‘Atlanta’ Recap: How Earn Learned to Pitch a Big Tent and Save His Relationship
A review of this week’s Atlanta, “Snipe Hunt,” coming up just as soon as I prank my daughter…
Early in “Snipe Hunt,” as Earn and Van are setting up the campsite where the two of them and Lottie will celebrate Lottie’s birthday, Van realizes that Earn bought a tent that’s much too big for the three of them to sleep in on a cold night. This is a classic multicam sitcom kind of setup, where the non-outdoorsman fails utterly to handle the demands of nature. Between that and the episode being named after an occasional sitcom plot device (most famously in an episode of Cheers where the guys prank Frasier), I had to wonder if this would be another case of Atlanta going big and broad in the series’ home stretch.
Van is correct about the body heat problem that comes with such a big tent, and the duo fail to assemble it properly. But after a run of very big and funny Atlanta episodes, “Snipe Hunt” opts for a quieter, more wistful tone. Earn screws up with the tent, but he ultimately accomplishes his main goal for the camping trip. He convinces Van to join him in Los Angeles, not as a co-parent and friend, but as the life partner he has finally figured out that he wants her to be.
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It takes a while to get there, though. Francesca Sloane’s script is deliberately light on incident, and for the first half of the episode, director Hiro Murai seems content to just show this small group enjoying the sights and sounds around them. At one point, we are watching them from the opposite bank of the river, the water rushing by with such force and volume that we can barely hear what they’re discussing. At that point, the subject doesn’t matter; the important point, for both the episode and for Earn, is that the three of them are together, and having a good time. They do not agree on everything — Van rightly rejects Earn’s attempt to cross what looks like a deep section of the water — but they are acting like a family. The show has previously been vague about exactly how present Earn has been in his daughter’s life, but we see here that he’s very affectionate with her, quick with a dad joke, and otherwise doing well with the job when he’s around.
We are also reminded, as we saw back in the German festival from Season Two’s “Helen,” that Earn and Van come from different backgrounds and have different views of the world. She did a stint in Girl Scouts, and feels like it’s an appropriate rite of passage to send Lottie out on a snipe hunt after dark, where Earn finds the whole thing weird and uncomfortable. But the joke backfires when Lottie actually catches something, even if the animal(*) ultimately crawls away without harming anyone.
(*) Perhaps a snake, or perhaps some kind of mythical creature; it’s hard to tell in the dark, and with this show, it could be almost anything.
The meat of the episode, though, takes place in that oversized, lopsided tent. Van has been suspicious of Earn all day, assuming he has been putting on a big show of fatherhood to convince her to follow him across the country. And as he presses her on the subject while Lottie sleeps next to them, she accuses him of wanting them along so he won’t feel lonely in a new city. And it’s here that the conversation — and the way that Donald Glover plays this character — makes a significant turn. For almost the entire series, Earn has been a quiet, guarded character. When he shows emotion at all, it tends to be annoyance with the likes of Tracy or Darius. Even when the show put him in therapy earlier this season, the way in which he opened up to his doctor was honest but relatively low-key. He is not someone who likes to reveal himself to the world.
But Van is not the world. She is the mother of his child. And more importantly in this moment, she is the woman that he loves, the woman he repeatedly screwed things up with, and the woman with whom he wants to make it right before it is too late. This is Earn putting himself out there, and Glover does very well for himself in this pleading, romantic mode. By the time Earn’s done with his heartfelt speech about how Van makes him feel, they are both crying, and why shouldn’t they? It is a lovely, lovely moment, and one the series has carefully built to over the course of these four seasons. Not every episode in this batch has been concerned with putting a bow on various stories, but this was too important a matter to progress in between episodes, in the way that so much of Al’s career does.
Lottie has spent much of the trip in a bad mood. She laughs at times at Earn’s jokes, and she gets excited about the snipe hunt. But overall, she is in a funk that neither parent can quite pull her out of. (She even shuts down their attempt to sing a birthday song, in amusingly no-nonsense fashion.) But as the trio drives away from the campsite — having abandoned the stupid tent as a thunderstorm begins — her mood shifts. They are back in the car, Sade again playing on the radio, but now they are a family, real in a way they have never really been before. Van and Earn haven’t said anything about it yet to Lottie, but kids are perceptive when it comes to what their parents are dealing with, and as the notes of “Love Is Stranger Than Pride” fill the car, we see a smile gradually creep across Lottie’s face. At the end of Season Two, the counselor at Lottie’s school suggested that if Earn couldn’t afford to put his daughter into a private school, the best thing to be done for the girl would be for her parents to be together. Earn has lots of money now. More importantly, though, he finally got his act together and figured out how to make the counselor’s suggestion come true, which is the best thing for all of them.
Another great one. Only three episodes left, which does not seem like nearly enough.
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