Atlanta returns with a crazy little dream about black and white faces
Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2: "Three Slaps" & "Sinterklass Is Coming to Town"
You’ve been waiting three years, ten months and fifteen days for the third season of Donald Glover’s Atlanta. (Unless you’re me, because I was in eighth grade doing…something back then. What was I even doing?) Glover is not unaware of this fact. Little slips have been dropped over these past four years—Instagram photos, Twitter flexes, set leaks—and it proves that, if nothing else, Glover knows how to make us wait. Like, Venture Bros. level wait. And this wait is why I think “Three Slaps” and “Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town” were released in a block of two. One was a story for the show, and one was a story for the fans. If released together, everyone comes away happy. I know that I’d certainly feel a little shorted if season three’s opener officially ended with “it was all a dream, kind of” and thirty silent seconds of Earn.
But Atlanta’s audience waited this long because they trust Glover, his brother, Hiro Murai, and the series’ leads. Everyone who was as tantalized by Robbin’ Season as I was knew that the Atlanta team had proven themselves beyond any degree that they needed to—and as such, season three returned last night, and it’s clear that they haven’t come anywhere close to losing their way.
“Sinterklaas” proudly returns us to our main characters, and we’re more than ready to come back to them, even if the story can feel a little roundabout and convoluted at times. Earn is even more Earn than he ever was, Al is still Al, Van is still Van, and yes, Darius is still Darius. We are, however, no longer in Atlanta—we spend the opening of “Sinterklaas” in Copenhagen, and the rest of it in Amsterdam, because Earn, naturally, overslept and got left behind. The first scene is a testament to how well the series can communicate tone without dialogue—Earn wakes up in a Dane’s bed, he stumbles to the bathroom to drain himself, his phone buzzes with several texts from Van, Al, and Darius, (“Just ate a persimmon that tasted like an avocado.”) and he continues to piss before realizing exactly where he is, tripping over himself to get his stuff, and leaving sans belt and underwear.
This episode feels like a lovely blend of seasons one and two, coming back with a brighter color palette and a lighter sense of humor, even if this one of those episodes where someone, you know, dies. And that someone is probably Tupac. Cool. The biggest “return to season one” connection in this episode is its tone, where it just drops its four characters in random places and lets them work it out. We get another Van-Darius adventure, Al in jail for the presumed wrecking of his hotel room, (his cell is higher quality than anything Earn could ever hope to get him) Earn trying to figure out what he’s even supposed to be doing, and blackface. Like, lots of blackface. It’s a Dutch thing, I guess.
Like “The Big Bang” before it, “Sinterklaas” is about getting the audience integrated into Atlanta’s new environment, and I can’t say it doesn’t do a great job with what it shows us. “Zwarte Piet” (or “Black Pete”) is the episode’s main “man, isn’t this really weird?” attraction, the Dutch Sinterklass’ helper that happens to have remarkably dark skin and remarkably red lips. (“Sounds like Santa’s slave, but I respect the rebrand.”) And this character isn’t, like, an old “wow, our culture used to be really racist, but now we’re retiring this aspect” thing—people still do this. And while Atlanta isn’t a perfect mirror of our world, the ease with which the Dutch chauffeur shrugs off Earn and Al’s shocked stares at the blackfaced kid on Sinterklaas’ back is eerily reminiscent of how many cultures will ignore things like this—say, America and (until very, very recently) the Washington Redskins. As usual, one of Atlanta’s greatest strengths is how it can be both surreal and perfectly grounded.
And that strength has never, ever been stronger than in “Three Slaps”, an episode that will be immortalized in Atlanta canon as one of its greatest. When I learned what this episode was based on, I realized I truly had no idea what it was really going to be, and I was both completely right and completely wrong when I actually saw it.
“Three Slaps” is based on the Hart family murders, in which a white lesbian couple adopted six black children and, after almost a decade of covered abuse, piled them all into their car and drove it off a cliff. When I first heard about this and was filled in on the basics, I thought to myself something like “no way they’re doing this.” Then, ever curious, I read more about the incident, and thought to myself something like “no way they’re doing this.” “Fucking” was probably somewhere in there, I don’t know. I don’t think I need to point out that an adaptation of this horrific story would be the darkest, most grotesque thing Atlanta has ever done—and it kind of is, but things are, thankfully, different.
