Atlanta's most abstract, complex episode to date asks a question with no perfect answer
Season 3, Episode 4: "The Big Payback"
The “dream episode” is one of those things where you can never anticipate how someone is going to react when you bring it up. You have those who think it can be a masterful way to communicate a story of the mind, and you have those whose opinion amounts to “if nothing was real, what about it mattered?” Dependent on context, I fall somewhere around the middle. If a dream episode can be clever and meaningful in its presentation, I’ll probably like it, and if the context itself probably doesn’t matter. When you think of a dream episode, you probably think of numerous sequences from The Sopranos, but that is a show designed to make those scenes be intrinsic to the plot.
What I think of when I think “dream episode” is Community’s “Advanced Introduction to Finality”, the finale of its fourth season. Not only does this comparison feel relevant because of a certain cast member, but because I feel it exists to establish the very idea a dream episode is built on. Joel McHale’s character retreats into his mind because he feels as though a better version of his reality needs to exist, and as such, he makes it. The purpose of a dream episode (at least most of the time) is to create a new vision of an already existing reality, whether that be for better or for worse, and say something with it. By throwing away the rules of reality, the dream episode can stay true to its show’s central theme while getting to explore a new aspect of a character’s wants and desires.
I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that I fucking hate “Advanced Introduction to Finality”. I find it to be unfunny and cheap and the reveal that “Jeff was actually just imagining it all!” is infuriating in the context of a show that had spent three seasons proving it was above that. If I was watching Community at the time, I absolutely would have quit. (And missed the best episode of the show, “Cooperative Polygraphy”—do NOT let the sheep psyop you into thinking it’s the timeline one!) My point in bringing it up was not just to show that I watch more than, like, five shows, but also to illustrate that “The Big Payback” is going to cement itself as my new standard for dream episodes because, aside from one thing, this is a perfect episode of television. I can’t perfectly remember the last time TV challenged me to think so deeply about what I was watching, the last time art in general forced me to engage with the world it was presenting. Is this my favorite episode of Atlanta? No, “Woods” is still more powerful, and I’d have to see “The Big Payback” for a fourth time before I consider placing it above “Alligator Man”, “Teddy Perkins” or “FUBU”.
But against all odds, “The Big Payback” is here. Like “Finality”, this is already proving to be a divisive episode amongst the fanbase, standing as the lowest rated episode of the series on IMDb with a 6.8 that has been dipping up and down by tenth points every other hour at the time of writing. Whereas with my previous two ventures into Atlanta’s third season had me avoiding all public consensus that I could until they were written, I spent my first day with “The Big Payback” reading as much as I could, trying to balance the praise with the criticism. Some reviews I wholeheartedly agreed with, some I found myself at least understanding where they were coming from, and I came away with the conclusion that I should not bother with IMDb user reviews—something I should have already known. “The Big Payback”, from what I can tell, is divisive because there’s a lot of confusion over what it actually is. Is it satirical? (Of course.) Is it a guide on how reparations should actually play out? (Of course not.) What is this episode trying to be? What is it trying to say?
Believe it or not, “The Big Payback” is about Earn. No, not Earnest the fisherman, (he reveals in this episode that he prefers to be called “E”) Earnest Marks, the main character of Atlanta. If you’ve seen this episode, you probably asked yourself something like “why is he talking about dream episodes for three paragraphs straight?”, and I can’t say I blame you for asking that—but consider this. What other episode this season featured the return of the Robbin’ Season-season three blend of a color palette, a title card presented in all lowercase over a black screen, Atlanta, and a reference to modern slavery? “Three Slaps”, the season’s premiere, was revealed to be two stories unfolding in Earn’s subconscious mind. And just like how “Three Slaps” touched on the very real story of the Hart family, “The Big Payback” is about a concept that has been a question for decades—reparations for America’s history of black enslavement. Despite the fact that this episode does not end with Earn awakening somewhere in Europe, the signs are all there, and it’s a credit to the trust that Glover, Murai, and writer Francesca Sloane (in her first series writing credit!) put in us that we’re left to figure it out for ourselves.
