A truth that will or might not be confirmed: When roughly translated to straightforward English, the title of the penultimate episode of Atlanta’s third season, “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga,” really means “selecting time.”

This can be a lie. I’m mendacity. I simply couldn’t assist myself. It’s simpler this fashion.

Let’s be sincere: There’s one entry left within the season, the whole lot’s all jumbled, installment no. 9 is one other one-off, Donald Glover and Co. gained’t cease doing these each different episode, and a recapper’s received to make sense of it someway. So “selecting time” was the decide. My apologies. Quibble should you’d like, although I’d ask, what’s the optimum idiom? The choice description for each an outing about (spoiler alert) a personality choosing sides, and an viewers ready for the return of a collection that will not exist?

So, “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga.” It’s a racial horror, a narrative just like the reparations-centered fourth episode “The Large Payback,” apart from a number of key variations. As a substitute of monitoring a white man as he grapples with Judgment Day, the determine of focus on this case is a high-yella teen who’s spent his life mixing into the sunny aspect of the colour line. (The hook is what number of methods the boy could be made to twist, squirm, fuss, and writhe in pursuit of racial equilibrium.) Atlanta’s vital cognoscenti gained’t have a lot bother pegging this outing as an extension of the long-lived tragic mulatto trope—the mixed-race protagonist torn between two forlorn worlds—but when we’re being sincere, “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga” is only a bit too cynical, exact, and humorous to suit that sort of invoice.

How the episode connects to the remainder of the collection is unclear; whether or not it caught the touchdown just isn’t. Your place on the latter will most likely be dependent in your skill to tolerate the previous.

The primary pictures of the episode are of objects in a room, the trimmings of Gen Z white boydom: a Submit Malone print, merch from Jake Paul’s 2016 comedy tour, an image from a sporting occasion with a bunch of screaming, foam-fingered preppies, a poster of a nondescript blond in a skinny bikini. Aaron (Tyriq Withers), a senior at Stonewall Jackson Excessive Faculty, is taking part in a fictional on-line taking pictures recreation referred to as Flamethrower 2. At this level within the episode, his race is left for the viewers to interpret on their very own, a choice codified partly by the selection to movie in black and white.

As the sport peaks, so does a refrain of shit-talking (Aaron’s Black counterparts imagine him to be white). When he receives a textual content from his girlfriend asserting that she’s been admitted to a neighborhood college, ASE, Aaron snaps, slithering seamlessly into the position of bigoted heel. When he loses the competition, he lets free a collection of slurs, literal ape noises, and gauche banana jabs, then turns off the console to sulk.

The subsequent morning Aaron’s father, who’s Black, is driving him to highschool in his pickup, when a narrative a couple of 15-year-old Black boy, killed by police in a routine visitors cease, blares from the radio. His pops expresses concern. Aaron doesn’t see the issue. He’d be alive if he’d adopted orders. “Boy, your white pals actually received you confused,” the patriarch laughs, “don’t they?” The son’s social circle is outright alabaster; it’s not precisely clear whether or not Aaron’s college pals are unaware of his heritage or just select to disregard it. (He’s received a slight tan and a bone-straight curl sample.) Whereas his girlfriend and his boys are desperate to have a good time their shared admission to ASE, Aaron is cagey about his plans. He doesn’t come up with the money for. His dad gained’t even fill out the FAFSA, not to mention take out any loans.

This week’s Liam Neeson award for random superstar visitor goes to the late YouTuber, life-style guru, and misogynist Kevin Samuels, who seems a couple of third of the way in which by as a magnate named Robert Shea Lee, who’s the inheritor to a multimillion-dollar hair-product empire. (That Samuels died simply final week makes the looks all of the extra discombobulating.) Lee, an alum of the highschool, pledges to donate 1,000,000 {dollars} to the establishment, change its identify from celebrating that of a “degenerate slave proprietor”—Stonewall Jackson—to honoring “one of many richest Black males this aspect of the Mississippi” (himself) and, lastly, pay the faculty tuition of each senior … who’s Black.

“That is what they did to Black folks within the ’50s, proper?” one in every of Aaron’s white pals protests. “I imply, they already go to highschool totally free.” The strings, which mark the soundscape all through, exude an more and more off-kilter high quality. Aaron seems panicked.

He heads to the auditorium, the place a crowd is ready to confirm their Blackness to a tribunal led by Lee. A South Asian dude with a durag, who’s ready to strive his hand on the entire Blackness factor, tells Aaron that Lee, “doesn’t imagine that ADOS necessitates Blackness while you’re actually speaking in regards to the tradition of Black in America.” Whereas they’re speaking, the tribunal (which incorporates the standup comic George Wallace at his most beguiling) unceremoniously calls Aaron in. The auditorium is pitch black, save for the define of a highlight. The tribunal instructs Aaron to “step into the sunshine.” The inquiries lobbed to certify his ancestry embrace the next gems:

Title me six issues that blend with Hennessy?
Bobby and Whitney or Will and Jada?
The place’s the primary place you are taking your cousin when he will get out of jail?
Your momma or your mom?
Mustard or mayonnaise?
Orange or grape Kool-Help?

