I apologize for missing the review last week, but I switched my Internet operator and had some trouble connecting, but now that I've sorted that out, I finally had a chance to watch both episode 5 and 6, and here's my take on both of them.
Nobody Beats the Biebs
Once again, Atlanta proves to be a one of a kind show, and in episode 5 it does that by introducing none other than Justin Bieber into the show, but wait... he's black!
The episode expands on the usual two prong approach, now showing three different and separated storylines for the three characters. Alfred is invited to a celebrity basketball game and that's where he meets black Bieber, another one of those moments where Atlanta gets deep into the surreal territory to make a point about something. Because see, the black Bieber acts in crazy and forced unconventional ways just like the one we know, but it sure looks different when it is a black guy that urinates in a corner of the locker room or gets his hand in the face of the journalist interviewing him. Alfred can't understand while people love him so much despite all his weirdness, and the celebrity game becomes a one on one battle between the two, with the morale at the end being that Alfred will never become a famous rapper, unless he embraces his role as "the bad guy" and becomes the a-hole that everyone else want him to be.
Meanwhile Earn is mistaken for some guy named Alonzo by another agent, played by the amazing Jane Adams, there at the celebrity game. He exploits the mistake to finally make some true progress in his career as an artist agent and make some real collection with other colleagues, but he also later finds out that said Alonzo threw a curveball to Janice (the agent that mistook Earn for Alonzo) when they were colleaguse, and she threatens him to ruin take back whatever he stole from her, despite Earn coming out about the misunderstanding.
Finally, Darius arc is just a small sequence intertwined between the ones of the two main characters where he goes to the shooting range bringing with him the cutoff of a dog, much to the despair of the other people training there with him, who are unable to understand why would he want to shoot to a dog, and accusing him of being heartless, all the meanwhile bringing themselves uncanny cutoff like the one that had a man smoking a cigar with the word "dad" spelled all over it. Finallly he's forced by the owner to leave the premises since the riff was about to become something much bigger with the mexicans there taking his side "against" the white folks.
Overall another very strong outing, one that like "The Streisand Effect" makes the best out of depicting a surreal world that is as faulty and as biased as the one we live in.
1.05 - "Nobody Beats the Biebs" - A-
Value
After widening its approach in the previous week episode, this time the show floats away from its usual structure, almost completely foregoes the three main characters Earn, Alfred and Darius and focus solely on Van, Earn's girlfriend catching up with her long time friend Jayde, whom she had not seen in a while.
After Van storms out of the restaurant, their night seems to be over, but Jayde manages to reconnect with his old girlfriend over the offer of smoking a joint together just like old time. This is where the episode turns into Van doing everything she can think of to avoid getting busted by the drug test awaiting her at work the morning after, and that she had completely forgotten of. She doesn't want to ask Earn's help (we see a glimpse of him as he stops by at home and even as a sweet moment with their daughter), so she's forced to call Alfred, asking for his help. That's how she gets the idea of using clean urine, putting it in a condom tied to her thigh, but instead of waiting for Alfred to come through on his connect for some clean piss, she finds a clever way to "squeeze" her daughter's urine out of the used diapers.
The episode ends on a rather bitter note, with Van finding out, after she didn't manage to properly "game" the system, that all her effort was for nothing since the school doesn't even send the samples to the lab anymore, but with her admitting to the principal about her trespass, she's now being fired because of it. This one was probably the weakest episode of the season so far, Van proved to be an interesting character to follow, but she's not on the same level as Earn, Alfred or Darius, though it didn't in any way felt unnecessary, but rather a stepping stone the show had to go through to give us a bigger understanding of Earn's world.1.06 - "Value" - B-
