Over the weekend, President Trump’s elusive income tax returns became the subject of much outrage after being obtained by the New York Times, which reported that he’d paid a very tiny amount while supposedly being a billionaire. The publication also pointed toward astonishing write-offs, including $75,000 for hair styling. That’s incredible no matter how one frames things, but in the harsh daylight of Monday morning, people are thinking of people who haven’t gotten away with not paying taxes, and that includes prominent cases like Lauryn Hill and Wesley Snipes.

The White Men Can’t Jump, Blade, and New Jack City star emerged from a federal prison in 2013 after serving three years behind bars. Although he was acquitted of felony tax fraud and conspiracy charges, he was convicted on misdemeanor charges involved with failing to file tax returns from 1999-2001. Snipes did offer to pay over $800,000 as a settlement offer, but as of 2018, the IRS was still pursuing him for much more money. Yes, Snipes is probably “saying: WTF?!” right about now.

There’s a lot of Blade jokes out there right now.

One user remarked upon Snipes being unable to take advantage of a “fake news” claim, and this Breonna Taylor reference cuts like a knife.

The subject snowballs from there.

For what it’s worth, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany already spun the tax report (as “inaccurate”) on Monday morning’s Fox and Friends edition. The next press conference should be an interesting one.

Angel Olsen has been on a covers spree over the past couple weeks or so. She took to her bedroom earlier this month to serenade followers with a rendition of George Harrison’s “Beware Of Darkness.” Not long after that, she and composer Emile Mosseri shared their version of Bobby Vinton’s “Mr. Lonely,” recorded for the film Kajillionaire. Now Olsen is back at it again, this time going back even further in time.

Over the weekend, Olsen shared a snippet of her performing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” an often-sung 1938 track that has been covered by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Mildred Bailey, and many others.

Sharing a dimly lit, black-and-white, 36-second video, Olsen wrote, “Working on some covers, some expected, some not. This one’s been close to the heart lately.” She then went on to share some background about the track: “Original music by Sammy Fain and lyrics by Irving Kahal. Published in 1938, it was inserted into the Broadway musical Right This Way, which closed after fifteen performances. Later made famous by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and my favorite jazz/ swing/ blues singer Mildred Bailey.”

Meanwhile, as Stereogum notes, Olsen also recently performed for La Blogothèque series of Take Away shows, performing “Waving, Smiling” on the street with her acoustic guitar.

Watch Olsen’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” cover above and her “Waving, Smiling” performance below.

Atlanta rapper Jeezy is going from “Soul Survivor” to having his own talk show on Fox Soul this autumn, looking to “bridge the gap” between “front-porch conversations” and “real-life situations.” The rapper announced the upcoming show in Billboard today, his 43rd birthday. The show is called Worth a Conversation With Jay “Jeezy” Jenkins and is set to premiere on the Fox Soul app and website October 14 at 10 pm ET. It will air weekly and include topics that affect Black Americans from politics to sports and entertainment.

Jeezy told Billboard, “It has been my passion and my drive to inspire, motivate and educate my culture. Every song I’ve ever written, every word I’ve uttered came from a real place and this is no different. I will talk about issues that directly affect my culture and its people. From the front-porch conversations to real-life situations, Worth a Conversation is bridging the gap. I’m excited to be a part of the FOX Soul family and can’t wait to introduce you to Jay ‘Jeezy’ Jenkins.”

Speaking of hosting talk shows, Jeezy also proposed to his girlfriend, Jeannie Mai of The Real, recently, with the couple announcing the development earlier in the quarantine. He also announced his “retirement” from rap after his next Thug Motivation album — then put out a surprise EP, Twenty/20 Pyrex Vision, in March this year.

Fox Soul is available on the web, Apple TV, Fox Now, Roku, YouTube, and more.

Earlier this year, when Atlanta rapper Lil Baby released “The Bigger Picture” as a response to the civil unrest that had swept the nation, he inadvertently became a focal point of the protests as the song turned into an unofficial anthem of the movement. However, in a new profile in GQ, the My Turn rapper explains that he never wanted to be a leader and why he’s since stayed out of politics.

