Atlanta 'Big Payback' episode review: The show solves the reparations issue and also (kinda) goes Full Anthology

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. Throw the whole world into turmoil while keeping track of microscopic emotional shifts. The fourth episode of Atlanta's third season does all that, and establishes a legal framework for reparations, and makes the phrase "Austro-Hungarian" funny forever.

The script (credited to Francesca Sloane) is an open-ended morality tale that devastates even as it charms. The show's frequent director Hiro Murai hits a new register of delicate tonal chaos. Justin Bartha gives the performance of his life. Justin Bartha? Yes, "Big Payback" marks Atlanta's most complete shift from any readily definable version of itself. No regulars appear. 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. It's an excellent bit of breakaway storytelling which does not answer the question of what, precisely, Atlanta is now, besides wonderful.

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. Impossible to look away from the mesmerizing Darius subplot about overreaching white guilt, but "The Old Man and the Tree" mostly could've been a decent midseason episode of The Other Two, complete with some influencer farce. Nothing wrong with that, but Atlanta'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 café line, blissfully listening to Radiolab. He completely misses an incident happening in front of him: A Black Customer (Jerome Beazer) is banished to the back of the line by a White Barista (Ashlyn Starlings). 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? It's a fable in micro — free food for one guy, a longer line for the other — but "Big Payback" turns macro fast. 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. Marshall works a vague office job at the Superior Shrimp Co. (Please freeze-frame the shot with the whiteboard full of tagline ideas: "Shrimp — Get Ready!" "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!" Marshall insists. He asks Lester (Exie Booker), a Black co-worker, for advice. When he doesn't like that advice — the sharp scene-ending edit is just hysterical — he asks his white coworkers for different advice.

"Big Payback" is a Worst Day Ever story, familiar to anyone who has seen The Twilight Zone or any movie with the words "Bad Lieutenant" in the title. 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!" Marshall sputters. (Atlanta never misses a detail. When we see the couple's text chain, a previous text from her has a Caucasian thumbs up; the latest message has a notably darkened downward pointing finger.) Marshall lands in a bummer hotel, pondering his suddenly ruined life "I'm being f---ed by some s--- I didn't even do," he explains. He's just a guy; why is this happening to him?

Persona-wise, Bartha occupies an uncanny valley between handsome love interest (like in The Good Fight) and snarky sidekick (National Treasure). So he's sharp casting here as a stand-in for a certain subset of white American maleness: Nice, thoughtful, absent, desperate. "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.

I'm no legal expert, but I suspect the "Big Payback" decision would run into some snags in real life. (Specifically, six snags with lifetime Supreme Court appointments — though maybe the generally goofy "originalism" philosophy would actually support centuries-old overdue compensation.) The specificities of the case resonate with Atlanta's loftier mission statements. "We were treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past," someone tells Marshall. "Now that history has a monetary value."

"Value" is Atlanta's watchword, a theme explored to relentless yet ambiguous purpose. It was the title of the first proper centric episode for Van (Zazie Beetz), when her glamorous NBA-girlfriend pal insisted "your value" was something Van simply had to know. Valuing yourself sounds like a good idea, but creator Donald Glover and his collaborators always complicate the meaning. Commodifying oneself into a product is not a good thing — this is not a show that loves influencers — but it may be the only economic reality left. "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. The role could call for outrage, but the comedy is in her confidence: She knows she's already won. Still, "Big Payback" is unquestionably the whitest Atlanta ever. We see the culture shift from inside Bartha's bursting bubble. It climaxes with a long conversation between Marshall and a man named Earnest (Tobias Segal), another fugitive from restorative justice. It's Earnest who says the line about the monetary value — and who draws a line from Marshall's suffering to generations of Black oppression. 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.

Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" plays in the background of their talk, the volume edging gradually from restaurant muzak to emotional hymn. The music shifts to a Miles Davis recording, "It Never Entered My Mind," right as a bullet enters Earnest's. It's an astounding scene, and that's before you consider the context. The first time ever we saw Earnest's face, he was on a boat in Atlanta's dream-within-a-dream season premiere, giving a different vast soliloquy about the venom of American racism. That sequence ended with Earnest turning into a monster, while ghosts pulled his Black companion into the watery abyss. Now Earnest himself is dead in the water.

Should we interpret this as progress? First, the ghosts of racism past claimed a new victim, and now the self-aware Phantom of Whiteness is dead? Or should we be skeptical of any person who says "Now we're free" right before dying by suicide? Much of what Earnest says is true, and he wouldn't be the first Atlanta character to clearly state a strange story's clear moral. 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. The Nobel-prizewinning author wrote gloriously about the volcanic open wound in our nation's horror soul, yet he may be falling into a readership valley: Too racist for anti-racists, not racist enough for Mar-a-Lago. (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! But Atlanta's confident vision is reaching into the outer edges of tragicomic wonder. Rewatching the episode, I kept clocking all the tiny details: Marshall's co-worker with the strange neck rash; that crying woman in the office parking lot; the free hotel cookie so tormentingly reminiscent of that stolen madeleine.

This is great, vital television. I'd rank "Big Payback" just behind the season premiere's feverishly funny white-adoption nightmare. Does it matter that the best two episodes of season 3 don't really feature the show's (generally stellar) main cast? I've seen some theories that the show is becoming an outright anthology. I hope that is not true, because anthologies suck. But I think Segal's reappearance suggests some hazy-but-potent continuity between these episodes, and maybe a larger thematic story that will only become clear with time. After Earnest shoots himself, a Black hotel employee nonchalantly responds: "There's more where that came from." It's a funny line, and maybe a promise. I count two masterpiece episodes this season, and we're not even halfway to the finale. Grade: A

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