Atlanta: When No Place is Home
The first episode of the fourth and final season of Atlanta sees its main characters returning from a European tour and lost in their own city. Throughout its run, the series has delighted in constructing a firmly established reality, supported by the locals-only details of its setting, while seamlessly disrupting it with fantasy. It’s not that we enter another world, but rather that the unreal folds itself into reality as if it weren’t any different at all — much like the casual racism its characters regularly face, deep-seated hatred inflicting itself into daily life as if it were just part of the routine. So it’s only appropriate that the show’s final episodes would present Earn (Donald Glover), Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), and Van (Zazie Beetz) in a state of disorientation.
Though they’ve returned to familiar terrain, the characters still end up wandering, with no sense of where their journey might take them: Darius tries to return an air fryer to a department store, only to end up being chased across the city by a strange vigilante, an older white woman in a wheelchair (Deadra Moore); Alfred discovers that Blue Blood, a rapper he admires, has recently died and left clues to an Atlanta-based scavenger hunt in the lyrics of his final album; and Earn and Van take a trip to the Atlantic Station mall and find themselves in a time warp where they constantly run into their exes.
Earn and Alfred both continue to struggle with their inability to trust others. When Earn began as Alfred’s manager in the show’s earliest episodes, he made hapless mistakes and repeatedly entered competitions that he was guaranteed to lose. Now, he’s mastered the cunning and ruthlessness of his profession, which, of course, only deepened his trust issues. In the final season’s second episode, Earn glibly tells his therapist (a grounded and compelling Sullivan Jones): “I trust people to be honest based on their incentives and how they rationalize things.” To which the therapist responds, with a knowing smile: “So, no one.”
Alfred, meanwhile, continues to face the seemingly bottomless cynicism of the music industry. When a Jewish millionaire (Jared Simon) pays him a fortune to teach his son (Daniel Rashid) how to rap, he learns that other rappers have begun mentoring and managing wealthy white teenagers as a way to cash in on their fast-track TikTok fame. He quickly jumps on the band wagon, as past experience has shown him that it’s useless to reach for higher ideals when everyone is just looking out for themselves.
Indeed, Atlanta has consistently provided some of the toughest and most refreshing satire on the entertainment world as a whole. Everyone from executives to professional activists show themselves to ultimately be profiteers with flexible moral standards. When Alfred asks Earn how he rationalizes his work as a talent manager, he says, “I just remember it’s not about what feels good. It’s about what survives.”
Fundamentally, Atlanta is about the difficulty of finding contentment in a world that perpetually keeps you on the defensive. In such circumstances, you can never really settle down, no matter where you call home. (The sole exception is Stanfield’s delightful, kind-eyed Darius, who seems happy living in his own reality, independent of the external world.) There may only be one place where the other characters ultimately find “home.” In a moving scene at the end of Robbin’ Season, Alfred tells Earn, “You’re the only one that knows what I’m about. You give a fuck. I need that.” As the series comes to a close, it confirms that we all need it too.