Atlanta: Season 3/ Episode 2 “Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town” – Recap/ Review (with Spoilers)

We catch up with Earn, Van, Darius, and Alfred as they head into the Netherlands for Paper Boi’s European tour and learn about Zwarte Piet.

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Aired	3/24/2022
Network	FX
Directed By	Hiro Murai
Written By	Janine Nabers
Introduced This Episode
Dirk	Matteo Simoni

Recap

Life Is Strange, Isn’t It? – Darius, Earn, Van

With Earn being late and a bit messed up after a night with a white girl who barely speaks English, Darius is tasked with picking up Van from the airport. He obliges, and the two do more than share a ride to the hotel but go thrift shopping together and join a peculiar group that suffocates someone Darius believes to be Tupac.

Holland Is Weird – Al, Earn, Dirk

Thanks to two girls he went to bed with fighting over what is and isn’t racist, Al ended up in a jail cell that had the kind of services which mirrored his fancy hotel. Making it so, despite Earn getting 20,000 from the promoter, Dirk, Al wasn’t really trying to quickly leave his cell. Though with it being the holiday season and seeing many people in Blackface, while the cell was nice, neither Earn nor Al are ready to stick around Holland for longer than they have to.

They Got Me F’d Up – Al, Earn, Dirk, Van

Imagine this: You are an American rapper from Atlanta, and the entire crowd is in Blackface. With seeing that, Al cancels and has Earn handle Dirk, who is quite upset that Paper Boi is canceling and thinks Earn is trying to screw him over. He’s so mad that he wants to fight, but with everyone in Blackface, and Dirk unable to differentiate Earn from a random guy in face paint, they take the ass whooping meant for Earn, and Earn just heads back to the hotel where Van, for some reason, is up 4 AM getting ice in a robe.

Things To Note

• Unexpected Content Advisory: Miscellaneous (Loads of Blackface), Violence (See someone get suffocated)

What Could Happen Next

1. Dirk’s curse haunting the rest of the European tour
2. Van and Darius getting closer, and her having a “What happens in Europe, stays in Europe” mindset

Review

Highlights

Darius & Van Being The Combination You Didn’t Know You Needed

Darius is everyone’s favorite weirdo who, with being relatively uninhibited and chill, can be a bit alluring. So Van hanging out with him, having her go on this adventure and seeing it through, even when it goes left, certainly must appeal to her with life not going as she wants and her unsure of what to do next. Now, does this guarantee they are messing around behind Earn’s back, never mind whoever Van’s boyfriend is back in the states? No.

However, there is this vibe that Van doesn’t want to play it safe and might want to be messy. That Van desires to hit a hard reset on her life, figure stuff out, and with Darius being zen, a decent listener, and with thoughts and vibes that aren’t easily found by the everyday dude, he might be the one for this journey she is on. One that could potentially be intense but doesn’t have to be a thing beyond whatever goes on during this tour.

Which, when you consider how Van’s character has been a bit of an accessory to Earn’s for most of the show, this could ultimately become the long-overdue focus and period of development Van deserves.

An Introduction To Zwarte Piet & Other Unique Features Of the Netherlands

As it did with episode 1, it seems the idea here is to remind or expose you to stuff you don’t know or put in the back of your head. This time around, it is pointing out how prisons are in the Netherlands, the character of Zwarte Piet, and even if it was a very minor thing in Al’s hotel room, showing that racism is a topic of discussion no matter where in the world you are. That and you can’t escape certain people who don’t know boundaries and have to get punched in the face to learn them.

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