Donald Glover went almost four years between the release of season two of Atlanta in the spring of 2018 and the premiere of season three just three weeks ago, so I hope that my own eight- nine-week absence can be forgiven. And one can only dream of making a return the way that Atlanta’s writers and cast have done with the first five episodes of their third season together.
The quandary of reparations and the horror of white vulnerability.
One of the standout new entries in Glover and company’s show is “The Big Payback,” the second stand-alone episode of season three and one that is just as good as what we get from Earn, Alfred, Darius, and Van, who are traveling around Europe in the second, third, and fifth episodes. We’re officially halfway through the season, and so far “The Big Payback” stands as one of the best.
For the record, it’s definitely worth talking about both “Sinterklaas is Coming to Town” and “The Old Man and the Tree” and the way that they handle the 100% same yet strangely different ways that whiteness operates in the Netherlands and in England. There’s perfectly cringey Dutch people in blackface (apparently that’s what happens when you help Santa, they say) and some wildly rich Brits who just love black people. And the newest episode, “Cancer Attack,” has its own commentary about celebrity and the entitlement of many grossly under-qualified white folks. But that’s for another time.
"The Big Payback” is probably the better of the two stand-alone episodes, although “Three Slaps,” which opened season three, was a fantastic welcome back to the personality and style of both Glover (who serves as showrunner) and collaborator Hiro Murai (who also directed 2019’s Guava Island which starred Glover and Rihanna). In the new mini-story, we meet a man in a world not dissimilar to our own, but with a key difference. But this is not the world of the main Atlanta timeline. That wasn’t the case for “Three Slaps,” which also took place with completely independent characters but was somewhat in the show’s universe, since it more or less takes place in one of protagonist Earn’s dreams. The series has had plenty of surreal elements (Twin Peaks for rappers, as Glover has said), but never until this season had they adopted a style that would allow for the kind of horror inspired afro-surrealism that they bring out in “Three Slaps” and “The Big Payback”.
In the world of Marshall Johnson (a perfectly cast Justin Bartha), there is a wealthy American man who has just lost a very important court case, one that says he has to pay back the family of the people who his own family had once enslaved. In many ways, the episode reads as the nightmare of conservatives everywhere, the idea that individual descendants of slaveowners could be taken to task for the sins of their ancestors.
“The Big Payback” asks us to consider what would happen if person-by-person reparations obtained governmental backing. But the point isn’t really that Glover or any of the other writers think that what they depict in the show is how reparations advocates actually envision the much-needed restoration of stolen wealth that they call for. Instead, it’s about realizing just how much it would upend people’s lives if someone came along and involuntarily stripped them of their social and economic status. And if that scenario doesn’t ring a bell, I would recommend opening a history book.
What we see in Atlanta’s depiction of reparations is certainly not a blanket condemnation of white folks in America. To see it as such would be a complete disservice to all the thought that goes into writing the show and this episode in particular. What “The Big Payback” aims for instead is to prompt its audience to consider how much they rely on access to wealth and resources that they have never been forced to consider losing, at least not at the hands of other people. And it’s also about pointing to the incredible fact that people have nonetheless found ways to survive the theft of not only their property but their personhood on top of it. It’s about recognizing that slavery involved breaking apart communities and families and denying them any chance to accumulate wealth or status, and that the descendants of those people make up a pretty damn substantial chunk of the American population.
Of course, none of these are new observations. People have been talking about reparations for centuries, about figuring out how to acknowledge the violence that took place and the ways that it echoes in the present day. But what I have not encountered before is the kind of fictionalized representation that the Atlanta team delivered this season. Asking us to consider just what exactly a reparations policy might look like and how it would play out is a hugely important thought experiment, even if it’s told as a story that is deliberately absurdist and that pretty much no one who knows anything about the inertia of American society and culture would ever expect to come about. And that’s because the topic of reparations will always involve at its core a confrontation with a fundamental contradiction in the history of the United States—the claim to establishing a nation based on freedom and equality that was only made possible by the subjugation and erasure of countless black and brown folks. Any and all attempts to address those evils will always contain their own contradictions because there is no solution free of conflict, no solution that can rectify what has passed without upending what has come into being as a result. And boy does “The Big Payback” remind us of the upending part.
What’s next? I don’t know, but I know that I want more.
There are five episodes left in the season, and it’s anyone’s guess what will come next. Ibra Ake, who has worked with Glover as a key member of the creative team behind Childish Gambino’s albums and touring performances, gets the main writing and directing credits for episode six, “White Fashion,” which is set to air this Thursday. Glover himself directed at least two of the remaining episodes, and also gets main writing credits for another two. Each of the first five episodes were written by different members of the team, so it will be interesting to see what Ake, Glover, and comedian Jordan Temple (who has worked on ‘The Marvelous Ms. Maisel,’ ‘Mythic Quest,” and ‘Abbot Elementary’) have to bring to the table when they get to take the lead during the back half of the season.
Whatever happens, you can be sure that Atlanta will continue to stretch your imagination, test your comfort zone, and question your perspectives on the intersections of race, gender, class, and pop culture. Of course it’s not the only show that wants to talk about issues like this, but no matter what you think, there’s nothing like Atlanta.