It opens with Starbucks. Marshall Johnson, a neat-looking guy with his earbuds in, is waiting to pay while the white barista tries to get a black customer to get off the phone and order. As he waits, he absentmindedly pockets a pack of cookies to be paid for when he gets to the register. After a moment of confusion between himself, the barista, and the customer, Marshall pays for his drink, accidentally leaving with the cookie pack in the process. When he gets in his car, he realizes his mistake—but he already has the pack on him, so who cares? Smiling a little at his small victory, he drives off, puts a podcast on, and starts to eat. The podcast talks about a group of scientists venturing into a “wild place” where they are “reducing wildlife to wild talk,” how there are “words in there” that allows the scientists to end up “entering that wild space in a very cool way” when understood.
I’ve seen Atlanta be praised for its openings many times, for the way they serve as both episodic and overall commentaries, (think the openings of “Go for Broke” and “Teddy Perkins”) but never have I seen it so stunningly encapsulated than here. Every shot and every interaction and every line is done to perfection. There are so many moments throughout “The Big Payback” that feel so perfectly realized and created that it’s honestly a little beautiful, moments where not a single element of their inception went to waste. From the opening alone, the episode has already started to establish its themes. Marshall is unintentionally reaping the rewards of something he took when he bites into those cookies. It’s a victimless crime, and from now on he’ll surely give his pockets a pat before he steps up to a register, right? But just as the scientists reduce the entirety of lives to mere talk and soon actually become part of them, Marshall soon finds himself living the consequences of his crime that was, in a way, out of his control.
The first ten minutes of the episode play out with little disturbance. Marshall receives news from his daughter that his separated wife may want him back in her life, he goes to work, he has a discussion with his daughter about her recent learnings about race. “Do you see any slaves in our backyard?” he responds when she asks if their family owned slaves. “Mr. Pedro.” Marshall thinks about this for a moment. “No, I pay Mr. Pedro.” He hears that a Tesla investor was sued by a black man over the fact that his ancestors owned the man’s ancestors in the 19th century, and learns at work that his company is going to start laying people off for a similar reason. “Lucky them.” Marshall’s white coworker mutters as she watches their black coworkers talk excitedly amongst themselves. “Not a care in the world.” Marshall doesn’t understand everyone’s worries and why they’re all checking their family trees. This doesn’t seem to involve him, so why is it his concern?
Marshall gets a knock on the door while having dinner at his apartment with his daughter. He opens it and is served with a lawsuit. On the other side is Sheniqua Johnson, a woman whose great-great-grandparents were owned by Marshall’s ancestor for twelve years—and, by her estimate, is owed three million dollars. Marshall is, of course, shocked beyond belief as she steps inside and begins assessing what parts of his residence she likes, streaming everything live to Instagram. “Get out of my house!” Marshall shouts when she pushes her phone into his face. This moment is another that feels so perfectly real—the entire scene has built up tension throughout from the instant Marshall opened the door, and it explodes in a perfectly natural reaction of stress and confusion. The audience is left to wonder what her response will be—will she take pity on him, or will she go through with her justice?—before it comes to a stalemate, with Marshall managing to maneuver her outside while she demands payment, shutting the door in her face. (“And don’t slam my door!” she calls from the other side.)
Not only is this scene fantastic because of its filmmaking and the excellent performance by Justin Bartha, nor because of the subtext in how Sheniqua’s undeterred and dismissive attitude can be likened to a colonizing mindset, as though she’s channeling and taking revenge on the very race she’s trying to receive compensation from. No, it’s because this scene illustrates exactly what this episode is trying to be—it’s a satire on what those who are terrified of reparations think it would be. It paints a picture of the middle-class worker finding his reality pulled out from under him by something he can’t control, even if that something is what the success he finds in life is based in. In this hypothetical, those being sued are the scientists who boil slavery down to something to be mentioned and never acknowledged, but soon find themselves having to get down in the dirt and pay it back. The summary of “The Big Payback” released by FX is “I was legit scared watching this”—who do you think the “I” is?
