PT Entertainment
Atlanta is back for its final season. A review of the two-part season premiere, “The Most Atlanta” and “The Homeliest Little Horse,” coming up just as soon as I return my air fryer…
Back in March, Atlanta Season Three premiered with back-to-back episodes. The scheduling seemed only fair, because it would have felt like a cruel taunt for the series to return after a four-year hiatus with a premiere episode that barely featured any of the regular characters (the first of four installments last season to do that.)
FX has again scheduled two episodes to kick off Season Four, though it feels much less necessary this time. It’s not just that the show’s absence was a mere four months this time, rather than four years. It’s that our season’s first episode, “The Most Atlanta,” is so determined to live up to its title that no one could come away from it feeling like they had been deprived of the full Atlanta experience. And with just 10 episodes remaining of this great, great show, it could almost feel cruel to burn two of them in one week.
Almost. Because while “The Most Atlanta” offers many of the series’ flavors, it does not quite provide all of them. And pairing it with “The Homeliest Little Horse” creates an even richer experience.
These two seasons were made back-to-back, before the audience had seen a single minute of any of it. So Donald Glover and company could not have known that Season Three’s anthology episodes would prove polarizing at best. (At a Television Critics Association panel last month, Glover laughed as he acknowledged, “We know you hated them. It’s fine. I’m really proud of those episodes.”) But “The Most Atlanta” — written by Stephen Glover and directed by Hiro Murai — plays as if the creative team knew there would be pushback to a third season mostly set in Europe, where the only stories set on this side of the Atlantic involved entirely new characters.
“The Most Atlanta” brings us back to the titular city. It offers stories featuring all four leads. And, like Atlanta does so often at its best, it dances along a very blurry line between genres, so that we are watching a trio of horror stories of varying kinds that at different points leak into mystery, comedy, relationship drama, social commentary, and more. It’s an utter delight.
We pick up, appropriately enough, in the middle of chaos. A big box store is in the middle of being looted, for reasons the episode declines to explain. Darius wanders in, oblivious (as he so often is) to what is happening even a few feet away from him, to return an air fryer he no longer wants. An incredulous, terrified clerk briefly attempts to complete the exchange, then realizes he can just run off with the cash in the register and no one will know. The reason for the looting does not matter, especially since the other subplots suggest it is an extremely localized disturbance while the rest of the city goes about its (weird) business as usual. The important part is what happens when Darius attempts to leave the building, and finds the exit blocked by a Karen type(*) on a motorized scooter. She does not appear to work at the store(**), but is just an old racist who cares about keeping people of color down more than anything else. As she bluntly tells Darius regarding the air fryer (which isn’t even stolen!), “I would rather die than let you take that!”
(*) The character, played by Deadra Moore, is actually named Christine, which perhaps is a reference to the Stephen King story about the deadly car that won’t stop coming.
(**) Her T-shirt is similar in color, but not identical, to the one the cashier is wearing, and she also has a flowery shirt on top of it.
Darius spends the rest of the episode fleeing Christine, who seems superhuman despite her disability. She shows up on the freeway when he gets back into Al’s gridlocked SUV; in an alley behind an abandoned warehouse when Darius gets there on a bicycle he has somehow acquired along the way; and eventually in the parking lot of the strip mall where the episode’s three stories converge. The whole thing is a testament to Murai’s gift for incorporating multiple tones at once, so that Christine seems at once ridiculous and genuinely menacing.
Earn and Van’s story is slightly slower-burning in its horror. They have come to the Atlantic Station outdoor mall ostensibly to run some minor errands — Van to replace a broken phone, Earn to get a sub at the local Publix — but really it is an excuse to spend time together. Van appears to have worked through the depression that caused her violent mental break at the end of Season Three, and she and Earn seem to have found an equilibrium as exes. They will always be in each other’s lives because of Lottie, but it’s also clear that they enjoy each other’s company, even if they do not function as a romantic couple.
Their relatively healthy status is set up as a contrast to the dawning nightmare they find themselves in. Everywhere they turn, they find Atlantic Station populated by exes whom they have not thought about in years — and who, it turns out, have been trapped at this mall practically since the breakup. Kenya (Sh’Kia Augustin), one of Earn’s exes, arrived there when Now You See Me 2 was still in theaters, and that movie came out in 2016 (shortly before Atlanta Season One debuted). The danger feels less imminent than Christine’s relentless pursuit of Darius, but as more exes keep popping up while Earn and Van can’t find his car in the parking deck, the story becomes another great example of Atlanta being silly and disturbing at the same time.
The Paper Boi subplot is less horror than it is a ghost story, as Al winds up on a scavenger hunt inspired by the lyrics of recently-deceased local rapper Blueblood, whose work meant a lot to him. Because Brian Tyree Henry is so good at playing displeasure for laughs, stories focusing on Al tend to involve him being unhappy about one thing or another. So the montage of him following the clues — to a BBQ joint, a local pool, an arcade, a comic-book shop, and a 3-D movie screening, among other locales — is pleasantly upbeat in a way that feels like a bit of a departure for him. But the trail eventually leads to a strip mall funeral home where Blueblood’s widow Keisha (Chimere Love) is greeting any of her husband’s fans who cared enough about his work to find their way to this faux funeral. Blueblood is, in fact, dead, but because he was cremated, the coffin is occupied by a fake skeleton. Both Keisha and Al seem sad that so few people have turned up. You can tell that this is something of a Ghost of Christmas Future for Al, who could one day be just as forgotten as his hero. And you can perhaps read Keisha’s lament that “I guess you don’t always get back what you give” as Stephen Glover’s meta comment on how Atlanta has not always been as appreciated as he and the rest of the creative team might like. Or perhaps the more telling comment comes right right after, when Keisha wishes her husband had more fun, “’Cause that’s all it is in the end.”
Though Atlanta has been many things over these three-plus seasons so far, its ability to be just plain fun sometimes gets underrated. But “The Most Atlanta” is 100 percent fun, up to the three stories converging when Earn and Van’s escape tunnel out of Atlantic Station somehow leads them into a closet at the funeral home, while Darius winds up in the parking lot outside, still worried about Christine. How are they all there? Why are the walls of the tunnel both carpeted and soaking wet? How late will Kenya be to bring her dad his gift (assuming she doesn’t get knifed first by Christine)? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I know that the episode as a whole was a joy.
“The Homeliest Little Horse” is deliberately much less joyful. Half of it is Earn in therapy, working through his anxiety and past disappointments like getting expelled from Princeton. And the other half starts out as what seems like another anthology story, this one just folded in as the B-plot in an episode otherwise focusing on one of the regulars. But the two eventually connect in ways that explain why we have been spending so much time with would-be children’s book author Lisa (Brooke Bloom), and reveal just how badly Earn needs to continue his therapy.
Earn being kicked out of Princeton is an important biographical detail mentioned in the Atlanta pilot, then largely ignored since then. It was presented as one of many examples of Earn having wasted his potential prior to reconnecting with his cousin, but details beyond that were scarce. As he attends session after session with therapist Everette Tillman (Sullivan Jones), he talks about being invited back to his alma mater for a fundraising event, and finally opens up about the incident that led to his expulsion. In Earn’s telling of it, he and fellow RA Sasha become close friends, and a complicated series of events led to Sasha keeping Earn’s new suit in her dorm, then vanishing right when he needed it for an important job interview. Earn used his RA master key to go in and get the suit; Sasha — who, Everette quickly intuits, is white — freaked out about him entering her room without permission; and Earn was soon cast out of the Ivy League. Going into her room without asking first (and they were communicating by text at the time) was not the best choice, but also not at all a crime fitting the punishment. (This is important for later.)
Because we are joining this therapeutic relationship at midstream, doctor and patient know things we don’t, like Everette’s casual reference to Earn being abused by a family member when he was younger. More than the Sasha story, this reframes a lot of what we thought we knew about Earn — including the nature of his fraught relationship with his parents — and more importantly gives him a chance to talk about how often spite motivates him. “I love spite,” he explains. “It’s a pure, powerful thing. It gave me courage. You know, I can count on it. I used it when I came back to Atlanta.”
Earn occupies a strange place in the world of Atlanta. At the beginning of the series, he is unquestionably the show’s protagonist and point-of-view character, and he’s played by the Atlanta creator and showrunner. But he’s also someone who reveals very little of himself to others, and the things we understand about him often come from his actions more than anything he says. And over time, he has drifted away from the center of the narrative, at times being one member of a relatively equal ensemble of four, at others clearly falling behind Al in importance. We just don’t know as much about him as anyone might have expected at the start of the series.
Putting a character from an ongoing series into therapy like this can be a dicey proposition. Sometimes, it’s revelatory; at others, it can feel like the clumsy last resort of a series that can’t figure out a better way to dramatize what someone is feeling. It works here, though, because Earn is such a reserved character the rest of the time, and because the scenes are pitched (by writer Ibra Ake and director Angela Barnes) at an understated level. Therapy is work that takes a long time, with many fits and starts, and Earn and Everette are at a point where they have worked through a lot, and developed enough of a level of trust and respect that Everette would even buy a floor pillow for Earn to lie on during their sessions.
It all feels natural, and the cutting between that and Lisa’s story creates a slight dramatic tension. Why, the viewer quickly feels compelled to ask, are we following this woman, and what does she have to do with everyone else? There is obviously something sketchy about Lisa being solicited by a literary agent. When Tracy (last seen at the end of Season Two, where he showed up at Al’s apartment right after the guys all left town for Paper Boi’s first European tour) turns out to be working for the agent, it’s clear this is connected to Earn, but how? Is Lisa perhaps Sasha’s real name, and we are watching her to see that her life has turned out to be more disappointing than the ex-friend whose future she once seemed to ruin?
We finally get a big clue when Lisa shows up at the library to do the reading her agent has promised will land her a big publishing deal. She has brought her dog, and when the librarian (Schelle Purcell) objects, Lisa attempts to pull rank by pointing out that she works at the airport — a place only just discussed by Earn, in a story about him being denied access to the flight north (where he had planned to take Van and Lottie for a mini-vacation after the Princeton event) by yet another racist Karen. Could Lisa perhaps be this Karen?
Indeed, she is, and after the library reading ends in utter humiliation for her, we cut to Earn watching footage of it at a bar, at the wrap party for what has turned out to be an elaborate, expensive bit of interactive theater, all designed as revenge for ruining Earn’s trip with his family. Does this punishment fit the crime, any more or less than Earn being asked to leave Princeton? You could easily argue that she’s more deserving of her fate than Earn was, since he did something dumb but intended to be harmless, where she was actively malevolent to him. (And the conversation with the fake librarian suggests the holier-than-thou bit is routine for her.) At the same time, going to so much trouble to not only embarrass this woman, but to put her in debt, estrange her from her closest friend, etc., is such overkill that even Al and Darius don’t seem the slightest bit amused by it. (Darius isn’t sure if it’s “extreme, extreme pettiness, or terrorism.”)
Earlier, when Earn discusses the power of spite, Everette replies that spite can also leave you depressed and empty, and that “you become a book written for somebody else.” Earn thought he was getting better in therapy, but this stunt proves that he hasn’t been, which even he recognizes after being left alone in the bar. He thought the joke was on this awful woman who ruined what was supposed to be a triumphant moment for him, when actually, it was on himself. His adult life has turned out to be far more successful than he might have once hoped for even with a Princeton degree, but it’s also filled with constant demands from his famous cousin/client, panic attacks, and more. And he still feels trapped enough in his lowest moments to pull a stunt like this.
In all, “The Homeliest Little Horse” is a sadder and more introspective episode than the one preceding it, but the two combine to form a wonderful of sampler of many (but not all) of the things Atlanta can do. We are close to the end now, and Earn talks with Everette about his plan to move across the country to work in Los Angeles, and hopefully have Van and Lottie join him. Combine that with the Blueblood subplot from “The Most Atlanta,”and how it forces Al to contemplate his own future, and you have a series very much aware that it has very little time left. But you also have a series that remains at the top of its game. If the rest of the season is this good, it will be even harder to leave Atlanta, even if Christine tries to chase us all out.