After planning to work with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms and having a conversation with district attorney hopeful Paul Howard misidentified as an endorsement, Baby decided his energy was best spent elsewhere. “The more I’m seeing what’s up with all that sh*t, the more I’m like, ‘Let me back up off politics,’” he says. “I don’t want to be no Malcolm X or Martin Luther [King].… I stuck my nose in it. I’m good on that.”

He says his intention in speaking with Howard was geared more towards trying to change the would-be D.A.’s outlook. “If I can sit at a table and really talk to you like I’m human, versus the politics and you in that courtroom, you really might come to reality versus you sending n****s goddamn down the road for 500 years,” he says. However, he says he never endorsed the candidate, even though Howard announced his endorsement on social media. “Paul Howard sent me to prison,” he clarifies.

Meanwhile, Lil Baby hasn’t been completely discouraged from civics; the profile notes that he’s investing in a local redevelopment project in the hopes of bringing opportunities to his hometown.

Read the full profile on Lil Baby here.

It’s been a bad year for almost everyone, but not Joaquin Phoenix.

The actor won his first Academy Award for his performance in Joker in February, and he and his fiancée, fellow Oscar nominee Rooney Mara, also welcomed a baby boy into the world. The announcement was made by Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, who worked with Phoenix on the documentary Gunda, at the 2020 Zurich Film Festival. “He just got a baby by the way,” the director said on Sunday. “A beautiful son called River.”

River is named after Joaquin’s brother, who died of a drug overdose in 1993 at 23 years old. He was also a talented actor, appearing in critically acclaimed hits like Stand by Me, My Own Private Idaho, and Running on Empty, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination; River also played young Indiana in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

“And through my brother and his understanding and appreciation of that kind of acting I think it just awakened something in me and I suddenly could see it through his eyes,” Joaquin told Anderson Cooper earlier this year. He also quoted one of River’s lyrics during his Oscar acceptance speech: “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” No wonder people are getting emotional about Joaquin and Rooney baby’s name.

(Via the Guardian)

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw Travis Scott link up with a strong pair of collaborators and a slew of albums from indie favorites. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Travis Scott — “Franchise” Feat. Young Thug and MIA

People learned what the inside of Michael Jordan’s house looks like during the Last Dance documentary series, and now Travis Scott has given us another look at it. He secured the Illinois mansion as the shooting location for his latest video: “Franchise,” a fresh collaboration featuring Young Thug and MIA.

Sufjan Stevens — The Ascension

Sufjan Stevens has kept busy since his 2015 album Carrie & Lowell, but ultimately, the following years didn’t bring an honest-to-goodness Sufjan Stevens album. That changed in 2020, though, as he just dropped The Ascension, which stylistically doesn’t have as much in common with its predecessor as it does 2010’s electronic-leaning effort The Age Of Adz.

Fleet Foxes — Shore

Robin Pecknold told Uproxx why Fleet Foxes decided to surprise-release their new album, saying, “It just feels like a good moment to try a no BS ‘here you go’ vibe. I feel sick of reading the news a little bit, and I’m keeping up with what’s going on, but it’s not the least exhausting part of my day. So I didn’t want to feel like I was trying to garner attention over a three-month album cycle. Especially when the album was ready… and it’s not really a winter album. It’s kind of a summer-to-fall album, and I would like to capture that moment of transition.”

Swae Lee — “Dance Like No One’s Watching”

Swae Lee has dropped some singles to promote his next album, and he did so again last week with “Dance Like No One’s Watching.” On the smooth track, Swae is looking for somebody new to keep his mind off somebody from his past

Spillage Village — Spilligion

Hip-hop supergroups pop up every now and again, but Spillage Village is especially alluring. Consisting of 6lack, Earthgang, JID, Hollywood JB, Jurdan Bryant, and Mereba, the group reconvenes to show their persistently undeniable chemistry, despite the individuals finding success outside of the collective in recent years.

Action Bronson — Music For Dolphins

Action Bronson is about 100 pounds lighter than he was not long ago, and his new album is also pretty lean. Clocking in at 35 minutes, it features more of the throwback-style instrumentals and signature personality that has endeared him to many in music and beyond.