The Glover brothers and Murai’s attention to detail is, of course, as sharp as ever. There are small incidents that take place in this episode that are direct parallels to the real-life Hart case—Devonte Hart stand-in Loquareeous wears a similar hat, sports a sign offering “free hugs” at one point, (“is ‘Hugs’ your father?”) and he tightly embraces a police officer, the image of which becomes a minor sensation. They even got the couple’s haircuts down pretty accurately, matching Sarah Hart with “Amber” and Jen Hart with “Gayle”. There’s even one detail that, had it synced up close enough, I would’ve found beyond sickening and probably too far—Devonte’s body was the only one not found in the wreckage, which may explain why Stephen Glover chose Loquareeous to survive. But the differences exist. The cop hug in “Three Slaps” is not an attempt to escape racism or whatever the Harts thought would be best to spin it as when the picture was taken, it’s just an attempt to escape. And all four of the couple’s children survive the crash, leaving only Amber, Gayle, and their ratty little dog dead.
And that’s really an accurate description of the majority of “Three Slaps”, save for how Loquareeous ended up with Gayle and Amber, the ending, and the vignette opening. This isn’t Atlanta’s most disturbing episode (“Woods”) or its most realistic, (“FUBU”) but it’s Atlanta at its most surreal. Everything feels like it’s really happening, because this is, if you make someone crazy enough, how they will act, but it all feels like something that just isn’t real at all—probably because the last thirty seconds of this episode is Earn waking in the bedroom that starts off “Sinterklaas”. “Three Slaps” is structured as a dream within a dream, which, granted, seems like an annoying idea for an episode, especially one of a show that (amongst many other things) is often heralded for its writing. But like I said, we’ve learned to trust whatever Atlanta has planned, and I certainly feel as though my trust was rewarded.
It opens on an inky lake, a smooth country song playing on a portable radio as two buddies—one white, one black—go fishing and shoot the shit. These men do not have names. Their IMDb credits have them listed as merely “Black” and “White”. These are not people. They are figments of subconscious imagination. Black tells White a story about how he nearly drowned in the lake—Lake Lanier, a real Atlantan body of water, where everything White claims as historical fact is actually true—and White begins to muse on the nature of his very existence, intrinsically linked with his name. “The thing about being white is,” he explains to Black, “it blinds you.” The natural light of the moon and the artificial light of the bridge starts to dim, and White hides his face from the camera. The music fades as he starts to talk about how he cannot truly see Black’s true ideas and problems, and how he is his own curse. “We’re cursed too,” he rasps, his face bone white, his eye sockets empty and sealed with skin. Hands emerge and drag Black down. He couldn’t have seen them coming—they’re the same color as the water.
Robbin’ Season opened in a similar way with “Alligator Man”, something I talked at length about in my rankings article, and while the opening of that will always hold a special place in my heart, I won’t deny the mastery of tone and thematics this opener gives us. There’s only one drone shot present, the camera basically trapped on the boat with Black and White. As the scene gets darker and darker, (both visually and tonally) this feeling of entrapment becomes more prominent, to the point where it feels like you already knew the outcome of the scene before it was over. Stephen Glover said that season three was going to be about “the curse of whiteness” during an interview with Variety, and the opening of “Three Slaps” specifies what the curse actually is—the idea that whiteness blinds the people it claims. While rambling about the idea of his identity, White makes the point that race is a made-up concept—either you’re born into being white/you pay enough to get there, or you don’t.
And it’s the curse of whiteness that drives the concept of “Three Slaps”. Before they die, Amber and Gayle pull over to let their dog out and spare him from drowning. Amber is having second thoughts, (“why isn’t anyone stopping us?”) but Gayle is adamant that “we’re doing what needs to be done” by killing themselves and the kids. In their eyes, they’re freeing them from racism and poverty—but they fail to see two things. One, they perpetuate the very racism they seek to save Loquareeous and his foster siblings from by whitewashing them. When Loquareeous is in the household, he’s “Larry” to them. He paints the walls white at their behest, the car they drive in is white, they eat (absolutely disgusting) white-pink chicken that Amber refers to as “fried.” When he works in their garden and bemoans how tired and hungry he is, Amber encourages him to sing, and gives him a rather off-putting example of what to hum instead when he tries to rap to pass time. Amber insists that she’ll “love that [his old life] right out of you.” Before the slaps that send him to Amber and Gayle’s house, Loquareeous’ mother warns him that if he doesn’t use his common sense “these white people, they gonna kill you,” and it’s his common sense that saves him when the couple fails to see the second thing—Loquareeous sneaks their dog back into the car while they talk and uses him to escape for good, the car careening into, you guessed it, Lake Lanier.
