"Everybody needs to feel special sometimes. Why do you think porn exists?"
After two episodes rather out of the box, with "Van" almost completely focused on the homonym character, and the surreal "B.A.N." which worked as a show inside the show, the whole gang gets again to be the focus in this week's episode of Atlanta, which set in a club called "Primal" explores the typical night clubbing life of the city.
The premise is that the gang is there for promotional reasons, the club gets to stamp the Paper Boi name on the flyer for the night and in turn they get paid 5 thousand dollars and get to stay there the whole night and drink for free (though not at will, maximum of 3 bottle allowed!). Alfred just like in "Nobody Beats the Biebs" is challanged with the fact that he's simply not as famous as he wants or thinks he is. While the whole club is pumped because Marcus Miles the Point Guard of the Atlanta Hawks is there (of course fictional name for a fictional character) almost nobody seems to care that Paper Boi is also in the house, and he's forced to offer free bottles of champagne to complete strangers for his VIP table to get at least a little crowded. During the night he meets a girl, and while he doesn't really accomplishes his objective (which of course was to bring her home or at least get her number), as she puts it just hanging with her fulfilled his experience of "having a good time" at the club.
Meanwhile Earn has to catch a really elusive promoter that slips his way around the club to avoid paying Earn and Alfred their due. He also meets a girl while running around the club, some barista that confronts him about his attitude and how he always believes to be better than the people he circles himself with. He, just like Alfred in the other arc, is critical of the Clubbing world and of the people that partake in it, but also in some ways enjoys being there, because it allows him to feel superior of those having fun around him. Moving on though, with the help of the barista he later catches the promoter, but has to settle for much less money than previously agreed. As he states to Alfred soon after, when he meets him, "I just don't scare people, they know I drink juice and shit". Luckily for him, Alfred is already very mad about the rest of the night, and he goes all Hulk like on the promoter, punching his way to the 5 thousand dollars that he was promised. That takes us to the end of the episode with the shootout outside the club and the awesome payoff for the running joke about Marcus Miles' car.
In all of this though, Darius is not missing, he's the one that first teases the joke about Marcus' invisible car, that gives some words of wisdom to Alfred about the girl that was checking him out, and then after a surreal exchange with a bouncer, finds himself outside of the VIP table because he wore the wrong wristband. He goes back home to playing Zoo Tycoon on his Xbox, but gets back with the gang just in time to find out, while eating at a diner in the middle night, that the police is once again looking for Alfred aka Paper Boi.
After two weeks of experimenting with the formula, the show needed to get back to said formula and did with an amazing episode that featured all of our beloved main characters and was able to be original while dealing with a theme (the clubbing and partying) that isn't exatcly unheard of in the TV business. We're almost at the end of this first impressive, fresh, surreal season, and almost the point of drawing some final judgement about the work in its wholesome, but so far it sure has lived up to the hype.
1.08 - "The Club" - A