Deftones — Ohms

Chino Moreno recently told Uproxx of the new album, “‘Heavy’ is kind of subjective, you know? The last thing I ever want to do is be quoted saying, ‘This is our heaviest record!’ The first thing that’s going to happen is some dude’s going to be like, ‘No way dude! This is…’ You know what I mean? It’s kind of subjective. But I do feel like it’s got a little more energy. I think that is attributed to everybody being engaged completely. Everybody firing on all cylinders. There’s not one of us individually that was sort of sitting back just going along. Everybody was very present physically and emotionally, ready to work and to put the work in.”

Public Enemy — What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?

Public Enemy have maintained a relatively consistent stream of output since establishing themselves as hip-hop icons in the ’80s, and now they’ve back with another. The longwindedly titled album features a similarly lengthy roster of guests, including Nas, Rapsody, Black Thought, Questlove, YG, George Clinton, Run-DMC, and the surviving Beastie Boys.

Idles — Ultra Mono

Idles recently explained to Uproxx how the album’s title relates to the band’s mantra while they recorded it, saying, “It set the path forward for the creative process. I think we work so much better when things get narrowed down. If we know we’re working toward a title, if we know we’re working toward these strict concepts, then anything we do, we can go, ‘Is this ultra mono?’”

Polo G — “Epidemic”

The young rapper could have packed it in and called it good for 2020, since he already dropped The Goat, his second album and highest charting thanks to its No. 2 peak. Instead, he returned with a new non-album single, “Epidemic,” which might not be the epidemic you’re thinking of.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The Fargo Five is Uproxx’s weekly collection of thoughts, observations, and goofball screencaps from each new episode the FX limited series’ fourth season. We do not guarantee that there will be five items every week. There could be four, or six, or a dozen. Who knows? This show doesn’t follow the rules. We shouldn’t have to either.

NOTE: The fourth season debuted with back-to-back episodes, so this edition will be a doubleheader. Do not expect this many words every week. Thank you.

EPISODE 1 — “Welcome to the Alternate Economy” (or, “Doctor Senator Is Neither a Doctor nor a Senator”)

5a. The fourth season of Fargo opened with a 23-minute cold open, largely presented as a history report by narrator Ethelrida Smutny, a smart Kansas City high school student, whose parents — father a white man who continues Fargo’s proud tradition of feckless husbands; mother a Black woman who clearly runs the show — operate the local funeral home, called The King of Tears, because Fargo rarely lets you down in the “naming people or things” department. The narration and the action on-screen lay out the themes of the new season: immigration, race, what it means to be and become American. (“If America is a nation of immigrants then how does one become American.”) It does all of this through a very abbreviated history of fictionalized Kansas City organized crime, featuring child-swapping and double-crosses and the general principle that as groups assimilate into American culture, they are replaced by newer and hungrier groups who have yet to do the same.

The whole thing pulled off a trick that could have flummoxed a lesser show: It laid out the backstory and explained the themes that will dominate the season and introduced most of its main characters — the Smutnys; the Italian crime family, the Faddas; the Black crime family, led by Chris Rock’s Loy Cannon — while skipping along at a fun, quirky pace. It’s nice to have this show back. Noah Hawley is good at this. And huge chunks of the action were set to the instrumentals from “Caravan” by Juan Tizal and Duke Ellington, a song I had always referred to as “The Heist Song” before finally looking it up after this episode because I am an uncultured goon who sits around watching the Ocean’s movies all day.

5b. The most notable result of this child-swapping is the existence of a character named Rabbi Milligan (Ben Whishaw), an Irish-born mobster who was swapped twice as a child — once to the Hebrew gang, who he set up with a double-cross; once to the Italians, who he worked with to triple-cross the Irish father who swapped him twice. The result of it all is, yes, a man named Rabbi Milligan who is a part of the Italian mob. It’s somehow both a lot and exactly enough.

4. The action picks up in earnest with the death of crime boss Donatello Fadda, itself the result of a chain of events that made me so happy to have this show back, and which I will now introduce with this screencap.

