‘Atlanta,’ FX’s new scripted comedy is making waves and if you haven’t watched it you, you are totally missing out!
[FLASHBACK: RECAP: Atlanta Episode 5 – ‘Nobody Beats The Biebs’ + Watch Full Video… ]
This week’s episode is titled ‘Value’ and we get a chance to get a deeper look inside Vanessa’s (Zazie Beetz), Earn’s baby momma and on again/off again housemate.
Synopsis:
Van is jealous; the blurred line between love and hate.
Van spends the night out on the town with an old friend that turns into a huge life lesson on ‘value’. ?We’re also introduced to ‘Atlanta’s version of the evil clown phenomenon… Tobias!
In case you missed it, read recap + watch full video below…
Jayde is apparently one of those ‘Atlanta chicks’ who has her booking information on Instagram. You know those ‘chicks’… the ones who travel the globe week to week with no known employment.
Jayde is a serial dater who lives off of the generosity of professional athletes, while Van is merely a 9 to 5-er with a young daughter and a no-good baby daddy.
Can you put a price on self-worth?
Apparently Van’s life doesn’t add up to Jayde, who insists that Van doesn’t know her true’value’. Jayde’s assessment of the word stems from ‘using what you’ve got to get what you want’ and while Van is an attractive girl, her friend points out that she shouldn’t have to work so hard to support herself (and her no-good, broke baby daddy).
It seems that Jayde’s mindset is a bit jaded. She’s put a dollar figure on her worth, but there are some things that should be priceless.
Case in point, one of Jayde’s athlete friends arrives and she eagerly offers him the bill since he can’t wait to get out of there and get their evening started.
He even brought a ‘friend’ for Van, who seems to have already pre-judged her as being for sell like her friend.
Van is insulted by his insinuations and decides to leave Jayde alone with her date(s) but later, Jayde confronts her in the parking deck and convinces Van to smoke a bit of weed before returning home to her mundane lifestyle.
Can you ‘cheat’ a drug test?
After her evening with Jayde, Van wakes up the next morning for work and realizes she has a drug test that day!
As the sole breadwinner for her family, Van is stressed because she knows that there’s no way she can pass a drug test after smoking the night before. She?s screwed!
I mean… he sells it and smokes it, so of course he knows how to get it out of your pee, right?
Paper Boi isn’t too keen on helping Van since she’s been known to judge he and Earn’s extracurricular smoking activities, but he offers her a story about a friend who buys urine and tapes a condom to his leg every month to keep his job.
Sounds like a plan for Van!
She gets the bright idea to strain urine from her daughter’s dirty diapers (ewwww!).
Van seems to have things all thought out. She heads to work (an elementary school) with a condom taped to her leg to hold the urine that will help her pass the drug test.
It’s a fool-proof plan, right? Wrong!!
Van makes it all the way to the bathroom with her cup, but instead of bursting the condom inside the cup, she attempts to remove the knot with her teeth… resulting in the condom breaking and her wasting her prized golden ticket all over herself. *sigh*
Coming clean and getting fired…
Van decides to just confess to the principle about why she didn’t provide her urine sample. “I smoked weed!” she states as she stands in her truth.
The principal first acts as if it’s no big deal. Even going so far as to assure Van that only one test a year actually goes to headquarters because of budget cuts. The rest are just to keep employees ‘on their toes’.
She even agrees that sometimes weed is a necessary evil for educators in inner city schools because of the stress involved.
The principal’s comments are somewhat of a relief for Van… until she tells Van she has to fire her now that she’s admitted to administration that she took an illegal substance. Dayum!!
Van shoulda just took the test and ‘failed’. Now she has a week to get her stuff together before she’s let go for good. All because she decided to tell the truth. ?Life sucks sometimes!
Black kid in white face… WTF?!
Last week it was ‘Black Bieber’… this week, it’s Tobias!
Tobais, the unruly student who showed up to class in ‘white face’ to freak out his teacher, is the new star of the show as he’s already sparked a slew of online memes and gifs.
In the ending segment of this week’s episode, Tobias ends up in Van’s class eerily smiling at her from the rear of the class as he rocks his ‘white face’.
I’m sure it’s a message of some kind. I just don’t know what it is.