Image via FX
Atlanta’s fourth season kicked off with two back-to-back episodes on Sept. 15, but the second episode, “The Homeliest Little Horse,” might be one of the most crucial of the entire series. The episode peeled back the many layers surrounding the show’s main character Earnest “Earn” Marks (Donald Glover) and finally revealed the reason why he dropped out of Princeton University. At the start of the series, we met Earn as a struggling college dropout, who in order to make ends meet and provide for his daughter, convinces his cousin Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) to let him manage his music career.
Now that things have finally settled for them and they have found success, Earn is at a point in his life and his career where he can pause and reflect on how his past has affected him and is still controlling the way he operates in the world. The episode kicks off with Al laughing and roasting Earn over the phone when he says he’s on his way to therapy, joking that he’s paying him too much money since he’s “giving it away.” The Sopranos already covered the whole aspect of tough men secretly going to therapy in fear of being shamed more than 20 years ago, but that exchange between Al and Earn is a reminder that the conversation surrounding Black men, vulnerability, and therapy still has ways to go.
Earn begins the conversation with his therapist, Everette Tillman (Sullivan Jones), and he begins to talk about having heart problems and a tightness in his chest, which his doctors have told him could be due to depression, panic attacks, or anxiety. Earn doesn’t believe them because things are going well in his life, like his probation ending and Princeton asking him to speak at an event. The therapist continues to probe more, and slowly Earn reveals that he’s actually deciding whether to accept a job offer in Los Angeles that could take him away from his daughter Lottie, which starts causing tension in his chest during the session—hinting that his stresses and anxieties might just be behind the physical symptoms he’s experiencing.
For the most part, Earn has been reserved and introspective throughout the show, and he barely opens up about his insecurities or any problems he experienced along the way to anyone in his life. As his rapport and trust with his therapist grow with each session, Earn seems more dynamic than ever and he starts to break down the hard shell that has encased him for most of the series. He reveals he doesn’t really trust anyone in his circle, and finally shares why he was expelled from Princeton, as well as the therapist mentioning that a family member abused Earn when he was a child. (Glover also delivers one of his most electrifying performances in this scene, showing way more emotional depth than we’ve seen from him in this role.)
Earn tells his therapist about a friend he made in school named Sasha, and what she did to ruin his reputation which led to him being kicked out of the Ivy League university. He went into detail about how one day a girl he liked invited him to a party, and Sasha offered to hold a suit he had purchased earlier for an important job interview in her dorm room until he returned. After the party, Sasha, who was a white girl, refused to answer his calls or text messages, practically holding his suit hostage. In a moment of despair, Earn went into her room without her consent using the master key he had because he was a resident assistant. Sasha reported the incident to the dean, saying she felt violated and that her privacy was infringed on. Regardless of him being a good student (one of only 12 Black students in the whole school, might I add) and an RA, Earn felt like no one listened to him enough to believe him. As much as he tried to provide an explanation and reasoning for what he did, he was still expelled.
The incident upended Earn’s life, taking him off the path he believed he was destined for. He was brilliant and intelligent and had a world of opportunities ahead of him, but Sasha’s accusations took him off course. It was the reason why he moved back to Atlanta, and was borderline homeless and working a dead-end job when we met him at the start of the series. He knew he was meant for more, and that is the source of his anger, his frustration, and why he has always had a chip on his shoulder. “I just promised I would prove everybody wrong,” Earn tells his therapist. “I love spite. It’s a pure, powerful thing. It gave me courage. I could count on it.”
The situation left a lasting mark on Earn, who continued to deal with a long list of misfortunes throughout the series. It sometimes felt like he couldn’t win no matter how hard he tried, and constantly had to prove himself, even to his family.
Season 4 does find him a bit more settled. Al’s rap career is thriving, Earn is working a new job at an agency and making good money, and considering a move to Los Angeles for an even bigger job opportunity. He’s dressing better, driving a nice car, and remodeling his new place. But the thing about unprocessed trauma and loss is that even when things are going well, one thing going awry is enough to trigger you and send you back down another path of destruction.