And so Loquareeous returns home, fulfilling the “black fairytale” Glover said he wanted season three to be. The hero, in one way or another, vanquished the wicked witches, and his mom is even kind enough to give him some spaghetti for breakfast. As he first sees a news report revealing that Amber and Gayle’s other children survived, left at the rest stop the dog was initially left at, and then watches American Dad while eating his pasta, he hears the floorboards creak, and he turns around. What does Loquareeous see?
And then Earn wakes up. And it’s unclear if this was just an editing choice or his dream, if he was dreaming of a scenario (perhaps inspired by the kid dancing on the desk and getting in trouble for it in “FUBU”—wait, holy shit, that might actually be it) mixed with a real life tragedy or just had a really weird idea that his subconscious mind wanted to show him.
I am pretty certain in my belief that Loquareeous sees Amber and Gayle, their skin unnaturally white and their eyes sealed. They were cursed too, and now they, like White before them, belong to the lake. The filmmaking and sound editing in this scene (the fading sound, the way we don’t see the supernatural until it reveals itself) line up with the opening pretty perfectly. If “Three Slaps” followed the Hart murders closer and killed the other three kids, I wouldn’t be trying to analyze Amber and Gayle’s thought process and instead would just write them off as monsters, (and they still very much are, and, judging by that clipboard in the trash, Gayle killed someone) but the idea that they died for a cause so rooted in delusion makes me wonder just what they really thought they were doing. The curse had made them think their efforts were genuinely noble, and that’s the scariest thing about “Three Slaps”—that they thought they were right.
Atlanta is built on what-ifs. What if Tupac was alive but dying in Amsterdam? What if Justin Bieber was black? What if some off-brand Michael Jackson got tired of his role as a monster? The arms that drag Black into the lake are black too, the souls of those drowned in the Chattahoochee, but they were cursed with white to begin with, weren’t they? “What if you built this system, but you can’t see it?”
Because the three slaps are this—Loquareeous wakes up from his Lake Lanier dream, Earn wakes up from his Loquareeous dream, and we, the audience, wake up after we turn off the TV, left to contemplate this question about the ever-present curse—what if it was white?
“Three Slaps”: 10/10 (A+)
“Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town”: 8/10 (B)
I laughed twice throughout the entirety of “Three Slaps”: when I realized Loquareeous crying while Fortnite dancing was a parody of a viral video, and “These white women are gonna kill us.” “Yeah, we know!”
“Earn, Alfred, Darius and Van revisit a troubled kid 50 years later while in the middle of a successful European tour.” So what the hell was this official “Three Slaps” synopsis? Was this a red herring or something?
Apparently Earn has a conversation in “The Big Bang” about a dream where hands drag him down under a body of water.
I think the fact that Loquareeous’ class was going to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a movie that hasn’t come out yet, is proof that this is definitely Earn’s dream.
Same with the improbability of that perfect shot of Loquareeous and the cop being captured right then, and the cop blatantly saying “I almost shot you!”
Really great detail with how Amber immediately locked the door after Loquareeous stepped far enough into the house.
Also a great detail: Loquareeous’ foster siblings collectively flinch when Gayle slams the phone down.
I hope Glover actually sneezes like that.
Zazie Beetz was really great during the eulogy that prefaced Tupac’s suffocation. I’m really, really glad I have the opportunity to write that sentence and have it make sense.
I know we were in Denmark and not France, but man, that shot of Earn in the airport lobby was very, very Tati.
Yeah, of course Darius would want Van to watch the Foodfight! trailer.
“I cannot with these crazy hos today.” I missed you, Al.
“I will destroy you.” “Okay!”
“I need 300 pieces of fried chicken” “All legs.”
A POST-ARTICLE NOTE:
The black fisherman still has no name, but according to FX’s press notes, the white fisherman is named Earnest. If you don’t understand how insanely important that is, you must think “Earn” is actually Earn’s full name.