Atlanta "Tarrare" Explained: Season 3 Episode 10 Finale Review

Atlanta "Tarrare" explained: a season finale without its leads

Anyone expecting the Atlanta finale to bring the crew back for a farewell was in for a surprise. Season 3 spent its ten episodes alternating between the European tour of Earn, Al and Darius and a series of stand-alone stories, and "Tarrare" belongs to the second group. It is set in Paris, written by Stefani Robinson, directed by Donald Glover, and built around Van, played by Zazie Beetz. Earn, Al and Darius appear only in a closing beat after the credits. For a finale, it is a bold choice, and it works because the season has been preparing the viewer for episodes that wander.

The episode opens with Candice, played by Adriyan Rae, and her friends Shanice and Xosha on what they call a business trip. They are in Paris for a paid weekend with clients whose tastes are not the subject of conversation. Everyone is a little sad, and Candice is the first to say so. When they take a walk through historic sites, she senses something stronger going on in the city, and then she sees Van down the street grabbing a baguette, dressed and moving like a character from Amelie.

Van does not recognize her at first, and then she does. She invites the group to her apartment, still in full French-fantasy mode, and the women realize that someone from their neighborhood is living a borrowed life. She has been working in the kitchen of a restaurant owned by a man named Marcel for months. She pours wine, and Candice asks the obvious question: what is she doing here? Before it can be answered, Van carries them off on a motorbike with a long baguette in her backpack.

The ride along and Alexander Skarsgård

The next stretch is a tour of chaos. Van weaves the group through crowded streets to a hotel that could have come from a Wes Anderson film, where she needs to pick up keys from a friend. The friend turns out to be Alexander Skarsgård, playing himself as a wealthy, high, self-regarding host who wants a threesome with Candice's friends. Van, who has no interest in a conversation, places drugs on his bed and then leads the women to the front desk to beg for an ambulance. It is the best performance of her act so far, and the viewer begins to understand that she is running a game.

The episode gets its title from the next sequence. In a Paris arrondissement, Van insists on going into a building while Candice would rather wait outside. Van shouts "Tarrare!" as a battle cry, and it recurs through the evening. Tarrare was an eighteenth-century French showman and soldier famous for an insatiable appetite, willing to swallow almost anything. The name is the key to the whole hour: it is about consuming and being consumed.

The loaf, the dinner and the hands

After a scramble through the subway, Van brings the group to the door of her friend Carlos. The walk-up looks shabby, but inside is a clean, pristine art museum. Emilio, who has wronged Van, apologizes at length, and the apology does him no good. Van pulls out the hard loaf of bread she has been carrying for months and beats him with it, with a threat that she knows how to kill. He hands over the package. The women are scared and also thrilled.

The reward is an invitation to dinner. Candice does not like it, since nobody invited them to begin with, and the party turns out to be for Skarsgård. Van's behavior unsettles Candice more with each scene. In the kitchen, Candice pulls her friend aside, and Van, still in her French persona, deflects. Dinner arrives, and the dish is braised and deep-fried human hands. The rich guests eat them without knowing, and the joke the episode makes is mean and pointed: powerful people are tricked into eating themselves. Skarsgård, for his part, is all for the food.

Candice, calmer in the kitchen, raises the one subject that can reach Van: her daughter Lottie. The mention breaks the spell. Van tears the kitchen apart, screaming, and when the women remove their hoods to look, they find the hand on their plates. Van, now speaking in her own voice, demands to know where Lottie is, and Candice talks her back from the edge.

Under the Eiffel Tower

The final sequence is the emotional payoff. Under the lights of the Eiffel Tower, Van admits she has not been herself for a long time. She was in a very dark place, and she says that running to Europe fixed nothing. She could not sleep, and at one point Amelie came on the television. She wanted that kind of happiness so badly that it felt out of reach. Candice listens without judging, and Van says what the episode has been circling: no amount of travel will tell her who she is, and she wants to go home. Candice tells her they will start over together. It is the best demonstration of friendship in the season.

The reason the scene works is the contrast with everything before it. For most of the episode, Van has been a performer, changing registers to suit a room: charming for the hotel clerk, savage for Emilio, soft for Marcel. The Eiffel Tower scene is the first time she plays no part. Beetz lowers her voice and her posture, and the Parisian lilt disappears. The change makes the earlier chaos legible as an act of avoidance, a way to keep busy so that she never has to sit with the question of who she is and what she left behind.

It is also a quiet tribute to a certain kind of friendship. Candice has no obligation to follow Van into a stranger's building or to watch a dinner party turn grotesque. She does it because she senses something is wrong, and she stays because Van needs a witness. Sensitive viewers should know that the conversation touches on suicidal feelings. The episode treats them plainly and without sensationalism, and it points its character toward home instead of toward spectacle.

The coda belongs to Earn. In a post-credits scene, he signs for a duffel bag of items that includes a family photograph of a white man who shares his name, a callback to one of the season's strangest earlier threads.

Verdict on the Atlanta Tarrare finale

As a finale, "Tarrare" is unusual: it leaves out the main trio and still feels like the right ending for the season. The writing is sharp. Robinson balances absurd comedy and real pain, and Glover's direction keeps the Paris of the episode faithful to the movie version in Van's head, bright and pretty, with a rotten center. Beetz gives one of the best performances of the series, shifting between the fake French lilt and her own voice with precision.

The cannibal dinner will be the image most viewers remember, and it is easy to see why it has been read as a comment on privilege. The rich pay for a spectacle and are made to consume the people who serve them. What matters more is that the horror is not the final note. The hour ends on a friend saying come home, and on a woman who admits she needs to.

There is a small joke in the way the episode treats Paris itself. The postcard city appears as a ride-along, a blur of motorbikes and subway tunnels and apartments, and the familiar landmarks wait until the last scene. The first sights of the city are a baguette, a hotel and a basement. Only at the end does the city get to be beautiful, and that is the moment Van is ready to leave it.

Not every viewer will take to a finale that skips the regulars, and the episode's loose, dreamlike structure can be frustrating. Viewers who liked the season's other detours, such as the stand-alone first episode, will find this the sharpest of them. It is a standalone, and it earns its place at the end. The season's last major scene is not about the tour, the cousins or the music, but about a woman who decides to go home.

Sources

• Atlanta (TV series), Wikipedia — cast, creators, season and episode details
• List of Atlanta episodes, Wikipedia — episode titles, order and air dates