The weekend, before the season finale of Atlanta, Donald Glover debuted a new Childish Gambino song and video. In “This Is America,” he raps, “We just wanna party / Party just for you / We just want the money / Money just for you.” Later, after he guns down a black choir and guitarist, he says, “Don’t catch you slippin’ up / Look what I’m whippin' up.”
It’s a music video that Vulture’s Frank Guan compared to Glover's FX series: “Much as Atlanta exists in the lacuna between Atlanta and Atlanta, 'This Is America' draws life from the unsolvable tension within a society whose bloody business is transmuted into cultural potency at relentless speed.”
“This Is America” acts as somewhat of a companion piece to Atlanta’s Season Two finale, “Crabs in a Barrel.” Both are directed by Hiro Murai, and both deal with the anxiety of guns, entertainment, and survival.
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Last we saw adult Earn, he’d been beaten down literally and figuratively. He’d been cut loose by Al and Van. It seemed like the system had won, and Earn had finally been broken.
But “Crabs in a Barrel” jumps forward ahead a little bit. His scars are still there, but he’s hasn’t stopped fighting. He’s getting Paper Boi and Darius ready to go on an international tour, opening for Clark County. And the actual premise of the episode doesn’t matter as much as the three main interactions Earn has with this season’s three co-stars: Van (Zazie Beetz), Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), and Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry). It’s a fitting structure in a season that allowed each of these characters and actors to anchor their own episodes without Donald Glover.
The first of these is with Van during a parent teacher conference, which begins with the funniest moment of the episode—the Kindergarten teacher absentmindedly humming “Wheels on the Bus.” While we’re used to getting bad news on this show, here’s a moment where something good actually happens: Their daughter is gifted. The teacher suggests putting her in a private school, fully admitting that the public one is garbage. As it always is, money is an issue.
It's a rare moment that we get to see Earn as a father. There he's faced with the reality of what that means. His daughter can actually be something. She can achieve the things he failed at—that is if he can provide her with those opportunities. To do that, he needs to keep working, to keep figuring out how to fight back against the system that's designed against him.
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In the next of these conversations, Darius sits down with Earn in a same-day passport place to discuss where things were left off. Paper Boi had seemed to fire his cousin, and Earn asks Darius what’s going on. And, in his stoned but wise way (which Stanfield has mastered completely), Darius gives Earn some insight:
I see you learning, but learning requires failure. Al just tryin' to make sure you aren’t failing in his life. And, I mean, you both black, so you don’t get a chance to fail.As Darius tells Earn, Paper Boi would probably fire him once they’ve landed, so he can at least see the world first. It’s a romantic idea, one that fits with Paper Boi’s tender interior that’s encased by the persona that hip-hop expects him to have.
At last Earn, Darius, and Paper Boi make it to the airport, where they run into Clark County and Luke (the latter of whom might be taking Earn’s job). As they get in line to pass through security, Earn looks through his bag and finds the gold gun—a callback to Episode One when he got it from Katt Williams’s Alligator Man. It’s a moment of pure terror—one which Murai perfectly builds until the sound drops when Earn finds the gun. We don’t see exactly what happens next, but Earn gets through security and urges Paper Boi to hurry up.
Finally, with Earn somehow through security, he and Paper Boi are on the plane.
I saw what you did. Just know that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Niggas gotta do what they do to survive because they don’t got no other choice. We don’t either. You my family, Earn, you the only one who knows what I’m about, and you give a fuck. I need that.He doesn’t need to say it. Paper Boi never needs to spell things out. But Earn kept his job. He learned that this game is a constant fight for survival. Earn didn’t have any other choice. In that moment, going through the security line, he could have given up and taken whatever punishment would have come with the gun (one that would have put into question the future of his daughter going to a gifted school and having a father), or he could throw the gun away by stepping on someone else on his way to the top. It’s not pretty, but if this show has taught us anything, doing the right thing tends to only hurt Earn and the people he loves.
So, what happened to the gun? Earn put it in Clark County’s bag, who put it in Luke’s bag. And so goes the cycle of Atlanta: Robbin’ Season: You’re only getting ahead at someone else’s expense, because that’s the way things work in America.
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