That’s a bold concept to tackle in thirty-five minutes, but Atlanta rarely ever disappoints, and it certainly doesn’t here. It doesn’t concern itself with every nuance of how this new idea would work, but there are enough allusions and little things to keep it interesting and intriguing. So Marshall goes to work, where he crosses paths with a man sporting an “I OWNED SLAVES.” shirt, the only reparations the family suing him felt he truly needed to pay. On the surface, it’s a good visual gag, especially when the same coworker from earlier muses that the man “got off easy”—but it goes from funny to funny and brilliant when you realize that the shirt’s message is backwards—only readable in a mirror. The alternative to not paying is to be reminded constantly of what gave him his benefits in the first place. It seems as though this punishment would better suit Marshall, who insists multiple times throughout the episode that his Austrian-Hungarian ancestry means his predecessors were also slaves, and by Sheniqua’s logic, he should be able to demand payment from the Europeans. He clearly sees this as an excellent point, but all it does is illustrate how Marshall views slavery and the other black injustices that mark American history—he doesn’t think about them, and when he does, it’s with the same attitude he treated the initial news about the reparations suits with.
This attitude comes to light when Sheniqua turns up to his workplace, megaphone in hand, and demands payment in front of his office. Marshall retreats into the break room, where the only two black workers who came in that day are discussing what they’ll do with their money when they get it. He asks to talk to one of them in private and does his best to ask for help without directly saying “I’m being sued because my family owned slaves,” only to get a genuinely helpful answer. (“I grew up with black women.” “Right, I figured.”) His coworker encourages him to just talk to her, try to negotiate, only to be cut off mid-sentence by a jump cut to Marshall’s white coworkers, who encourage him to fight it. If the black solution is to pay and address the problem directly, it’s the black solution he’s not interested in.
Things, of course, get worse. Instead of taking him back, his wife suggests that they finalize their divorce, and his chances of seeing his daughter are left up in the air. When he expresses shock at the same indifference to his situation that he showed to that of others, she points out that she’s automatically exempt from the anxieties of whiteness due to her Peruvian heritage. (Which, funnily enough, wouldn’t have protected her for long.) “You were white yesterday!” he balks, in reference to the fact that she used a white thumbs-up emoji in a recent text message to him, only to use a black one the next day. He returns home to find that Sheniqua and her family have camped out outside his place, waiting for him, and in an excellent moment of comic absurdity, one of her relatives almost runs down Marshall’s car when he tries to escape.
He retreats to a hotel (where an advertisement for a duo of reparations lawyers is playing on the TV, one black, one white) and finds a cookie on the nightstand, finally coming back around to the opening—but this one is different. Whereas there were multiple light cookies in the Starbucks pack, there’s only one chocolate chip, light mixing with dark, only in Marshall’s hands because of the demolition of his identity. He weeps as he eats it, as though biting into this new, mixed-race world is the final nail in the coffin for him.
So he goes out to the bar to drown his sorrows in alcohol, only to bump into a very familiar fisherman—none other than E, returning from the opening of “Three Slaps” to pontificate more about the nature of being white. I’ll admit it—I was not expecting this character to return, but in the context of what this episode is, it makes sense. With the knowledge that this is Earn’s dream in mind, the recurring character of E seems to serve as a representation of the whiteness I mentioned Earn was seemingly taking on in my review of the previous episode, one that still has ideas about being black and race in general despite the curse he claims he suffers from. It’s worth noting that he chuckles about how he and Marshall are “in the same boat” when he started the season in, you guessed it, a boat. In “Three Slaps”, the boat was the only thing bringing him and Black together, keeping them above the water, but now it’s something that everyone afflicted with the curse is in.
E starts off his monologue with some pretty solid and unsettling points about the way white people view slavery as opposed to black people—how it’s Marshall’s past but Sheniqua’s entire existence, how it is a “cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts us in a way we can’t see”—but then comes the interesting part. The part I’ve seen people voice confusion and displeasure over, and I understand. If I felt “The Big Payback” was presenting itself as a straight story like “Three Slaps”, I would be unnerved by this too: E makes the point that, now that Marshall’s daughter will grow up without him and will need to make her own fortune, unlike Marshall and E, she is in the same position as the descendants of the freed slaves. Now that black and white are essentially trading places, E believes that “the curse has been lifted” and “now we’re free.” He promises that, despite their newfound handicap, “we’re gonna be okay.”
Now, this an insane comparison for multiple reasons and everyone knows it. To equate a financial setback to the utter inhumanity and brutality of America’s past is so ridiculously disingenuous, and to turn it around into a positive for white people is just as crazy. But here’s the thing—they know. Atlanta hasn’t always been perfect, but it’s always seemed like it’s always known what it was doing, and this moment is no exception. This is where the satire doubles, where if you weren’t sure if this was supposed to be making fun of something, you got your answer. Only someone who is scared of the idea of reparations would see it this way, as something that is more about them than the people they’re paying, and only they would turn it into something that is seen as a win for themselves. But why is E, who seemed to be surprisingly well-versed in these ideas, (the fact that he’s a lake ghost aside) making this comparison? Look no further than the moment in “The Old Man and the Tree” where Earn stares intensely at an archaic photo of well-to-do white men receiving a large check while a slave stands, blank-faced, in the background. Earn seems utterly taken by it, possibly the image the inspires this very episode, (and if episode five opens with Earn waking up somewhere, I will be very, VERY pleased with myself) where the white, in every aspect, overtakes the black. As E’s more sensible side fades away and is replaced by borderline delusion, the white that I theorized was taking over Earn in “Tree” starts to infect his dreams. If we see this character one more time, (which I really hope we do, as Tobias Segal has been killing it in this role) would he be spewing more of this rhetoric? Probably.
And so E leaves Marshall to his own devices, and he contemplates the man’s words before opening Sheniqua’s Instagram and watching a video of her with her kids. It’s something human he can relate to—he has a daughter, after all—and as his features soften in a fantastic bit of performance, E lights up a cigarette outside before shooting himself in the head and falling into the pool. (I knew he was going for the pool—I KNEW it—but god, I thought he was just going to jump in!) It’s a small thing, but it illustrates my point above, how E is kind of full of shit here—Black was dragged into the water by force, but despite his recent financial crisis, E has the choice to fall in. He gets to choose whether he dies in the water or not, no matter what. “There’s more where that came from,” a black staff member murmurs as onlookers watch in horror.
If Atlanta was a more predictable show, the restaurant Marshall is shown working at in the episode’s final sequence would have an all-white staff—but as usual, Atlanta will always surprise me. It opens in the moment with a young, Spanish-fluent man taking the bus to work, silently revealing to the audience Marshall’s new place of employment. When he has time, he gives Marshall a little bit of shit for staring off into space, and Marshall fires back in perfect Spanish that he saw the man come in late. They chuckle, fist bump, and part ways, before transitioning into a fantastic long take (Almost forgot to relentlessly praise Murai in this article! Whoops!) that shows the machinations of the restaurant—and the staff are mostly of color, with the white workers being mostly waiters—as though the restaurant is strategically dividing its positions by race to give off the impression that the entire staff is white. Why? Because not a single customer is. As Marshall takes food to an all-black table, the camera zooms out to show us the restaurant is populated with a mixture of races as the clientele, which white is notably absent from.
The detail that makes this scene—and the whole episode, honestly—is the fact that Marshall brings out two plates for three people, and the outlier at the table is visibly pissed, despite the good nature of his companions. Contrast to the kitchen, where everyone gets along, speaks each other’s languages, and works in harmony—despite the fact that one group is clearly on top, it’s the white group that’s happiest in this scene, even if a portion of their reparations now come out of their paychecks. It’s like a happy ending for this scenario where white people are knocked down a peg, still okay just as E predicted, even complete with a triumphant song the imaginer probably heard in that one Jordan Peele movie. Everyone seems happy on bottom, but there’s visible discontent on top.
“The Big Payback” is not a guide to how reparations should happen, or even an imagining of how it would—since when has Atlanta ever been about that?—if anything, it’s about the futility of reparations, as sad as that is. Can human suffering be monetized, as E suggested it could? No. No, it can’t. Even with the payback suggested in the title, the system built centuries ago still exists, and everyone is still living in it. Perhaps I’m overthinking a lot of the points I made in this article (a likely possibility) or maybe this episode connected with me that deeply, but regardless, it’s something I’ll be thinking about for a while. No matter how I feel about dream episodes, this will be one that lives rent free in my head—one where, no matter how you slice it, the reality is less than ideal in the grand scheme of things, because the cookie still crumbles the same way, even in the subconscious mind.
Rating: 10/10 (A+)
So, uh, not to be that guy, but about that “one thing” I mentioned—where did the gun go after E shot himself and very clearly dropped it on the deck?
“You see the blood, and you think somebody else is bleeding.” -E, “Three Slaps”
“I don’t yell ‘fire’ unless I see flames.”