Atlanta wants to barter for the one thing that can't be traded
Season 3, Episodes 5 & 6: "Cancer Attack" & "White Fashion"
So this article is quite late, isn’t it? If you aren’t a dedicated Sam Layton fan, (get the hell out) you may have missed my little “I’m not Ozarking Atlanta, guys” note at the end of my Better Call Saul article. (Good thing, too—Ozark’s finale was shit!) And I am a man of my word—mostly—I will be sticking with Atlanta, and Ozark will be left to rot in the ground, in the name of the Justified, the Moral Orel, and the Holy How To with John Wilson. (I’m in high school and it’s AP season, alright?) My point in saying all this is not just to explain where this damn thing has been for the past two and a half weeks, (and where Barry and Better Call Saul are) but to also illustrate one important thing: that I’ve been thinking a lot about season three of Atlanta, because I’ve had time to do so.
As I’ve been shopping around the internet, (as I tend to do) I’ve been noticing something funny going on with the Atlanta discourse. It’s split. Not just on “The Big Payback”, either—the entire season. The one episode that people agree was fantastic is “Three Slaps”, and while some like some episodes more than others, there haven’t been any that have come anywhere close to a rating of nine or higher—which is unusual. I’ve seen people complaining about the season’s structure, how the characters will pop in and out of countries in thirty minute intervals, and even that pace is broken up by the occasional dream episode to pontificate on the nature of race and the way we create it in America. What made seasons one and two of Atlanta so good was the way each episode felt truly connected despite most being a bit floaty and far apart.
So, being that “White Fashion” may be the messiest and least effective episode the season has put out so far, I decided to mull it over for a while and think about why this is, and if this can be attributed to the season as a whole. The most significant problem I feel that this season has suffered from is its pacing between the episodes. The episodes themselves are entertaining at worst and absolutely outstanding at best, but, like the season opener and Robbin’ Season, there’s no indication of passage of time for the good majority of them. There could have been a week between “Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town” and “The Old Man and the Tree”. There could have been a month. But beyond that is just how disconnected the main cast episodes feel from each other. The dream episodes are obviously meant to be disconnected from each other, but aside from references to other things that happened, the other four episodes in the season feel incredibly separate from each other—very unlike the first two seasons.
And “White Fashion” continues this trend by being one of the most disjointed episodes the show has ever made, while “Cancer Attack” is an incredibly tight and impactful narrative that is easily my favorite non-dream episode of the season so far. The premise is simple enough—the boys are doing a show out in Copenhagen, Al’s phone gets nicked during his set, and the only suspects are a pre-teen fan with cancer and some twitchy guy that may or may not be a ghost, or something like that. Classic Atlanta. But what makes “Cancer Attack” so great is how it plays into the theme of “Al and Earn losing their souls,” but not in the way you’d expect. “Cancer Attack” is not about Al selling his soul. It’s about Al getting it stolen.
The first half of the episode is pretty damn funny, of course, from “I’m the white Liam Neeson, bruv,” to the absolutely legendary Darius dance, to what is easily my favorite joke of the episode—Earn, trying to figure out if the cancer kid took Al’s phone, hesitating for a moment before lamely trying to pat the bed-ridden child down and getting booed out of the room instantly. But it’s the second half, where Al sits down with the maybe-kind-of-ghost Wiley, that is the emotional core of this episode, where Al confesses that he hasn’t written a song in seven months, and the only copy of his first song in that time is on his phone.
Brian Tyree Henry obviously sells this scene perfectly. He continues to give the best performance on this show in this incredibly human scene where he bears everything that he is to the weird kid who he is sure took his phone. He reveals that he raps because it makes him money and that he was never really into it to begin with, but while standing on a dock outside the venue, (there has to be some sort of connection to E there, right?) he felt a true moment of inspiration. If he doesn’t find his phone, he’s never going to get that moment back, and he’s never going to be a real musician. And then, an even more powerful performance, Wiley whips out a guitar and plays a song of his own, and the look in Henry’s eyes as absolutely stunning. Not only is the song pretty damn good, but the audience can see how quietly this breaks Al down—the knowledge that this kid has what he almost did.
So the group leaves, but not before the reveal of who took the phone—it was Socks, the miscreant who is tagging along with them after he latched onto Darius at the house party. Just as how he took advantage of a relatively tame but still offensive remark then, he takes advantage of Al’s vulnerability here and tosses the phone in the trash when out of sight. It’s this scene that makes me question whether or not Socks is even real—whether or not he’s just a white ghost, there to leech off non whites in their most vulnerable moments. Regardless, it ends with them all on the tour bus as Al tries to forget what’s happened to him with some weed, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? His passion, in his eyes, may as well be gone for good.