The digicam follows Aaron’s motion and expressions as he performs for the tribunal, solely chopping from his determine a number of seconds after he utters the wonderful non sequitur of a response, “If her foot is in it, it’s good.” The tribunal stays unmoved, refusing to present him a scholarship. “How lengthy you been coasting in your whiteness, son?” Lee asks, simply earlier than the child storms out.

Again along with his father, Aaron is sizzling. (For what one imagines to be the primary time in his life, he makes use of the phrase “colorist.”) As Aaron complains, he notices his girlfriend flirting with one other man on Instagram and calls her out. She says she is aware of he’s not going to varsity and decides to interrupt up with him. The sequence caps a run of close-ups within the center third of the episode—momentary pictures of faces as they snigger, frown, scream, and seethe.

And seething is strictly how Aaron responds to the break up. He leans all the way in which in on the disaffected play. In a dreamlike montage, Aaron constructs a real-life flamethrower and exits his house, able to burn the world. When he arrives on the newly erected Robert S. Lee college signal, he meets a equally alienated child who additionally occurs to tote a flamethrower. His identify is Felix, he’s Nigerian however grew up overseas, and Lee’s tribunal rejected his Blackness too. The place most would see Felix as an ally, Aaron, ever the lord, mutters that he can see why they turned the emigree down. “You understand the place you’re from, you possibly can hint your ancestry, you also have a nation and identification to fall again on.”

Felix seems at Aaron and responds (splendidly): “You seem like fucking Frankie Muniz.”

Unable to take an L with grace, Aaron makes an terrible joke about Felix’s pores and skin tone, sparking a flamethrower duel between the 2 would-be arsonists (Felix burns down the marquee). For a couple of minutes they chase one another, by alleys, buildings, and courtyards. Simply as Felix has Aaron pinned, a cop fires a shot to his chest.

By the highest of the following scene, Felix has someway survived and is being wheeled on a gurney towards an ambulance. Lee, who’s simply arrived to see the harm executed to his funding, tells the wounded teen that “getting shot by the police is the Blackest factor you are able to do.” He guarantees to maintain Felix’s medical payments, pays the EMTs to take him to the “White” Grady Hospital (not Emory), and offers him a scholarship test for his troubles. Then the cops take Aaron away and the display screen fades, momentarily, to black.

It’s an attention-grabbing take. For most likely the primary time this season, in “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga,” the stand-alone narrative doesn’t really feel prefer it’s coming from an area of surety. The episode presents most frequently as an intra-communal dialogue, full of purposefully flawed, twisted, and unreliable narrators. Racial identification on this case is framed as messy and contradictory, inconsistent and ever-changing—it issues till it doesn’t and is in the end depending on time, place, circumstance, and the person. Race exists, sure, however in relative precarity.

Within the last seconds of the episode, the timeline strikes ahead a 12 months. Aaron has, um … chosen a aspect: The brother’s received a skintight fade, a component on his temple, and Cuban linx that dangle under the collar of his shirt. He appears to be working at a division retailer. We see him hollering at a buyer (the one Black lady to look within the episode). As he tries to get her quantity, his white ex walks by and acknowledges him in shock. The previous companions alternate just a little small speak. Aaron periodically pulls out his brush to are inclined to his erstwhile waves. The dialog runs its course, and his ex turns to depart.

“Hey, can I be sincere with you?” Aaron asks, earlier than pausing briefly. “I’ve by no means been extra interested in you in my life,” he finishes, turning to the digicam.

What does the final scene imply for the remainder of the collection? I’ve received no thought. Is it a commentary on Black males normally, biracial males specifically, and even Donald himself (he of “Are you afraid of Black girls” and possible-Asian-fetish fame)? Possibly it’s an announcement on Black artistry and the draw and hazard of the mainstream—learn: white—gaze? Possibly it’s in regards to the inevitable fruitlessness of each racial passing and racial efficiency, of attempting to outwit two sorts of inheritance?

The factor that almost all stands out at this stage within the season is: Does it even matter? In an age when movie and tv worship the idols of plot, interconnectivity, and concept, does Atlanta need to have some extent past no matter was final on display screen? Do we have to know the precise states of Van’s or Darius’s headspaces? Or if Al and Earn can steadiness inventive ambition and monetary stability (or a scarcity thereof)? The present was gone for 4 years. Quite a bit has modified. That it took this kind in its return appears to be an argument in and of itself. If the penultimate episode is any indication, the message is that there’s no proper means to do that, that the whole lot’s context dependent. In “Wealthy Wigga, Poor Wigga,” as appears to be the brand new regular on Atlanta, race is fickle and proper is an abstraction.