Let’s hit the bullet points for maximum efficiency:

• Two cars containing the Faddas were stopped at a school crossing as ominous music built and the action cut quickly from character to character and frantic bits of action, building tension in a classic crime movie way, implying something bad was about to happen
• Children were playing with toy guns and men were standing around reaching into their jackets and, again, it was all getting very stressful, and as this was going on, Fadda the Senior was starting to look ill, sweating and writhing and turning purple as though he was having trouble breathing
• Just when it looked like he might really be dying, we learned that the source of his discomfort was gas, and we learned this because he emitted a four-second Earth-rumbling fart that caused his oldest son, Josto (Jason Schwartzman), to open the window in a desperate attempt to breathe fresh air
• Seconds after this tension was revealed to be a long buildup to the best fart joke since Jeremy Irons in Watchmen, one of the children fired a pellet gun into the father’s neck by accident

This is what I’m talking about. Fargo delights in the okie-doke, the classic menacing setup turned left abruptly and transformed into the stupidest joke you’ve ever seen. It legitimately might be the hardest I’ve laughed in 2020. I’m okay with that.

3. The death of Fadda the Senior created a power vacuum, which Josto and Loy Cannon are both intent on filling. Josto is a blast, a seemingly incompetent and spoiled wannabe tough who is all smirks and posturing. Cannon is a combination of actual tough and smarts, who, with his Number Two, an economist named Doctor Senator who is neither a doctor nor a senator, is in the process of pitching what will become the modern credit industry to white banks in the area, to no avail. There are moments in this pitch that might feel a little too much like a wink at the camera to you (the banker saying their customers won’t want to spend money they don’t have and explaining that banks don’t engage in this kind of predatory behavior) (uh-huh, sure), and I was prepared to agree with that until I realized the snobby banker who was doing the winking at the camera was literally named “Wink.” There are layers here. It’s quite fun to peel them back.

2. I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry. In my excitement to tell you about Wink the Winking Banker, it appears I skipped over at least two important things, which I will go back to bullet points to explain

• The pellet that landed in Fadda the Senior’s neck did not kill him right away, instead resulting in a rush to the nearest hospital, where they were denied access by a stuffy administrator named Dr. Harvard (YES), who tells them he doesn’t serve “their kind” and sends them to the public hospital
• His nurse as the public hospital, Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), a Minnesota-nice woman who is fond of big words — she likes to be precise to avoid “instances of misreckoning” — and doing drugs with the children of her patients and, it appears, killing those patients with injections of unprescribed medicine before stealing their jewelry

Jessie Buckley appears to be having way too much fun with this, dropping her “donchaknows” in a Minnesota accent heavier than a Minnesota snowstorm. It’s a blast, and kind of scary, like the best parts of Fargo usually are.

1. Speaking of the best parts of Fargo, it says a lot about the show that a man named Doctor Senator does not have the best name of the season so far. Look at this collection of Cannon gang members that Cannon whistled to assemble early on. There’s a Mars Freeman, and an Opal Rackley, and a… wait a second.

Computer… enhance. I think that said…

COMPUTER. ENHANCE.

BANJO RIGHTWAY.

Welcome back, Fargo. I missed you very much.

EPISODE 2 — ” The Land of Taking and Killing” (or, “Enter Gaetano Fadda, My Menacing, Theatrical, Eye-Bulging Prince”)

5. There is really quite a lot to get to from the second episode. There is murder and attempted murder and a jailbreak and a hostile takeover of a slaughterhouse. I promise I will get to all of that. But now, right now, in this moment, I must speak about Gaetano Fadda, Josto’s younger brother, back from Italy with Il Duce’s teeth in his pocket, with the energy of an ornery rhinoceros and the aggressive theatricality of a silent film star. He is doing so much — exaggerated movements, scrunching his face into various shapes and sizes, staring with such intensity at everyone and everything that it looks like his bulging eyes might shoot out of his head and into his adversaries — and I adore every part of it. He’s going to be a problem for everyone, starting with the older brother who he sees as weak and extending to the Cannon organization he intends to snuff out. This is all still in the very early going but I don’t think I’m out of line in any way when I tell you that Gaetano Fadda is my favorite character in this season and maybe my favorite character of this entire year. He’s like a cross between a Fargo villain and a Justified villain. This is very high praise, and very interesting when you consider Point Number One at the bottom of this page.

