Yeah I wasn't nearly as impressed with it as twitter or some of yall. I was engaged for the entire 40 minutes but by the end I felt like they setup something cool and didn't know what to do with it so they just killed everybody.

My first problem was that there were some filmmaking/storytelling technical questions that I found distracting. Was Donald Glover suppose to be a white man or a black person in whiteface (a la Michael Jackson)? But then I generally find whiteface distracting because its like White Chicks, no matter how good the makeup is, you can never really suspend belief enough to really believe anyone won't see that it's a black person in white face. If the story intended it to be a black person in whiteface and make commentary on MJJ, that's cool but they could have signaled that in the storytelling. If they intended that to just be a white guy, well then the idea DG gave an emmy winning performance is silly to me.

Anyway, that's a minor gripe. My biggest gripe is that this is so obviously a Get Out influenced episode but I am not sure why people give it the benefit of the doubt of being a tribute as oppose to being a rip off? It wasn't a parody of Get Out. It wasn't Commentary on Get Out or the reaction to the movie. It didn't openly reference Get Out. It was just very similar to movie without being additive. That's not terrible. Artist do this all the time, but I kind of feel like because it's Donald Glover, folks are giving him a pass they wouldn't give other artist. Small storytelling gripe: Comeon folks talking about this is as scary as Get Out, different from Get Out you just knew that they weren't going to kill Darius so the stakes were way different in this episode than the movie.

I think there is something interesting their about celebrity and MJJ, but I don't think they said much besides tough show biz parents can screw up their kids.

What I roll my eyes at are all these people reading so much deep meaning into this episode. I just don't think it's there or that the Glovers went that deep with it (e.g., the elevator was intended to invoke the death of Prince. I might have bought that if one of the actors actually died in the elevator but naw. Or that this episode was the freeing of Darius's character from Get Out. Nope). I think this episode was borne out of Donald Glovers desire to try white face and they really didn't have a lot of deep ideas about what to do with it.

And I am not an anti-critical literal analysis type. I was an English Major. One of my last college papers was about how Hamlet was the first self-aware literary character because he was aware he was actually in a play and he was being literally when he said "All the world is a stage...." So I can dig different readings of a work. But it is one thing to ascribe different meanings and readings to a work and it's another thing to say the author INTENDED certain deeper esoteric meanings. Like I read this today:


ep. 1: "alligator man" - the drive-thru scene explains it all

ep. 2: "sporting waves" - paper boi's plug pulls a robbery & tracy robs the shoes

ep. 3: "money bag shawty" - earn & van are robbed of their dignity by racism

ep. 4: "helen" - earn & van rob each other of a potential future together

ep. 5: "barbershop" - bibby robs everyone of time, honesty, money, lumber, trust

ep. 6: "teddy perkins" - a father robs his kids of their childhood, ends up with deadly consequences


Maybe people think that's deep but you can literally make that reading work for anything.

Anyway, again, I think people are trying extra-hard to add a layer of depth to this episode that I doubt they would do if this wasn't Atlanta and Donald Glover.

Ok, that's enough hating for one day.


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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"