Atlanta’s sophomore season (or Robbin’ Season, as it was titled) saw Donald Glover’s Emmy-winning FX comedy push its well-established penchant for genre-bending satirical humor and avant-garde storytelling to new boundaries. Each episode felt more accurately described as an event, with the hysterical opener “Alligator Man” featuring a career-high performance by Katt Williams—and an actual alligator—as a prime example. “Barbershop” was another gem that riffed off the almost religious devotion Black men have to their barbers. Then there was “Woods,” a well-earned cathartic moment for Al aka Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), whose depression and disillusionment with fame was a thread throughout the season.
With all the comedic excellence Atlanta delivered an entire four years ago—yes, kids who were freshman in high school when the last season aired are now about to graduate—the stakes for Season 3 have never been higher. Our country has also experienced several major cultural events since the show was last on TV, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a new administration, Black Lives Matters protests, and an insurrection. Looking at our current TV lineup, it’s hard to think of a show more capable of mining the absurdity and tragedy of our current moment.
Directed by Hiro Murai and written by Donald and Stephen Glover, “Three Slaps” is a narrative detour that hardly features any of the show’s main characters. It’s an unusually dark showcase from Atlanta, even with the show’s tragic bent, borrowing the disturbing true story of the Hart family—a white lesbian couple with several adopted Black children who, after abusing their children, drove everyone off a cliff to their deaths in 2018—as its main plot but with a much different outcome.
Jamie Neumann as Gayle, Christopher Farrar as Loquareeous, Laura Dreyfuss as Amber in Atlanta
Guy D'Alema/FXSeveral parts of the episode interpolate well-known cultural stories. In the cold open, a white man tells a Black man about the history of a lake they’re both fishing on from a small boat at night. Referencing the history of Georgia’s infamous Lake Lanier without mentioning its name, he says that the body of water used to be a self-governed town of Black people that’s currently haunted. ‘They were almost white,” he says presumably about the freed slaves who inhabited Oscarville. He then goes into a tangent about whiteness, the way it blinds people and how anyone can be white with “enough blood and money.” Reminding us of this show’s interest in horror, the white man suddenly transforms into a frightening, zombie-like creature and attacks the Black man.
The rest of the episode is focused on a boy named Loquareeous (Christopher Farrar) whose life drastically changes after he gets in trouble for dancing in class after his teacher informs the students that they’ll be seeing Black Panther 2. (See the famous video/GIF of a Black boy in Timbs dancing on a desk for reference). After a meeting with his parents, a guidance counselor sees him receive three slaps from his father and calls Family and Children’s Services. Before Loquareeous can even be taken away, his mother and father practically kick him out, assuming he was the one that snitched.
The next time we see Loquareeous, he’s being dropped off at a smelly, disheveled home of two kombucha-making white women who’ve already adopted three other Black children. In a funny introduction to a rather ominous situation, they give Loquareeous his own towel with “Larry” sewn into it because they refuse to learn his name, look befuddled when he asks if they own washcloths, and feed him “fried” chicken that’s clearly uncooked. Practically every joke made about white women on Twitter or their association with the term “Karen” is stuffed into this half-hour.
The family’s living situation becomes even more perturbing as we realize the children are basically glorified slaves, forced to maintain the couple’s garden and barely receiving food. At a farmer’s market, where the financially challenged couple put the kids on display to attract buyers to their tent, Loquareeous tries to make an escape and runs into the arms of a police officer, recreating the image of Devonte Hart that was widely circulated during the Ferguson riots (Devonte was one of the children killed in the horrific crash). Of course, the police officer ignores his pleas for help and hands him back to his guardians.
We think Loquareeous will officially make it out of this house of horrors when a Black worker from Family and Children’s Services shows up to do a check-in. But she mysteriously vanishes after one of the women pulls her outside.
Then comes the moment anyone familiar with the source material has been dreading, when the couple tells the kids they’ll be going on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. The image of the family piling into the vehicle is jarring and not something you necessarily want to visualize. Even with the “happy” ending of the children jumping from the trunk of the van before the couple plunges into Lake Lanier, it hardly obscures the image of the mass child murder that occurred in real life.
Ultimately, this short story is a dream, as we see Earn wake up in a bed next to a random woman and transition into episode 2. “Sinterklaas Is Coming to Town” is fortunately much lighter and feels distinctly Atlanta-esque, as it features the cast mostly hanging out and tons of Blackface.
Earn wakes up from a one-night stand to his phone blowing up with messages from Swissair reminding him of his flight, Van (Zazie Beetz) asking why he hasn’t picked her up yet, Al saying he needs $20K, and Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) telling him he ate a persimmon. We’re not sure why Earn is in Copenhagen while everyone else is in Amsterdam, but he flies to the Dutch city where Paper Boi has a show.
When he arrives, he learns that Al got arrested and is being held in a jail that’s practically a three-star Hilton. The entire scenario recalls A$AP Rocky’s detainment in Sweden in 2019 and the assumption made by some people online that he was actually doing pretty well thanks to photos of Swedish jail cells resembling studio apartments in Manhattan. In that way, the bit feels a little expired considering how much public consciousness about the prison system has advanced since then. But watching Al tell the prison guard that he wants his meal before he leaves left me in shambles.
Earn (Donald Glover) and Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) in Atlanta
Coco Olakunle/FXMeanwhile, Darius picks up Van at the airport for Earn. The last time we heard from Van, she was texting Earn that she planned on moving in with her mom. But now she’s in Europe, seemingly on Earn’s dime, in an attempt to rediscover herself and take whatever opportunities are presented. She also mentions that she has a boyfriend.
She and Darius head to a store where she finds a piece of paper inside a coat pocket with an address and decides to go there for the heck of it. They’re greeted by a woman who assumes they’ve come to pick her and some other people up to go to what appears to be a wake. At the house, which looks like a set from Midsommar, Van has a vague discussion with a death doula where she mentions that she’s “pretty aimless right now.”
The funniest part of the episode occurs when Van walks over to what originally looks like a corpse but is really an unconscious man transitioning to death to say some final words. After telling him “it’s going to be OK,” the doula releases a contraption that suffocates the man. This jarring moment in the middle of a serene vigil is hilarious in and of itself. But the amount of effort the man puts into trying to escape and how long it takes for him to stop breathing suggests that he wasn’t actually dying and was maybe just asleep.
Zazie Beetz as Van in Atlanta
Coco Olakunle/FXMeanwhile, free from his luxurious prison stay, Al is getting ready to perform at a venue later that night. He and Al encounter a man dressed like Sinterklaas with a baby in Blackface dressed as the controversial Zwarte Piet (or Black Pete) character. Their driver informs them that Black Pete is actually just a child that’s fallen in a chimney, but anyone who’s read about the recent controversies surrounding the tradition and its festivals knows the character is racialized. We also find out Al was arrested after two women he was having a threesome with got into a physical altercation.
Just before Al is set to perform, he sees the audience, all made up like Black Pete, and ditches the show. When Earn notifies the booker, he tries to chase him down but can’t tell him apart from the Black Petes in the lobby and starts punching one of them. After this extremely silly joke, we end on Earn arriving at his hotel room and seeing Van in the lobby. The two barely exchange words but appear to be in a good place.
At this month’s SXSW, Glover promised that this season would be more about Van, which is something to be excited and slightly tentative about. Van—and Beetz’s amusingly dry embodiment of her—has always been extremely fascinating to watch. But considering how much of the show is largely written from a male perspective and by men, it could be hit or miss, like previous episodes that have spotlighted her. Overall, it seems like the show is trying to correct some criticism it’s received in the past for its sometimes stereotypical portrayal of Black women. Whether it pays off this time, we’ll have to see.