4. Gaetano Fadda was not the only new character introduced in this episode. We also met:

• Two fugitives, one the aunt of young Ethelrida and the other a foul-mouthed pistol-pulling Native American named Swanee Capps, who escape prison in the opening and show up at the Smutnys door in stolen clothes, with intentions of freeing the family from a debt to the Cannon organization and robbing banks to do so
• Odis Weff, a local lawman on the Fadda payroll who a) appears to be suffering from a very pronounced case of OCD, and b) is played by Jack Huston, who is back in a prestige period drama after starring in Boardwalk Empire, a show led by Steve Buscemi, who also appeared in the original film version of Fargo, which has nothing to do with anything beyond me just wanting to point out the connection

There is another new character we meet at the end of the episode. I’m teasing Point Number One again. I’m excited.

3a. The big piece of action in this episode was the Cannon organization making a move on the Fadda’s slaughterhouse, using the claim that Fadda the Senior promised it to them in a secret pre-death negotiation. There’s some great dialogue flowing all around this. Loy Cannon and Doctor Senator discussed the need for the move (or lack thereof) with comparisons to lions in the wild versus lions in cages versus lions mounted on a trophy hunter’s wall. Doctor Senator and my sweet boy Gaetano had a stand-off in which the latter breathed as loudly through his nose as Tony Soprano and announced, proudly, “In the land of taking and killing, Gaetano is king,” and the former retorts “Well be back. Because y’all just got here yesterday, but we’re part of this land, like the wind and the dirt.” It goes back to the themes introduced in Ethelrida’s opening from the first episode, about who is American in a nation of immigrants and how one transitions from one category to the other.

Also, in a somewhat related piece of business, before the slaughterhouse coup, Cannon went to the Fadda house for a brief swap-back of children (each family is raising the other’s youngest, as a way to encourage peace) and told Josto that they should sit down sometime to “hash out the rumpus” in the aftermath of Papa Fadda’s death. I wrote down this phrase when I saw the screener a few weeks ago and I have been itching to use it ever since. Turns out I don’t have many rumpuses in need of hashing out. This has been devastating. Someone, please, come to me with a rumpus to hash out. I must hash out a rumpus. I had no idea I needed this until a couple weeks ago and now it’s the only thing in the world that I want. Let me be a rumpus hasher. I’ll hash out all the rumpuses.

3b. On the subject of beautiful turns of phrase, Josto was accosted by his pushy politician future father-in-law at his own father’s funeral and responded by telling the mayor-dreaming man to “go fuck a state park,” which is as confusing as it is enjoyable. I do not even know how one begins to do that. I am kind of fascinated by it, though. Is… is a geyser involved? No. No. I don’t want to know. I want to let this mystery be.

2a. The most consequential mob-related event of the episode that did not involve a slaughterhouse takeover was probably the attempted murder of Dr. Harvard. Josto called for the hit, which failed and resulted only in the death of the wealthy woman the doctor was attempting to pump for money. Josto is furious about all of it for many reasons (revenge, embarrassment, etc.) and Gaetano’s eyes bulged even more as they discussed it, which I didn’t know was possible. This will be a thing.

2b. The most consequential event of the episode that didn’t involve any of that was Oraetta getting fired from her job in the act of trying to kill another patient, which she somehow spun into two months of severance and a glowing written recommendation through a string of verbal loop-de-doos aimed at a hapless administrator, including, at one point, the phrase “I thought this was America.” It was a great bit of monologuing on a show filled with monologues. And the direct result of her getting fired appeared to be her having more time on her hands to work on her “special projects,” which for now includes getting close to fellow Sagittarius Ethelrida through offers of cleaning work and French music and also involves delivering pies laced with stomach-churning chemicals. Oraetta terrifies me. There’s something about a tiny evil person who smiles all the time that is even scarier than a huge rage-filled monster like Gaetano. It’s why I would turn and flee as fast as I could if I ever saw Christoph Waltz on the street. Can’t be too careful.

