"The Big Payback" is the fourth episode of the third season of Atlanta. It is the twenty-fifth episode of the series overall. It was released on April 7, 2022 on FX.[1]
Premise[]
I was legit scared watching this.
Plot[]
At a coffee shop, a man named Marshall Johnson waits in line while listening to Radiolab on his AirPods. After he gets his order, he gets back to his car, where he took a bag of cookies from the shop. As he drives off, another car follows him. He then visits his separated wife, Natalie, to take his daughter, Katie, to school.
While leaving her at school, Marshall hears a story in the radio, about a black man who sued a Tesla investor as his ancestors enslaved his forebears. At his office, Marshall and his colleagues are informed that the company is preparing for layoffs and the company is also being put under investigation for similar claims to the Tesla investor. Marshall's white colleagues are scared of the implications and they are researching their family trees to see if their ancestors were slave owners, while his black colleagues are seen celebrating the events. As Marshall exits his office, he finds a white colleague crying in the parking lot.
After picking up Katie, she questions if they are racist and ever owned slaves, which Marshall denies, remarking that as their ancestors were Austro-Hungarian slaves during the Byzantine Empire and he wouldn't demand any payment for that. That night, Marshall is visited by a black woman named Sheniqua Johnson, who is suing him as his family owned her ancestors. She then enters his house by herself, livestreaming it and demanding $3 million, prompting Marshall to kick her out in front of Katie. The next day at the office, Marshall sees that most of the black employees are absent and even sees a white man wearing a shirt that reads "I owned slaves" as part of losing a lawsuit. He is further humiliated when Sheniqua shows up at the parking lot demanding money.
Marshall consults with a black coworker, who advises him to just tell her to admit his family's mistake, meet with her one-on-one and pay her as much as he can, and she will honestly drop the issue. Ignoring this advice, he consults his white coworkers, who tell him to instead contest the lawsuit. Natalie contacts Marshall, who does not want to be affected by his connections and wants to finalize the divorce. When Marshall returns to his home, Sheniqua and her friends chase him off and he checks into a hotel.
He laments his situation as he goes downstairs to the hotel lobby. There, he meets a white man named Earnest "E", who is in the same situation. E explains how he learned a lesson from his grandfather, viewing slavery not as past, but as a "cruel unavoidable ghost." He states they will be fine then steps outside and commits suicide by shooting himself in the head.
The scene then transitions to a Hispanic man arriving to his job at a restaurant. One of the employees is revealed to be Marshall, who has part of his salary garnished as "restitution taxes" to Sheniqua. The employees then start working, showing that most of them are people of color. Marshall then takes a dish and takes it to a black family; the camera zooms out to reveal that the waitstaff is mostly white and the diners are almost exclusively people of color.
Gallery[]
Videos[]