I loved the main storyline in “White Fashion” so much because it felt like it was trying to tell Al that he could hold on to his soul and identity. After a fashion brand releases a rather disconcerting jacket, (“CENTRAL PARK 5” is on one side and a cartoon raccoon is on the other) they need to bring in a black artist for damage control. Al is more than happy to do it, despite Earn warning him that “this feels like an Uncle Tom photo op.” “Why’re we doing this?” he asks Al as he gets dressed for the event. “You’re not worried about what the streets think?” “Fuck the streets, man.” Al snaps back, and it’s a surprising moment—Al has never been the most interested in any sort of social justice, let alone using his platform in regards to it, but he’s never shown any sort of contempt either.
You’d think that, in an episode about performative activism, Al would only lean harder into this when he met the committee of fellow black “activists,” (along with one guy that he thinks may be white) but it actually has the opposite effect. Led by Khalil, a man who hasn’t “paid for a meal in seventy-three police shootings,” they sit around in a big room and talk about how they can profit off of the situation they’re in. It harkens back to the conversation Earn had with Al and the young artist in “Tree” about how black people should run more scams as opposed to less considering their centuries of being scammed, but something about this doesn’t sit right with Al this time. They’re not solely taking advantage of white people—they’re taking advantage of other black people too, of their trust and good will. Instead of going along with it, he shamelessly takes an idea Earn had mentioned to him (and one that he had rejected) and fires up a livestream to talk about it.
It’s an interesting shift from one end to the other, and it’s a testament to how Atlanta is always willing to mess with our expectations for the sake of making a point. This, if anything, shows that Al is most definitely still Al, still someone that cares about something and is willing to try things. But, of course, his idea gets twisted into some weird, faux-abstract commercial that cuts clips from his live as shamelessly as he took Earn’s idea, mixing something that was already inherently bullshit with more bullshit. “You All Lives Mattered my shit!” Al shouts at the committee after the commercial’s airing, but the irony is that he fails to see how he took Earn’s idea—maybe even without realizing it. Khalil offers him a chance to fully join them and get in on their mass scams, but he doesn’t quite fell comfortable with it.
And that was all great, but the problem with this episode are the other two stories, creating an episode with pacing and structure almost as bad as “Nobody Beats the Biebs”—and that’s a hard bar to even get close to. The Darius story, where he wants to get a traditional Nigerian bowl (“it’s as though your taste buds are being scammed by a Nigerian prince”) and goes with a friendly assistant to get it, only for her to become so enraptured with the place that she buys it out and opens her own bastardized food truck. I like the conclusion of this story—she names a bowl after Darius that is rooted in Atlanta instead of Nigeria, quietly indicating to the audience that she sees the culture he was placed in, not the one that he should have been born in.
And I would be honestly really cool with this episode as a whole if that was all it was, but for some reason, “White Fashion” felt the need to fill time with a tertiary plot involving Earn and Van. We got a little bit of Van in “Cancer Attack” via a thumbs up in response to the continuous texts Earn has been sending regarding her whereabouts. (In an interesting detail, he almost sends a text, then edits it to look more professional.) The sequences feel disconnected not only in the context of the episode, but in the context of the season. They do end up spending the night together, and that’s cool—but with Van being gone from the past two main cast episodes, I found it really hard to get into and stay interested in. Above all else, it’s hurt by the fact that we don’t know how long it’s been between Robbin’ Season and season three.
But while “White Fashion” feels ultimately sluggish, I still have to praise “Cancer Attack” for feeling tight and well-comprised. These two episodes of Atlanta aren’t bad companion pieces by any stretch of the imagination—they have similar ideas about Al’s character, and they’re both quite funny—it’s just a little disconcerting to see how far some important aspects seem to be getting shoved to the side.
“Cancer Attack”: 9/10 (A-)
“White Fashion”: 7/10 (B)
Earn did NOT start “Cancer Attack” by waking up, guys. The dream is dead. I would almost be willing to say him waking up at the end of “White Fashion” is actually where “The Big Payback” comes in, due to the image of the elite activist group with the two white waiters in the background, but Earn would have no way of knowing about that yet considering he spent the night with Van.
I do like how Wiley started deconstructing Earn’s feelings on his race. It was both very sad and almost funny.
Alright, enough with the “FAKE” shirt. We get it.
Another very Tati shot in the opening of “Cancer Attack”.
Fisayo Akinade did a great job as Khalil. Him immediately switching from the stereotypical “black man arguing” voice to his usual cadence as soon as he and Al were out of sight was brilliant.
They mentioned the Black Panther sequel again. There’s something significant about that, right?
Darius wanted the CENTRAL PARK 5 jersey anyway.
“Gracias.” -Al, to a French assistant
“Get this girl a cigarette, she’s freezing.”
“What, you want it now?” “Yes?”
“…what the hell is wrong with you?”
“After this, is racism over?” “Ummm...fuck no.”
“I think we’ll find out if we just go to this one place on the map–” “We’re not gonna do the map.” “I know.”
“It don’t sound right. It don’t sound right when he say it.”