1. The episode closed with Oraetta leaving the pie on the Smutneys doorstep and a long slow camera movement toward a car parked in the dark on the street, raising the all-important question of “Who is in that car?” Well, ladies and gentlemen, it brings me great pleasure to report that the car contained a group of lawmen led by a Stetson-clad Timothy Olyphant — yes, I shouted “RAYLAN” when I saw this; yes, I miss Justified — who proceeded to kick in the Smutney’s door as the screen cut to black and the credits started rolling.

This is how you do a cliffhanger. All shows should do cliffhangers like this. Like, specifically like this, with a Stetson-clad Timothy Olyphant kicking in a door. Even This Is Us. It couldn’t hurt.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ is ambitious and astounding and will undoubtedly blow your expectations away. Created by Misha Green, who’s working with Matt Ruff’s 1950s-set dark-fantasy novel as source material, the show counts horror visionary Jordan Peele and sci-fi maestro J.J. Abrams as executive producers. The show is full of literary and musical references, along with monsters, both in-your-face and figurative; we’ll discuss the resulting symbolism on a weekly basis.

Lovecraft Country is starting to feel increasingly anthology-esque, with the episodes so far diving into monster, cult, haunted house, Indiana Jones-esque, and body-horror entries, along with the show departing from Chicago setting last week to show viewers what happened to Army Atticus in South Korea. This week, the show goes to… space? Yes, of course. I’d be surprised if not for two things: (1) This show’s been bonkers from the beginning; (2) Everyone from Tom Cruise to Vin Diesel to Kal Penn wants to make movies in the cosmos, so I don’t see why Lovecraft Country can’t journey across time and space before the real deal happens with those blockbuster-type films.

This move makes the show even more audacious than I gathered in my review of the first five episodes. And all of the gutsiness and creativity and tone-hopping and genre-mixing still comes back to reinforcing the larger message: Black history and horror are often interchangeable terms.

This week’s episode, “I Am,” integrated the effects of the Tulsa Race Massacre (which reinforced how this show’s a good followup to Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen), but most prominently, Hippolyta took a multi-dimensional voyage to discover herself (which yielded truths about how she’s been “shrinking” herself to suit how society sees her as a Black woman). We also learned a lot about ongoing Chicago events. As far as literal monsters go this week, that might have to do with Leti. We’ll get there soon.

As mentioned, the bulk of the episode involves Hippolyta’s road-trip-cosmic-journey, which somehow ended up involving Aunjanue Ellis executing fight choreography as an Amazon warrior. What she meant to do was to find out what really happened to George and unravel the mysteries of Hiram’s orrery, and all of a sudden, a portal opened up (gotta be careful about those portals, man). Before all hell broke loose, we did get a nice cameo from none other than the legendary Bessie Springfield, the “Motorcycle Queen of Miami” and first Black woman to ride solo across the U.S.

Hippolyta found evidence of George’s presence in the Ardham Lodge rubble, and then things got weird at an abandoned observatory, and my god, there’s a ton of exposition in this episode. Perhaps that’s the one aspect of Lovecraft Country that actually does feel overdone at times. Long story short: Hippolyta got sucked into that portal and landed on another planet, where she awakened with alien-tech implants. She was not sure if she traveled in time or is actually not on Earth anymore, but a giant “robot” with a human head informs her that she’s not a prisoner. And that led to a whirlwind trip for Hippolyta to explore different lifetimes as time coordinates whiz across the screen.

First stop: Paris, where Hippolyta was starstruck to find herself onstage with Josephine Baker. (This is the same face I’ll be making whenever we can go to concerts again.)

Damn, this show is layering those historical references on thick. Baker’s much more than a Jazz Age dancer, singer, and icon — she’s a symbol of Black female empowerment. In the 1920s, she ditched the U.S. for Paris, where she flourished (not only as an entertainer but as a Black woman no longer tied down by racism or the patriarchy). She later became a World War II spy against the Nazis for France and returned to the U.S. to become an NAACP activist. I’m pleased to also report that Hippolyta learned the dance moves and connected with Josephine. Their conversations were telling.

