S03.E01: Three Slaps/S03.E02: Sinterklaas is Coming to Town

[PrincessPurrsALot]

Quote

Earn, Alfred, Darius and Van revisit a troubled kid 50 years later while in the middle of a successful European tour.

Quote

People know blackface isn't cool anymore, but they try too hard to go viral.

The show returns for a ten-episode season three, kicking off with two new episodes on the first night.  

Original air date 2022.03.24

[Adgirl]

This show is perfect.  So smart, subtle and so inside the Black experience.

[Irlandesa]

I did not expect the first episode to be an alternative retelling of the horrible abuse that the foster kids of Sarah and Jennifer Hart went through.

And I loved the second episode too.  Are they setting up Van with Darius?  Their adventures were crazy.

I run hot and cold on this show but this was a solid start.

[AngieBee1]

I'm getting the Van/Darius vibe too.

Opening with the story of Lake Lanier, using various viral moments and tying it all up with the excruciating tragedy of the Hart kids (because f*ck those women) was inspired. I didn't know if it would be possible to inject humor into that story but they did (Loquareeous' seeking safety with the cop turning into a "free(dom) hugs" caption.).

I saw the resolution of Earn and the promoter storyline coming a mile away but it didn't make it any less funny.

 

[Crashcourse]

I didn't realize the first episode was based on a true story.  

[Racj82]

10 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

I did not expect the first episode to be an alternative retelling of the horrible abuse that the foster kids of Sarah and Jennifer Hart went through.

And I loved the second episode too.  Are they setting up Van with Darius?  Their adventures were crazy.

I run hot and cold on this show but this was a solid start.

I think they are just playing with mixing up the cast. Darius and Van is something we never got. Also, if Van is lost and on a journey, Darius is the best person to fuel that.

[aghst]

4 hours ago, Crashcourse said:

I didn't realize the first episode was based on a true story.  

But there are fantastical and horror elements, like the opening, which is a dream within a dream?

I don't know if it's conscious or deliberate but some black storytellers have used fantastic or supernatural tropes more and more in recent years.

Examples would include Get Out, Lovecraft Country and Atlanta itself, with episodes like Teddy Perkins.

Maybe it's a thing like magic realism was for Latin American authors.

Is it a way to depict the monstrous behavior or just monsters that the black protagonists in their shows and movies are subjected to?  In Lovecraft Country, the racists trying to murder black people were figurative and literal monsters.

In Three Slaps, Loquarious' mother tries to warn and scare-straight her son about white people who will murder him -- though if that's the case, why just let him be taken away from her for a few days?

Sure there's the social commentary about white do-gooders like the guidance counselor proposing that Loq be put in remedial classes and then ultimately calling child protective services because the grandfather lightly slapped him 3 times.

Or the crunchy-granola woke lesbian couple making their own kombucha and making "good for you" food that was nasty to Loq.  They kill the black social worker and take the children on a death ride, pull a suicide pact.  They went from annoying and eyeball-worthy to scary in nothing flat.

 

 

[Crashcourse]

I'm surprised those poor kids didn't die from eating that nasty food.  That chicken looked nasty and damn near raw.

[Racj82]

I just read up on the real story.

Fuck me. There was barely any fabrication on here. 

The hug really happened.

They really were starving in shitty living conditions.

A social worker did go to visit the home but they had already left. Sad sad story.

[heatherchandler]

2 hours ago, Crashcourse said:

I'm surprised those poor kids didn't die from eating that nasty food.  That chicken looked nasty and damn near raw.

Were they coating it and then microwaving it?  That's disgusting.

 

46 minutes ago, Racj82 said:

I just read up on the real story.

Fuck me. There was barely any fabrication on here. 

The hug really happened.

They really were starving in shitty living conditions.

A social worker did go to visit the home but they had already left. Sad sad story.

I wish it ended the same way this story imagined it, rather than the real life where the kids were all killed.

Horrific story.

[aghst]

Finally caught up with the Sinterklaas episode.

So that's why they're in Europe, Paper Boi has blown up and it's not his first European tour either.

But didn't Alfred and Earn have a falling out and there was talk about him no longer being the manager?  The story in the first couple of seasons was whether Earn could use his education for something interesting and manage Paper Boi to make him big.

Unlikely that Earn or any other manager would have altered Paper Boi's popularity or trajectory to freedom.

Also in many ways Earn is just like a messenger boy for Alfred or gets things done for him, so like a gopher or production assistant more than a Svengali managing an artist with an international following.

BTW the black face thing is real in Holland.  Appears to have been some attempts to get rid of the Black Pete tradition in recent years.  But some of Paper Boi's fans were in black face so was it following their tradition or they think it's something Alfred would like?  They can't be that clueless can they?

No mention of covid so it's not clear when this is suppose to take place.  Really astounding to think this series hasn't been on air for 4 years!  Glover was going to be busy and some of the cast had other projects too.  But the pandemic surely impacted their production schedule.

The only possible allusion to covid may be Earn sneezing a couple of times and the Dutch yelling gesundheit loudly.

Van had an interesting arc.  She just decided to come join them in Amsterdam because she didn't get some job, just left the kid with her parents and flew in.  Earn seems surprised to see her but he got Darius to pick her up.  So they follow the address and then they witness Tupac being euthanized?

This is what I mean about the fantastical/horror elements in the storytelling.  I also vaguely recall Van going through what is supposedly one of Drake's homes and that had a suspenseful vibe throughout that episode.

 

Just an overall weird episode.  I guess them spending most of the season is kind of like season 2 of Master of None, taking place entirely in Italy.  Strange scene for them.  Earn hooks us in Copenhagen, with a young woman who can't even speak English -- actually the Danish and the Dutch all tend to speak very good English.

Alfred gets in trouble but his jail room is like a fancy Airbnb with them ordering food for him.  He doesn't want to leave until he's had that lunch and makes Earn wait.

He had trashed his hotel room but it was never cleaned up or repaired during the time he was in jail?  He was hooking up with 2 women but they get into an argument about whether using the n word is sexy or not.

Darius loves Amsterdam but otherwise didn't have much to do this episode, other than tagging along with Van's little adventure.

Earn pushes his weight around to make the Dutch concert promoter do what he wants but doesn't make the most graceful refusal to perform and the guy beats up some guy in black face because he can't catch up to Earn.  Maybe Earn will have to keep looking over his shoulder.

 

[gesundheit]

4 hours ago, aghst said:

BTW the black face thing is real in Holland.  Appears to have been some attempts to get rid of the Black Pete tradition in recent years.  But some of Paper Boi's fans were in black face so was it following their tradition or they think it's something Alfred would like?  They can't be that clueless can they?

I'm going with "the show used artistic license" on that one! As in yes, it's a real thing, but no, not that much of a critical mass of his Dutch fans could be that clueless.

[AngieBee1]

I didn't take the tour manager beating up that guy as he's taking out his aggression on a rando, but playing into the notion that people think all Black people look alike. The guy in blackface was wearing the same jacket as Earn so the manager really thought he caught up to Earn and was beating him up.

Which ties into the touches of Zwarte Piet throughout the episode and how people were trying to explain to Earn and Paperboi that it wasn't racist, but meanwhile there was a racist undercurrent like the manager mistaken a man in blackface for Earn and the two women with Paper Boi fighting over Rihanna being referred to a n*gga b*tch (which is real. A Dutch magazine thought they were praising her by calling her the "ultimate n*gga b*tch years ago).

[Irlandesa]

I might be reading too much into the blackface story but there are many Europeans (not all) who look at the racism issues the US experiences and don't feel that racism towards black people is an issue in their countries.  There are many reasons why it might look different in European  countries compared to the US but those countries do have both current and historical racism, it just might be more hidden than it is in the US. 

I think that was Paper Boi's experience.  He felt so loved and warmed by the crowd and even in jail only to get slapped in the face by the racist tradition.

[JenE4]

On 3/25/2022 at 5:38 PM, heatherchandler said:

Were they coating it and then microwaving it?  That's disgusting.

It was a satire on what racist, crunchy white ladies would cook for their black kids. The stereotype that black people like fried chicken? We can’t have that much fat! We’ll dip this directly into a bag of flour and pop it in the microwave for 8.5 minutes—because 12 minutes was too rubbery last time. What killed me was the side dish of avocado sprinkled with capers. That went the other way with the writers thinking what’s the whitest hippie mom side we can come up with? L’Quarius didn’t know what that was when he was offered the choice of capers or sprouts.

It was an interesting dichotomy to show how over-indulgent and blind the white savior complex is compared to the black tough love. These white people are all so happy to be patting each other on the backs that it doesn’t dawn on anyone to stop for a second to see what’s in the best interest of L’Quarius or to ask how he feels—well, his mom was guilty of that, too. L’Quarius’s mom is just taking none of this—give him detention and go ahead and leave if you think you’re better off. In the middle there, you think it’s funny to dance for the white people? Go ahead. But at the core of it is what made that whole escalation so tragic. This was not a “bad kid.” He was simply super excited to get to go see Black Panther 2–and that led to traumatically being taken from his mother, abused, and almost murdered. What was a black child having a joyous moment—over a Black History Month event sponsored by the Atlanta Falcons and Dominos Pizza (ha)—was seen as disruptive because even though this is in celebration of “you,” you’re distracting your white classmates.

It’s difficult to try to comment on two one-hour episodes at the same time. This is like the equivalent to half of a season’s worth of material!! This show is just so nuanced, that you could go scene by scene and talk about what lesson or social commentary the writers were trying to impart. So for the Sinterklaas episode, I’ll simply say that I liked the elements of a stranger in a strange land with the characters having their American expectations and then suddenly being faced with some experience or tableau that defies anything they could have ever imagined. On the one hand, the Dutch people were so much more polite than even seemed reasonable—handing over $20,000 in cash plus 2 taxi fares without question, taking a used tissue, and having four-star prison accommodations. But then underneath that was a lot of darkness, such as what seemed like a lovely celebration of life gathering was a pretty graphic euthanasia event! Alfred and Earn could only excuse the blackface for so long—from “appreciating the rebranding” of it being chimney soot rather than Santa’s slave to noping out when they saw the entire audience was—and this is just my opinion—possibly trying to look more like Paper Boi than dressing as Black Pete.

Edited March 27, 2022 by JenE4

[cmfran]

The weird assisted "suicide" segment reminded me of the suicide scene in Midsommar. I'm not sure which way of dying seems worse, though. My jaw dropped when the plastic sheet dropped over the guy's head.

As usual, Atlanta is the most unpredictable show on TV right now.

[luckyroll3]

4 hours ago, cmfran said:

My jaw dropped when the plastic sheet dropped over the guy's head.

I lost it when that happened. I was laughing so hard I started to cry! And then I lost it again when I saw the reactions of everyone compared to Van and Darius who were like, "What in the entire fuck!" How in the world is that gently transitioning to the next phase?!?!?

[aghst]

18 minutes ago, luckyroll3 said:

I lost it when that happened. I was laughing so hard I started to cry! And then I lost it again when I saw the reactions of everyone compared to Van and Darius who were like, "What in the entire fuck!" How in the world is that gently transitioning to the next phase?!?!?

It's urban folklore or mythical event.

Tupac fakes his own death, hangs out in the Dutch Caribbean and then sneaks into Amsterdam where he is taken care of by a death doula among other things.

She made it sound like he was going to die and they were just watching over him.  Then they have a suffocation machine.

Van and Darius have both been in some plots that's out of some macabre movie or Twilight Zone.

[tennisgurl]

I listened to a podcast about the Hart case a few years ago, so as soon as Aquarius showed up at that house and they started talking about that nasty food, I realized where this was going. The actual story is even crazier and much more tragic than what happened here, if only those poor kids had managed to get away from those awful women in real life. Watching the kids at that house was way more of a horror movie than even the creepy intro knowing what was coming. You really never know what your going to get with Atlanta, you go into any episode, I really never know what an episode will bring. 

The next episode had a very dreamlike stranger in a strange land sort of feeling, everyone trying to navigate this culture that feels so different than what they're used to, but still dealing with similar issues from back home. I really like Van and Darius having an adventure, and while I suspected that we were heading for some Midsommar vibes as soon as they got into that van, I still gasped when the sheet came down around that guy. Seeing the gang in Europe is really interesting, a major undercurrent seemed to be how, while things seem so polite and so pleasant, this place has its own issues just like back home, and as much as people awkwardly try to explain how things like Black Pete aren't really racist like things in America, but its all there, just under the surface or taking a different form. 

[sunnyface]

"I lost it when that happened. I was laughing so hard I started to cry!"

Just started watching (first two seasons up to this episode) and somewhat puzzled that this series is classified a 'comedy'.  Some of the writing has wit with a sprinkle of grace thrown in but the highlight of the writing seems to be situational drama.  Solid casting.  Donald Glover is entertaining to watch.

Edited December 24, 2022 by sunnyface