A great TV show at the height of its powers can do anything.
Introduce immediately fascinating new characters.
Conjure a unique setting out of thin air.
Justin Bartha on ‘Atlanta’.Guy D’Alema/FX
Throw the whole world into turmoil while keeping track of microscopic emotional shifts.
The script (credited to Francesca Sloane) is an open-ended morality tale that devastates even as it charms.
Yes, “Big Payback” marksAtlanta’s most complete shift from any readily definable version of itself.
The only recurring character is the nondescript dream avatar for American whiteness.
The plot dramatizes a landmark court case that could change world history or get forgotten by next week.
Worth pointing out last week’s trip to a London billionaire’s secret house was, like, fine.
I have an allergy to Crazy Rich Person jokes, even very good ones.
Nothing wrong with that, butAtlanta’s early seasons set a tone for far-out experimentation.
“Big Payback” goes beyond.
Bartha plays Marshall Johnson, the dictionary definition of “Caucasian.”
He’s amicably separated from his wife, and amicably separated from everything else.
We meet him in a cafe line, blissfully listening to Radiolab.
Those are the characters' names in the credits, and their barely heard interaction seems racially charged.
(I think the barista didn’t like the guy using the n-word?)
Marshall gets to his car and realizes he walked out with a madeleine stuffed in his pocket.
He smiles and eats it: What’s the harm in a bit of thievery?
Somewhere in this country, a Black man has successfully sued kamillionaire Josh Beckford.
The Tesla investor’s great-grand-something was a slave owner.
The prosecution claims his current wealth derives, illegally, from the criminal labor of the plaintiff’s forebears.
“The decision will have very far-reaching consequences around the world,” the radio explains.
Marshall doesn’t notice.
Things seem cordial enough with Natalie (Dahlia Legault), his wife.
Daughter Katie (Scarlett Blum) thinks Mom wants Dad to move back in.
“Be Young, Have Fun, Eat Shrimp!”
“My Shrimp is Mine!")
Dinner with Katie gets interrupted by a process server and by Sheniqua Johnson (Melissa Youngblood).
Marshall’s ancestors owned her ancestors, she declares, already eyeing up his apartment.
The next day, she’s outside Marshall’s office with a megaphone.
The new precedent goes viral.
Anyone remotely white is in a flurry, checking databases for ancestral atrocities.
“Austro-Hungarians were slaves as well!”
He asks Lester (Exie Booker), a Black co-worker, for advice.
Natalie demands a finalized divorce, worried about her finances.
She has no sympathy for Marshall’s plight; after all, she’s Peruvian.
“You were white yesterday!”
(Atlantanever misses a detail.
He’s just a guy; why is this happening to him?
“I’m just a guy, you know, trying to get by,” he explains.
You get the vibe that he knows what racism is, and does not want to embody it.
He experiences no outrage about the big court decision.
He seems to sense that Sheniqua occupies the moral high ground.
The specificities of the case resonate withAtlanta’s loftier mission statements.
“Now that history has a monetary value.”
“Value” isAtlanta’s watchword, a theme explored to relentless yet ambiguous purpose.
Valuing yourself sounds like a good idea, but creatorDonald Gloverand his collaborators always complicate the meaning.
“Big Payback” imagines a moral reckoning with American slavery that is less moral than fundamentally capitalist.
Work was done, and now salaries must be paid.
The interest will get you.
Youngblood has great moments as Sheniqua.
Still, “Big Payback” is unquestionably the whitestAtlantaever.
We see the culture shift from inside Bartha’s bursting bubble.
He sounds, briefly, optimistic.
Won’t Marshall’s daughter grow up in a different world?
“The curse has been lifted from her,” says Earnest.
“From all of us.
We were running from it, but now we’re free.”
Then he shoots himself dead.
It’s an astounding scene, and that’s before you consider the context.
Now Earnest himself is dead in the water.
Should we interpret this as progress?
Yet Marshall pulls back from Earnest’s brink.
He winds up as a waiter, with a 15-percent restitution tax pulled from his wages.
(Tips aren’t garnished.)
He’s chatty with his fellow employees, who seem friendlier than his cubicle neighbors ever were.
I’m not sure he’s happier, but he’s certainly more engaged with the world around him.
The episode ends on a shot of the busy restaurant.
Essentially all the diners are people of color, which either means nothing or everything.
“The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.”
That might turn out to be the only sentence anyone remembers William Faulkner writing.
(And, like, not everyone loves four-page sentences.)
Yet Earnest’s words seem to rhyme with Faulkner’s fundamental point.
The buried fact of slavery is not buried at all.
The brutality lingers in the present, as an economic force and a constant act of societal cruelty.
Heavy stuff for an episode that also has solid visual-gag shrimp jokes!
ButAtlanta’s confident vision is reaching into the outer edges of tragicomic wonder.
This is great, vital television.
I’d rank “Big Payback” just behind the season premiere’s feverishly funny white-adoption nightmare.
I’ve seen some theories that the show is becoming an outright anthology.
I hope that is not true, because anthologies suck.
It’s a funny line, and maybe a promise.