Earn tells his therapist about another incident he recently experienced at the airport. After their conversations about spite in therapy, Earn had decided to accept Princeton’s offer to speak at the school and he wanted to use the trip as a way to face his past, while also turning the trip into a family vacation to Sesame Place with Van (Zazie Beetz) and Lottie. Things were going as planned until a white woman working at the airport refused to let them on their flight because his passport was “too damaged” to travel—so they were forced to cancel the trip.
The situation became another example of Earn feeling helpless, belittled, unheard, and overlooked, while also being unable to make up for the time he planned to spend with his child and Van. He was angry about the situation, and understandably so, especially because of what the trip represented for him. But Earn’s inability to let go of the past—and move on from the things that have made him feel small and insignificant—continue to get the best of him. As soon as it looks like he is making progress in therapy, he withdraws again and returns to where we started. He tells his therapist he is pausing his sessions and pretends like he has made peace with and learned from both situations.
That’s when we return to the B-plot of the episode which focused on a white woman named Lisa Mahn. She prematurely quits her job at the airport after a literary agent reaches out about her children’s book manuscript. He tells her in order to have the book published she has to land a publisher by hosting a book reading for kids at a local library. But it goes horribly wrong as the publisher and the kids walk out of the reading, leaving her with nothing.
It turns out that Lisa was the woman who got in the way of Earn’s trip and he had orchestrated a whole plan to get back at her, enlisting the help of paid actors (including Season 2’s Tracy) who all worked together to make her believe she was on the brink of literary success. Instead, she has gone into debt from hiring stylists, publicists, and illustrators, and is now unemployed—which were all parts of Earn’s big revenge.
When he tells Al and Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) about the whole setup at a party to celebrate his plan’s success, Al asks: “You’re still tripping off of that?” To which Darius adds: “That was two months ago.” Darius also wonders if this is an “extreme level of pettiness or terrorism,” but even their disapproval doesn’t seem to faze Earn at first. “You better watch out man, you’re next,” Earn quips at Tracy, who beat him up in Season 2’s “North of the Border.” Tracy takes it as a joke, but deep down we all know that Earn has something coming for Tracy, too.
Earn seems quite pleased with himself and the results of his vengeance at first, and then he whispers to himself as he sits alone at the bar, “I really need to go back to therapy.” And he couldn’t be more right. Suppressed resentment, anger, sadness, or any other emotion can lead to bigger problems down the line, including physical ailments. There have been studies and research that have determined that holding onto grudges, chronic anger, and disappointments can cause depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which keep a person in a constant state of fight or flight mode. Anger can have a toxic effect on the body and can trigger a heart attack. On the contrary, forgiveness can prevent a person from developing heart problems and can even lower the risk of heart attacks.
“The Homeliest Little Horse” serves as a guide into the makings of Earn and shows why he was so hell-bent on making sure he and Al’s careers were a success. There was a lot more riding on it than him being able to provide for his family—he had something to prove to himself and to the people, like Sasha, that he deeply trusted and let him down. As much time as the characters on this show spend together, based on this episode and Season 3’s finale that showed Van’s mental breakdown, none of them have deep enough connections with one another to really open up about their inner turmoil. Al is also someone who is constantly at odds with himself, his past, and his fame, and he can’t confide in the two closest people to him. They are all experiencing some level of grief that they have kept to themselves for way too long. Remember, you can’t heal what you never reveal—or whatever Jay-Z said.
Atlanta is known for moving on from a storyline or topic without further exploration, so there is no guarantee we will revisit Earn’s progress in therapy as the season goes on, or if the show will ever talk about his struggles ever again. But what Earn experienced in his childhood and in college would have lasting effects on just about anyone if left untreated, so viewers seeing him going to therapy is a start. He needs it, and so may every other character on Atlanta. And if we’re being honest, those of us who watch the show could probably benefit from a session or two as well.
Atlanta airs on FX on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET.