Atlanta's final opener considers what happens after it's gone
Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2: "The Most Atlanta" & "The Homeliest Little Horse"
The burden taken on by a final season of television is as immense—if not more so—than the burden taken on by its first. You can’t take back a first impression, but it’s even harder to take back a final one, because then you’re gone. All that’s left to defend you are the people that love you. If you look at Donald Glover’s musical works, minus Camp because it sucks and 3.15.20 because I’m pretty sure it sucks and I couldn’t finish it, (so yeah, half his discography—maybe 3.15.20 has this idea too, but fuck that) the theme of the legacy that comes with fame is strong. Because the Internet is a theoretical parable about what could become of a young, reckless man who rides his clout hard and doesn’t give a shit about anything, while Awaken, My Love! is about Glover himself, and the shift in perspective that comes with having children while still being as famous as someone like him. Legacy feels important to him, but not in lieu of “this sucks” or “this is good”—more so “this is what this was about. This is what I gave to you, and I want you to see what I saw, or what I was hoping you might see.” I don’t feel guilty about discarding half his albums as shit, but I do feel a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that I’m missing something, that there’s something about them that I can’t see.
Four months after its finale, season three of Atlanta is both beloved and maligned, often times by the same people. The episodes that everyone loves are the ones that are easy to understand the appeal of, and the ones that everyone seems to dislike are the most confusing ones with the most rabid, determined, possibly insane defenders. This doesn’t make Glover uncomfortable—“we know you hated them, it’s fine,” he insisted regarding the anthology episodes during a press tour—but at some point, even though this season was likely written before season three premiered, he and the other writers may have realized that their upcoming season was going to be jarring. So what do you do after you drop an incredibly risky and bold season that deviates from the norm you’ve presented? Return to form, but as hard as you fucking can. Don’t let up. It can’t just be Atlanta—it has to be the most Atlanta.
With Atlanta’s two part return, the show is firing on all cylinders with two very different episodes that excel at nearly everything they set out to do. “The Most Atlanta” is an episode straight out of season one, evenly splitting time between the four main characters and frankly doing it better than the show has ever done it. The primary issue I have with episodes like “Nobody Beats the Biebs” and “White Fashion” is the way they handle the three different storylines they take on, and despite the fact that “The Most Atlanta” is a full six minutes shorter than the latter, it interweaves the three to a perfection. Never before in an episode featuring all the characters have I felt like everything was exactly where it needed to be, until now. Meanwhile, “The Homeliest Little Horse” is more attuned to a character study episode from Robbin’ Season like “Woods” or “Helen”, and is as rich of a look into the most underdeveloped main character as we’ve ever gotten.
“The Most Atlanta” follows three different storylines—Earn and Van are out in Atlantic Station and find that they’re having trouble getting out, Darius tries to escape a scooter-bound, knife-wielding woman who is based on a real person, and Al discovers that a rapper he admired has been deceased for several months and may be leaving messages from beyond the grave. But at the same time, “The Homeliest Little Horse” follows just one, maybe one and a half if we’re being generous—the focus is on Earn, and his decision to go to therapy and examine just why he is the way he is. While he works through his recent stressors—his health, his job, his consideration of moving to California to make more money—we see a story that feels appropriate for Earn in season one, a story of a woman trying to achieve success in an industry that she’s clearly been struggling in for a long time.
From the opening scene, it’s clear that Atlanta is so back. Darius goes to Target, expect it’s different than usual. “Kind of looks like a Marshalls now,” he observes to the clerk as a riot blazes around him. The production design of the ruined store, the tracking shot following Darius through it as the air fryer he’s trying to return bounces against his thigh, the flashing alarm lights, all of it comes together to make a scene that is so well done. The idea of “a guy goes to a Target while it’s being looted and all he wants to do is return an air fryer” is funny enough on its own, but this is the kind of environment Darius thrives in, even if the clerk made off with all the money in the register that he was hoping to get for the fryer. The title of “The Most Atlanta” feels indicative of what the episode—and possibly the season—will be as a whole. In this episode, the characters are placed in situations that boil them down to the characteristics their archetypes most embody. Darius is often the wild card who finds himself a victim of circumstance, while Al is the rapper who is out of touch with the culture he surrounds himself in, and Earn and Van are the couple who can’t figure out what they are when together. We are literally watching Atlanta at its most Atlanta, full of weird shit happening that continues to persist until the very last seconds of the episode.
Despite being the first episode of the show’s final season, “The Most Atlanta” feels like a perfect starter episode for people not familiar with the show’s style yet. All of the filmmaking here is fluid and fun, and the color palette is the brightest it’s been since the first season. Things are good in Atlanta right now, save for the knives and the racist TSA agents, and everyone’s grown up a little from the people they were when the series first began. Earn and Al are both successes in their industries, while Van is more confident in her relationship than before, and Darius is still Darius, of course. The characters are clearly defined here and their stories serve as excellent introductions, but the added context of seeing their three season journey makes these episodes even more exciting. Van and Earn are, of course, stuck in Atlantic Station, and there’s nothing to indicate whether or not they’re actually together—I’ve seen some interpretations that they are, some that they aren’t—but I don’t think it matters. Before they go into the exit Earn finds and he proposes going alone, Van asks if he’s just going to leave her stranded “like the rest of your exes?” “I would never let you become one of them,” Earn assures.
But the best story in “The Most Atlanta” is with Al, who learns that beloved Atlanta rapper Blueblood has been dead for several months, and that the tracks of his latest album may contain a coded message to…something. After getting separated from Darius, (because knife wheelchair woman is willing to go onto the freeway) Al is left to go on his own solo odyssey, and it ends up in a sequence that is ultimately one of my favorite things Atlanta has ever done. While listening to Blueblood’s music, (where we get a reveal that he is voiced by Earl Sweatshirt, which is insane and also awesome) Al realizes that the lyrics are actually a series of intricate puzzles that lead him through the city, and we get to see these lyrics match up with the visuals of what Al is doing. The way it’s all quickly edited together, the sounds of women in a pool swishing their arms and car horns blending into the rhythm of the song, the creative directions in which it takes us, it all flows together perfectly. It’s one of those scenes that is the reason I—and everyone should—watch Atlanta, perfectly embodying its tone, sense of humor, and style without seemingly trying.
The songs lead Al to a funeral run in the back of a storefront, where he is shocked to discover that only four other people had bothered with solving the mystery. The only other person in attendance is Blueblood’s wife, who talks to Al about the effort that went into setting the mystery up, only for it to go largely unappreciated. “I guess you don’t always get back what you give,” she laments, and it feels like it’s about more than just this fictional rapper, or even the most important rapper in this series. It feels like it’s about Atlanta, about Glover’s ideas about legacy and fame and if anyone will care after we die. When Al approaches Blueblood’s coffin, his body is gone, because it took so long to get all this together and then have people show up that his wife needed to have him cremated and replaced with a very fake looking skeleton rocking a tuxedo and a Braves hat. Despite how much he put in, the only thing people have to remember him by is his art. And on one hand, that’s a very nice thought, because then Blueblood gets to live forever, but on the other, it leaves us with a scary idea—what happens when nobody wants to listen to his stuff anymore?
Contrast to the sprawling “The Most Atlanta” is the focused “The Homeliest Little Horse”, likely the closest thing to a bottle episode Atlanta has done or ever will do. “Teddy Perkins” takes place almost entirely in a singular setting while this episode features several, but the majority of it is spent in a therapist’s office, a therapist that Earn has been regularly seeing. They talk with familiarity. Their relationship evolves little throughout the episode despite the fact that we see three separate sessions that turn out to be very important. Context clues that I’ll get to in a minute indicate that Earn is able to talk very freely with the man. We don’t know when Earn has started seeing him—Al’s amused reaction and the casualness of Earn telling him could either mean it’s recent, or an arrangement that he’s never felt necessary to bring up until now—but however long it’s been, we get the sense from the way these two men act that Earn has found something that’s important to him, something that he wants to preserve. The way the three sessions are structured are brilliantly done in their own way, because each of them contain extremely important reveals—one for the episode, one for understanding Earn as a character, and one for the series as a whole. So I’d like to talk about them as they’re presented, and maybe we can reach a higher understanding of the episode as a whole.
The first session: Earn is considering leaving Atlanta. Earn explains that he’s gotten a job offer to work as a creative consultant out in L.A., an offer that he’s been seriously considering but is putting a great amount of stress on him, so much so that he walks around with an EKG machine under his shirt. On one hand, this can be read literally. If the main character (delete the text you’re drafting and keep reading the article, dad) of a show leaves the environment the show is solely based on for good, then the show is usually over. It feels as though it’s setting up at least one endgame for the series finale, while also serving as a goal post for the audience to stop and look back on how far we’ve come. Earn is off probation, a plotline that’s been in place since the season one finale, and he and Al are making each other lots of money. Life is good in Atlanta, so maybe it’s time to move on to wherever the characters are headed next—and where that might be is out of the city.
But on another level, this is Atlanta creator Donald Glover talking to Sullivan Jones, also known as the “FX presents: Atlanta” guy that voices the intro to every episode. The other two sessions are about Earn, but this one feels as though it could be about both the show in-universe and out. Glover’s music is praised endlessly amongst his fans and Troy Barnes is a character gushed over by the internet to this day, but critically, he was divisive before Atlanta. Camp was trashed by all the major outlets, and Because the Internet was regarded as good at best by the same people who hated Camp. Atlanta was the first time everyone was taking him seriously, and even now, as it stands as one of the most acclaimed shows of the previous decade, that doubt still feels there. Will I be able to move on and continue working in L.A. when this is all over? he seems to be asking Sullivan. Will they see me as how I worked to be seen? The series creator talking to the man who speaks over images of the city like an omniscient god before every outing feels like Glover trying to work these feelings out to the show itself, as if he’s asking it if everyone will see what he wanted them to see.
The second session: The reason Earn left Princeton. To further expand on this idea of things moving forward, we get the answer to one of the oldest mysteries the show has ever posited—what happened to Earn in college? It’s mentioned offhand in the pilot that Earn has been acting different ever since he got back from Princeton University, and it feels like it should be important, right? But Atlanta isn’t the kind of show to really come back to something it mentions. There are many, many questions the series leaves us with that it never gets back to—I can think of at least three others from the pilot alone—and yet, considering Earn usually has the least character out of the main cast, this felt important. And now, three seasons later, we finally have our answer. Earn put his trust in somebody he felt like he knew, and they did worse than let him down—they completely flipped on him. As the scene progresses, Glover gets more and more quietly agitated. His eyes grow wider, his hands and head move with more intensity, and then, at the moment of revelation, he goes still.
What is so utterly brilliant about the reveal that Earn had been molested by a family member is that it’s not treated as such. If the therapist could bring it up in the way that he did, it had to be something they had already discussed. This session isn’t about making a breakthrough regarding this, it’s about Princeton, so there’s no reason to hype it up. And at the same time, it all recontextualizes Earn’s behavior in the episode and the series as a whole. The anger he displayed at the end of “North of the Border” when his laptop was stuck in a college dorm that he couldn’t get into, his panic over losing his key in “The Jacket”, even his choice to put his phone away instead of giving it to his therapist when asked. It’s never been about money with Earn, much as his behavior in the first two seasons would lead us to think it was. It’s been about the choice to make money, the ability to be in control. This could feel cheap, giving such an important character this big of a leap towards being fleshed out this late in the game, but the intentional detail in how he acted prior to this makes it work even better than if it only had Glover’s performance to ride off of.
The third session: The identity of the author. And finally, we learn who we have been following on and off in the breaks between sessions—we’ve been following Lisa Mahn, the racist TSA agent who stopped Earn from going back to Princeton and proving that he made it despite their rejection. Like with Princeton, he was profiled by a woman who could never understand him, and he missed the chance to prove himself. He lost his agency, his chance to control whether or not he succeeded or failed at Princeton, and he was in college all over again. So in revenge, he lifted an idea from Nathan Fielder and set her up to get what she always wanted, only to tear it all down with the children she so despised. He did to her what she did to him, because she couldn’t see the hurt he was carrying and how much this trip meant to him, so why should he care?
But then comes to the brilliance of the final reveal. Atlanta has, time and again, asked us to think about its villains—Teddy Perkins, Zan, the lesbian couple—even if it in no way wanted us to empathize with them. When we see Lisa’s life, we she that she’s still spiteful and fetishistic, but she’s also lonely and desperate. She’s not a good human being, but she’s a human being, and when human beings create things, they often project onto them. Lisa’s simplistic book is about a character regarded as ugly and useless by her peers, but she proves them all wrong and wins their respect and love by the end. It feels like something birthed out of a long life of insecurity, and while it doesn’t mean she didn’t deserve comeuppance, it speaks to how Earn didn’t, couldn’t see her, just as how she couldn’t see him. As Al and Darius leave the afterparty, unimpressed, Earn smiles, pleased with his own cleverness, until the smile fades and he realizes that this didn’t make him happy. The revenge wasn’t enough. Instead of moving on from Princeton like he thought he had, Earn became Princeton.
So yeah, Atlanta is back. It’s very back, and it’s back with two episodes that will go down as classics in the show’s canon, ones that embody it at its very best, and ones that will define the series, both looking back and moving forward. I don’t know if I like “The Most Atlanta” or “The Homeliest Little Horse” more, and I don’t know if I should pick, honestly. They’re very different episodes that are trying to do very different things, and yet, they work so well together. Atlanta is going to be over in a month, and people are going to remember it. Maybe people will stop watching it after five years. Maybe it’ll take ten. Maybe it’ll only take two. But like the impact Blueblood had on Al and the impact Lisa and Earn had on each other, Atlanta was here. It is here. We’re watching it unfold in our culture, for our culture, and it’s up to us whether or not we get what Glover wants us to get. Whether we’re the five fans that show up to its funeral or the children who mock its illustrations, it was here. And all we can do is live with it until it’s not anymore.
Ratings: 10/10 (“The Most Atlanta”: A / “The Homeliest Little Horse”: A)
Hey, can this new formatting for text under images, like, fuck off, please? I’m not the only one who sees this, right?
Friends who were near me when the opening scene of “The Most Atlanta” dropped on YouTube prior to the premiere can attest to how ecstatic I was to see that the “overhead shots of Atlanta accompanied by modern-day rap” title card had returned. (Yes, “Alligator Man” still has the best one.)
My roommate’s paraphrased summary of the “Earn and Van escape Atlantic Station” sequence, having overheard it without any context: “Donald Glover traps all his ex-girlfriends in a maze with a minotaur, and now he’s gotten stuck in there by accident and is trying to get out.”
Point for the “Earn and Van are together” party: she and Lottie were going to come with him on the Princeton trip. I’m pretty certain they are, but I kind of like the idea that they’re in a healthy enough place that they can still be very involved in each other’s lives without being together.
The final shot of “The Most Atlanta” feels like a callback to the final shot of the second dream in “Three Slaps”.
Blueblood dying months before it was officially announced and his reportedly secretive nature is an obvious reference to MF DOOM.
Been getting mixed answers about this, but how I believe they did the Blueblood song is just taking an unreleased Earl song and writing scenarios around the lyrics, which is almost as cool as writing the song themselves and getting Earl to perform it.
Khris Davis returns as Tracy, who is as Tracy as ever. That’s all you really need to know.
“They said yes. To the degree, not my ass.”
“He tellin’ me to come to the car.”