“All those years I thought I had everything I ever wanted, only to come here and discover that all I ever was was the exact kind of negro woman white folks wanted me to be,” Hippolyta told Josephine. “I feel like they just found a smart way to lynch me without me noticing the noose.”

Hippolyta’s next destination had everything to do with the name “Hippolyta,” who was queen of the Amazons in classical Greek mythology.

This whole sequence was flat-out wild with Hippolyta training as an Amazon warrior, rising to general status, and leading a battle against Confederate soldiers while Mother’s Finest’s “Fire” blazes on the soundtrack. (Seriously, it’s invigorating.) We saw blood spatter all over the camera lens and a beheading and a resounding victory speech from Hippolyta while enemy reinforcements lurked in the background, proving that the fight’s ongoing. Bless HBO for lighting this scene up so much better than the Battle Of Winterfell because it never hurts to see racists lose their sh*t in broad daylight.

From there, we saw Hippolyta come full circle with George as she revisited him (in a variation on their first scene of the series) in bed. He listened to what she had to say and apologized for helping shrink her down as a person. It feels like semi-closure. God only knows what this show has in mind for Hippolyta next.

Loose Ends:

– What of the Christina/William/Ruby triangular mess?

Despite the many social media reactions I saw (last week) that celebrated how Christina and Ruby are “a couple,” I’m not feeling so great about this “love triangle,” and Ruby appeared to agree, at least in the moment. She thought she was sleeping with William, you know? And there was Christina, inside of William’s skin, which Ruby had no idea was the case, so she never consented to have sex with Christina. It’s… a problem. Ruby left the house, although who knows how long that will last.

We did receive confirmation that, yep, William is dead, and Captain Lancaster killed him. Christina’s been hooking up his blood (and Dell’s) for her skin-crawling potions, and she’s making all kinds of noises about wanting to use the Book of Names for “so many other things,” which may or may not include romancing Ruby. Again, Christina’s motives are impossible to decipher, although Tic has made it clear that he believes she’s going to follow in Titus’ footsteps and use spells to wipe out Black America.

– Leti’s warning, the Book of Names, and the Tulsa Massacre

Before Tic showed up while cops were apprehending Hippolyta, he and Leti tried to track down the Book of Names after they have the same dream about Hanna (who was carrying the book) at the Ardham Manor. Sooo, magic must be in Tic’s family, and he visits a maternal family friend in St. Louis but learns that that book (if it existed) probably burned in the Tulsa Massacre. There’s a little interlude where he leafs through a photo album and notices that his birthmark matches one on his cousin’s arm, but Leti’s phone call interrupts that moment. Of course, Ruby heard the whole Tic-Leti exchange, which (I suspect) means that she’ll pass that information to Christina. Oh, and it looks like Leti’s pregnant, so I have to wonder… is she carrying an alien or monster? We’ll see!

– Hey, Atticus took a journey, too

Lots of developments for Tic this week, including a nasty exchange between himself and Montrose, who was engaging in a lover’s quarrel with Sammy when Tic and Leti showed up. That confrontation wasn’t handled well on either side (with Tic letting a gay slur fly before venting to Leti about how Montrose physically abused him). And while attempting to rescue Hippolyta, Tic slipped into his own portal. We’re not sure where he went yet, but he did return with a keepsake.

His re-entry feels super relevant because of the book he’s clutching. For a split second, one would assume that he unearthed the Book of Names, but it’s a copy of a book called Lovecraft Country. This also could have been viewed as a meta-reference to the show’s title, but the book’s not authored by Matt Ruff, who wrote the novel that acts as this show’s primary source material. Instead, George Freeman wrote what looks like a pulp novel called Lovecraft Country. Atticus nabs it and what looks like Hippolyta’s notebook, and from there, he bolts into what I assume is next week’s episode.

HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ airs Sundays at 9:00pm EST.