We all know it was going to take a while for the incredible Atlanta, Donald Glover’s masterpiece of African-American life in the form of a comedy, to make its return even before Covid broke the world. Indeed, it’s been nearly four years to the day since we left Paper Boi, Darius and Earn boarding their flight for a European tour and there have been millions – I among them – wondering what has happened to them in the meantime.
It is perhaps inevitable that Glover and fellow showrunner Hiro Murai would build on this anticipation and then begin season 3 with an episode where not only do we not see any of the main characters until the end, but doesn’t even seem to be connected to anything we’ve seen in the past two seasons. However, I’m relatively certain who saw the first episode of last nights two-part premiere - definitely not me – would complain after having seen ‘Three Slaps’, an episode that is just as certain to inspire analysis among TV critics the same way the incredible ‘Teddy Perkins’ did in Season 2. In fact, I’m going to break a rule and actually spend a lot of this review doing just that.
(Note: I’m going to try my hardest to keep this analysis free of as many spoilers as I can because I real think that even people who’ve never seen Atlanta should experience this episode. That said it’s impossible not to give everything way without revealing certain things, so be warned.)
The episode begins on a river where two men, one white, one black are night-fishing. This simple excursion begins to turn dark when the white men mentions almost casually that the river they’re fishing in was damned to flow over an old black town. The discussion turns more surreal about the differences – or not – between white and black, then the white man becomes a zombie, and in…
We’re in a classroom. A middle schooler named Laquarius has just learned that he is going on a class field trip to see Black Panther 2. Everybody starts dancing and he starts dancing on the desk. The teacher calls him to get down, he keeps dancing. Then we’re in the principal’s office and Laquarius’ mother and grandfather have been called in. The teacher and guidance counselor try to explain the situation. The mother doesn’t give a damn, telling them to just give him detention. The guidance counselor goes outside to see his mother ordering him to do various dances and shouts things like: “Do you want them to kill you?” She sees his grandfather slap him. The guidance counselor leads him away saying: “Don’t worry I’m going to get you out of there.”
We actually see Laquarius home and while it looks nice, there is no evidence that his mother is taking good care of him or even seems to love him. Indeed, when family services come for a surprise inspection, she doesn’t even pause before saying: “You snitched”, packs some stuff up, and throws him out of the house.
Laquarius is taken to a ramshackle house where he meets two foster moms. They seem at first to be just very defunct flower children, but it takes less than a minute for the viewer – and Laquarius to see the warning signs. The moms foster three other African-American children and one of them at least starts out being a hippie version of compassionate. The other can’t be bothered to even go through the motions.
And now I will start becoming vague about what happens next, save to say that ‘Three Slaps’ has the feel from beginning to end of something from the pen of David Lynch or Jordan Peele…or if we’re being honest, ‘Teddy Perkins’. I’ll just give one of the most prevalent examples of how truly terrifying this episode is. At one point, things become so bad for Laquarius that he actually runs into the arms of a white cop which everyone – especially the main characters of Atlanta – know never has a happy ending. The interaction doesn’t end in violence, but knowing what you do about where Laquarius is, you actually think that might bring some kind of relief, especially compared to the horrors that follow.
There are some of you who are familiar with the real-life scenario that Glover and Murai are laying out, especially how it ends. At one point, the ‘nicer’ of the two moms breaks down and finds herself asking how things could have come to this point. The question is never answered, but this is a question that fundamentally everybody in the universe in Atlanta already knows the answer to.
There are some that might argue that there is a happy ending to this episode, especially compared to how this scenario played out in real life. Given the last two minutes, I don’t think there is. Which is fundamentally why I think the writers chose to start Season 3 with ‘Three Slaps’. Earn and everyone else no doubt came to Europe hoping they would be able to escape everything that awaits them in America. ‘Three Slaps’ basically tells you, there’s no way of getting away from the world.
After seeing Three Slaps you’ll want a laugh even more than you did before the season premiere, and thankfully the second part is more than willing to deliver it. Earn (Glover) wakes up in Copenhagen in bed with a white woman who doesn’t speak English, sans his underwear and having just learned that Van (Zasie Baetz) has just arrived in Amsterdam. He calls Darius (Lakeith Stansfield, who has done a lot over his summer vacation) who, big surprise is really high. Darius tells him that Alfred is in jail. I should mention that this particular ‘prison’ is just one step above the nicest three star hotels in America and Alfred actually gets his lunch order from a friendly guard before he is ‘released’.
When Earn and Alfred get out of ‘jail’ they find that there is a child in ‘blackface’. When they hear the explanation: “It’s for Sinter Klaus and it’s from coming down the chimney” Earn’s reaction, even though he has no underwear and has a bad cold, is priceless (and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it). We learn that Alfred got into trouble when two prostitutes began fighting over one’s racist term (and he didn’t even get to have sex with either!) and the level of blackface continues to increase until the night of concert when things escalate to a level that I wouldn’t dream of revealing (save to say it has a genuine ‘punch’ line as a payoff).
Darius picks Van up and learns that she’s here because she lost her job and no luggage. They go to a thrift store for her to find a coat and she finds an address in the pocket. Because Darius is there, they go to the address which leads them to a tour bus which gets them to what appears to be a hospice where it is possible Tupac is dying? (At least that’s Darius’ theory, which leads to Van asking: “How high are you?) Van has a very pleasant conversation with the woman who she considers a caregiver. We know that we’re in the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize physician assisted suicide and as the scenes go on we think we know what we’re in for, until in traditional Atlanta style, the writers prove us horribly- and in their way, hysterically - wrong.
What will await us as Paper Boi makes his tour of Europe? What will be the final resolution of the relationship of Van and Earn which never seems to get easier or more complicated? All of these questions make me glad Atlanta’s back, and deeply saddened to know that the fourth and final season will air later this year. (Well, Glover and his fellow writers did have a lot of time to figure out when and how they wanted to end the show, so full ‘marks’ for going out on their own terms.)
Atlanta has won more than its share of awards in its first two seasons – multiple prizes for Glover, including a Golden Globe and an Emmy and the series itself won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy way back in 2017. Yet somehow it has never taken the prize for Best Comedy from the Emmys, always falling behind more ‘traditional series’. (Veep’s victory in 2017 was totally an act of laziness. I really can’t argue over Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s victory in 2018, though I am still a little appalled that ‘Teddy Perkins wasn’t even nominated for Best Comedy Teleplay. There were two other nominees, but still…) Glover and the rest of the cast and creators of Atlanta are going to get two more bites at the apple before the series ends. Ted Lasso may be the current frontrunner, but there are plenty of other contenders already – Only Murders in the Building and the final seasons of Insecure and black-ish are behind us, and still to come the much awaited premiered of Barry which has been gone from the airwaves almost as long as Atlanta has been. But with the first two episodes, Glover and his fellow writers are sticking their flag in the sand. And having seen them, it’s really hard to view any episodes that have already aired as more imaginative or creative than these. Some might argue that Atlanta barely meets the standards of being a comedy, but can anyone argue that it’s any less creative than so many ‘high concept’ comedies these days?
My score: 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment