by Bryan Washington | via Vulture
Atlanta is a show about some black folks living in that city. It isn’t a simulacrum of Georgia’s capital. Or a faux-documentary. It’s not a manifesto on blackness (although virtually every character is black), or a cautionary tale (although some truly terrible shit does happen), or even a comedy, alt ugh it is funny, unless the punch line you’re looking for is “life.” If you haven’t seen the first season, the things you need to know are that Earnest “Earn” Marks (Donald Glover), a Princeton dropout, is managing his cousin, Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), a rapper on the cusp of making it big. Both men are friends with Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), a guy who speaks in paradoxes, and Earn shares a baby with his sometimes-partner, Van (Zazie Beetz). That’s your core context, and all you’ll really need. If the first season was any indicator, everything else is malleable.
Glover and Hiro Murai (Glover’s collaborator and frequent director) make that clear in “Alligator Man,” this season’s opener: The show begins with two young men fucking around with FIFA, lounging and ragging on an acquaintance for wanting to “be somebody so bad,” before casually deciding to rob a drive-through for drugs. That decision is made with little fanfare, just like the beginning of the actual incident; eventually, there’s a shootout, culminating with an unseen casualty. The violence is senseless. But it’s also mundane. The scene simply notes that this is something that happens here: death and the day-to-day coexist seamlessly. We don’t find out what’ll become of the two young men, or the woman who’s covered in blood, but we know that Atlanta has happened to them. That’s probably the only explanation we’ll get.
No matter how you’d thought this season would start, this wasn’t it. In the New Yorker profile that dropped a few days back, Glover said, “A lot of this season is me proving to people that I didn’t get those Emmys just because of affirmative action.” His insistence on proving something is a motif throughout the episode, one that’s even repeated moments later: “I watch Storage Wars, too,” says a storage-unit employee to Earn, whom he catches sleeping in a unit. “This ain’t that.” “That” may as well be any other “black” show on television. (Or whatever you thought you were about to watch.)
From there, “Alligator Man” juggles several narratives: For starters, Earn is still homeless and the jig is up on his storage-unit situation. The revolving door of Al’s place seems like a nebulous possibility. And a large part of securing a spot revolves around keeping Al happy, because now he’s got money. So to that end, Earn accepts a quest: He’s tasked with resolving a dispute with his Uncle WillyWho, I’m guessing, is Al’s dad. It’s never explicitly stated, though Earn says that Willy is his uncle, and of course Al isn’t the dude who’s gonna say, “My father requires your assistance.” (an outstanding Katt Williams). The man has apparently “kidnapped” his partner Yvonne in their bedroom over the disappearance of $50. When Earn asks Willy to resolve the issue, he’s recalcitrant to do it, playing the old-head; and of course that’s when 5-0 shows up, with Darius noting that the vibe’s transitioned from “intense” to “more and more like jail.”If you know what Darius’s premonition feels like, his comment is spot on: The country’s incarceration system, and its absurdity, quietly permeate the episode. You’re on a street corner, just vibing, and you start to feel a wave, a looming sense of doom. Or you’re at a party, and the scene isn’t too hot, but everything’s starting to feel a little too present. There’s violence in the air, and a potential for suffering later on, even if you can’t taste it just yet.
If season one already established Atlanta itself is a character, it looks like we’ll only be underlining that point, making season two another recent entry in black creatives viewing their cities on their own terms, mostly absent from the lens of whitenessExcluding the network executives they’re pitching for. Ha. . The concrete sprawl pulses. The traffic provides its own soundtrack. As Darius and Earn walk into Willy’s house, the flora behind them alludes to another world (although, for many viewers, it may as well be Area XAlbeit with even fewer white people. ). The existence of “Florida Man” is taken as a given: As Darius says, “Think of him as an alt-right Johnny Appleseed” working “to prevent black people from coming to and/or registering to vote in Florida.” A man keeps an alligator in his home, with a reputation so ubiquitous that children from around the way have dubbed him “the Alligator Man.” But the through-line of this episode — of the entire show, really — is that, within this context, all of these things are reality. To that end, there’s no reason to explain them as Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are 425 elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.”
Click HERE to read the rest of the recap, “Alligator Man.”