Tarrare (Atlanta)

In Paris, Van’s friend Candice (Adriyan Rae) and her friends Shanice (Shanice Castro) and Xosha (Xosha Roquemore) are chatting at a coffee shop. Candice then discovers Van (Zazie Beetz) nearby and greets her, discovering that she is now speaking exclusively with a French accent. She takes them to her apartment where Candice is surprised to see that she is a model in magazines and has a partner named Marcel.

Van then takes them to a hotel apartment to see her friend, actor Alexander Skarsgård, implying that they have a sexual relationship. As Skarsgård dances and starts undressing, Van plants some drugs on his bed before leaving with her friends. She informs the receptionist that Skarsgård may be dying from the drugs, claiming to Candice that it's part of a game with him. They then go to a housing project where Van plans to pick up a package using a key she got from Skarsgård, but she discovers that it's missing, deducing that a person named Emilio is responsible. The group also find their mopeds' tires have been stabbed with a knife just as a gang shows up, referring to Van as "Tarrare". Van states that Tarrare is "the man who ate the baby.” However, the gang leaves when they see a nearby fight, allowing the girls to flee.

The group heads to an art gallery where Van finds and confronts Emilio. Emilio tries to explain the missing package, but Van takes out a stale baguette and brutally attacks Emilio. A bloodied Emilio reveals where the missing package is, allowing Van and her friends to take it and leave the gallery. They then arrive at a party where Candice expresses her discomfort with Van's behavior to Shanice and Xosha, but they actually like and are intrigued by Van. Skarsgård appears and confronts Van, as the incident at the hotel had serious repercussions for his career. Van responds by spitting on him, and Skarsgård is later seen masturbating in the bathroom. Van starts working in the kitchen with Marcel, who also works as a chef there. Candice confronts Van about her new life, but Van brushes her off. Candice also realizes that the packages Van picked up contained human hands, which Marcel then proceeds to cook for the guests as a meal named "Les mains", with the guests eating while wearing a large napkin over their heads.

Candice asks Van about her old life and her plans, with Van revealing that she intends to marry Marcel and get French citizenship. But when Candice asks about Lottie, Van is taken aback. She has a breakdown and starts trashing the kitchen, scaring Marcel away. Her screams are heard by Shanice and Xosha, who remove their napkins and are disgusted to find that they are eating human hands. They leave just as Skarsgård arrives excitedly to eat. Near the Seine, Van talks with Candice on a bench, expressing how she felt lost and passively suicidal for a while, deeming herself a bad mother to Lottie. Candice consoles her and Van concludes that she needs to go home. In the final scene, Shanice visits a man for an assignment: urinating on him while looking out at the Eiffel Tower.

In a post-credits scene, Earn (Donald Glover) receives a missing duffel bag, despite being certain that he didn't forget anything on his trip. He opens the bag and finds pill bottles, a Deftones shirt, and a white family portrait. Earn leaves the room while the camera zooms in on the portrait, revealing the white man who shares his name (Tobias Segal, previously seen in "Three Slaps" and "The Big Payback").

In April 2022, FX announced that the tenth episode of the season would be titled "Tarrare" and that it would be written by executive producer Stefani Robinson and directed by series creator and main actor Donald Glover. This was Robinson's fifth writing credit, and Glover's seventh directing credit.^[1]

The episode featured a guest appearance by Alexander Skarsgård, who appears as himself.^[2] Donald Glover personally contacted Skarsgård, who agreed to appear in the episode.^[3] In March 2022, Glover stated that he hoped Ryan Gosling could guest star on the series, with Stefani Robinson confirming that Gosling was originally contacted to play Skarsgård's part.^[4][5] Robinson also said, "He just really threw himself in there. It didn't seem like he was shy about doing what was written. If anything, he added more to it."^[6] As part of his appearance, Skarsgård said he would perform a half-naked dance as long as he could wear "leopard-print underwear."^[3]

The episode is titled after Tarrare, a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. The A.V. Club offered an analysis on the episode, "The symbolism of Tarrare, that cannibalistic friend of sex workers and thieves, works overtime. It's an obscure enough reference that it doesn't seem, um, heavy-handed. Van has herself been hanging around a gang of people who are both ripe for exploitation (and being eaten alive) and have access to more money than they probably should, including a friend who does sex work."^[7] Zazie Beetz offered her own interpretation, "In some ways I feel like, again, this goes back to Van. The glutton of consuming all these different things to try to mask the pain or to be something else or to be someone else."^[2]

The writers planned the episode as the flexibility of the season would allow them to delve into bottle episodes. The writers also wanted an episode focused on Van, where they could explain her character's presence in Europe. Episode writer Stefani Robinson explained that they decide to give the final episode to Van, explaining "I think ending with Van and putting a fine point on what she was feeling and why she was feeling it distills the experience they're all having in Europe. It's been chaotic for all the characters. They're in the wilderness a little bit."^[3] Beetz also said, "We wanted to end this season or end that episode with the feeling of some things have been addressed, but not necessarily solved."^[2]

The post-credits scene bring back "Earn" (Tobias Segal), who appeared in "Three Slaps" and "The Big Payback". Robinson suggested the anthology episodes may be set on "some dream-like plane", but decided to connect the man to Earn to suggest that "the stories we've been seeing actually can be very real. There's some crossover here. These bottle episodes aren't so random, the way that a lot of people are reacting to them. They exist as the sort of subtext of everything that we're seeing."^[6] She further added, "Our experiences feel so different that we can't relate, we don't understand, and then that's what we claim to do. At the end, what I appreciate about it is that it's a reminder: You can be in Europe and you still carry this experience with you. It'll always come back to you, and we're all kind of tied together in that experience, as well."^[8] Jordan Taliha McDonald of Vulture compared it to the film Watermelon Man, where a white salesman wakes up to find that he now turned into a black man, "Are Black Earn and white Earn inverses that follow one another? Is white Earn just Glover's voice disguised in another character?"^[9]