After a near four-year wait, FX’s Atlanta opened its third season with “Three Slaps”, a standalone episode that didn’t feature anyone in the main cast aside from a brief cameo from Donald Glover (Solo: A Star Wars Story, Community), the show’s creator, as his character Earn. The episode felt much more like a short film than a part of the episodic show and took advantage of thematic ties to provide a thrilling and engaging story about Loquareeous, played by Christopher Farrar (Home Team, Chicago Med), a black boy who is having disciplinary problems at school.
The episode opens on two unnamed characters, a white man and a black man, fishing together on a lake in the middle of the night. The black man recalls how he nearly drowned in this lake as a child, and in response, the white man tells him that there is a town underneath them filled with the souls of black people that were likely trying to pull him under. The white man continues by rambling on about whiteness and how it is something that can be bought with blood and money, before a horror sequence ensues in which the white man’s face turns demonic as he says, “we’re cursed too” and countless black arms pull the black man down into the lake. This is supposedly a dream of Loquareeous, who was sleeping in class. Loquareeous gets in trouble for dancing at school after a school trip to go and see the new Black Panther movie is announced. His mother, played by Nicole Lockley (The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey), and his grandfather, played by Timothy Tinker Sr. (Sustained), come to speak with the headmistress and guidance counselor. After quickly concluding that Loquareeous just needs more detention and leaving the meeting, she forces her son to dance and warns him that if he keeps acting the way he does, white people are going to kill him. His grandfather then slaps him three times across the face. All of this is witnessed by the guidance counselor who promises to get him out of there.
Child services shows up at Loquareeous’ house where there are minor discomforts including a lack of milk and not being allowed to watch the television. His mother immediately throws him out of the door, thinking that he was the one to call child services. That’s when Loquareeous ends up at the house of his new two mothers: Amber, played by Laura Dreyfuss (Glee, Voyagers), and Gayle, played by Jamie Neumann (The Deuce, Sunday Water). He is renamed ‘Larry’ and finds himself with three other young black children who are silent in the hostile conditions. They have a dog named Cornpop who is treated better than the children. The house smells from the homemade kombucha and the undercooked organic food that causes him to throw up when he consumes it. He tries to escape, but the white police officer only reaches for his firearm upon Loquareeous’s approach before assuming that his mothers are not mistreating him. He is sent back home with them. There are consistent racist remarks and mistreatment towards him that are justified by comments of the delusional mothers who believe that they are helping to shield him from an even crueler world.
A child services worker shows up and inspects Loquareeous’ new home where she is shocked at the smell, the sickness and hunger of the children, and everything about the place. Gayle and Amber are also clearly in financial trouble and are deliberately avoiding debt collectors. The visit of the second worker prompts a spontaneous road trip to the Grand Canyon which Loquareeous immediately discerns as a lie. He spots the child service report in the trash. Gayle and Amber have a talk about how things spun out of control for them, as they release Cornpop into the wild, before driving off a bridge and into the same lake that the episode began at. They think that all their adopted children are in the car with them, but Loquareeous jumps out of the car at the vital moment and had freed the other children while the mothers were having their talk. He returns home and is grateful for the simple comforts of spaghetti in the fridge and cartoons. That’s when Earn wakes up in a hotel room next to a random white woman.
The introduction to the relationship between black people and white people in the opening sequence is brilliant and expertly introduces the theme of white guilt within the episode. Despite the harsh treatment of his mother and grandfather, Loquareeous is taken out of his home not by his own design, but rather by the white student counselor. Amber and Gayle then take this concept to the extreme by using their adopted children for work and social media while believing that they are acting as saviors. It may frustrate some fans to have watched an episode that was so far adrift from the characters they were accustomed to watching, but this digression was well and truly justified by a mesmerizing story and expertly crafted social commentary.
Rating: 9.0/10