Recaps: Atlanta, S3 (Vulture)
After a four-year hiatus, season three of Atlanta returns with a question: What can’t water wash away?
Opening with a night-fishing scene in which two men, one white and one Black, discuss their unease on the water, episode one of the new season begins when a forgotten history rises to the surface. As the two men look out into the murky waters, the Black man suggests they call it a night. “Hey, man, I think it’s ’bout time we haul it up out of here,” he says. “Yeah, it might be,” the white man responds, agreeing to head out once he finishes his beer. As they sit, lacking urgency in their plans to leave, the Black man begins to share a traumatic childhood memory of nearly dying in the lake. “This place always gave me the heebie-jeebies, man,” he says. “I almost drowned in [the water] when I was, like, 8,” he explains, noting that he “felt like [he] was being pulled.” Unsurprised, the white man suggests that he was, in fact, being pulled.
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Recaps: Snowfall, S5 (Vulture)
The season-five premiere of Snowfall begins with the fall of a star on the rise. Opening up to a scene at the University of Maryland, a group of young college athletes is doing lines of cocaine. One of the bunch is identified to be none other than Len Bias — the first-team All-American college-basketball player who the Boston Celtics selected as the second overall NBA draft pick in 1986. A bright future ahead of him, a 22-year-old Bias holds his green jersey up to his chest and saunters before his teammates with pride. After a few more lines, he grows quiet and grabs his chest. Panic washes over the scene as his friends scramble for help. Soon it is announced: Len Bias has died of cocaine-induced tachycardia on June 19, 1986, just two days after his draft selection. Snowfall pulls from this cultural archive of the ’80s and situates the death of Bias within a larger story of shifting geopolitics, crime syndicates, and the War on Drugs as they facilitate the increased accessibility of cocaine within the U.S. The tragedy of Bias’s premature death reveals the tensions that heighten the season’s stakes: Last season’s drug game is not this season’s drug game.
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