Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
We’re halfway through the first season of Boots Riley’s inventive Prime Video series “I’m a Virgo,” and this fourth episode, “Balance Beam,” is where we get to the white meat of Riley’s communist manifesto.
In the last episode, Krown Hospital kicked a critically injured Scat (Allius Barnes) out of its emergency room for not having health insurance, and he winds up dying in his best friend Felix’s arms before he could make it inside of another hospital. “Balance Beam” opens with Felix trying to make sense of what just happened in front of him. He seeks out Jones (Kara Young) at a house party where she’s making out with her girlfriend but immediately knows something awful has happened just by the devastation on his face.
Let me just pause right quick to shout out Brett Gray as Felix. We’ve seen him be hilarious in the Netflix series “On Our Block,” and we’ve seen him break our hearts in “When They See Us.” In “I’m a Virgo,” Gray gets space for the full range of his talent, and he’s firing on all cylinders.
And so is Riley. He’s given us a cruel, systematic death of a Black boy that’s inherent in the metaphor of a 13-foot-tall friendly Black giant named Cootie (Jharrel Jerome) without giving us a brutal police brutality scene or even a graphic onscreen death for Scat. I entered the series fearful that they might “Queen & Slim” this, and I’m grateful that fear was unfounded, on two fronts.
Not only was Scat’s death deeply emotional instead of graphic, but Riley also does not intercut his death with Cootie and Flora (Olivia Washington) having sex for the first time like in the aforementioned triggering movie. Both of these moments are pivotal to the characters and the series as a whole and deserved to stand on their own, and I’m so glad episode four gives Cootie and Flora their moment to have some weird ass, sweet, hilarious, balance beam sex — innocent for a few hours before the news of Scat’s death reaches them.
Cootie shows her the rash on his right side of red and white raised bumps. She kisses it. They have the most emotionally aware and honest conversations during sex that lead to gratifying experiences for both of them, each using their superpowers (him being a giant, her being faster than the speed of lightning) to benefit the other. Absurdity aside, I’ve never seen such sexually healthy conversations between a man and a woman on television. Do people talk like this? No, and for Flora, she’s already having to slow herself down to the point of minutes feeling like years to her, so she doesn’t have time to waste being shy or dishonest or unfulfilled.
But, I also don’t care much about seeing realistic emotional honesty between a young couple! Riley is trying to paint a picture of what’s possible, of who we can emulate, what we can be — and I’m so here for all of it.
Then the greedy power company knocks everyone’s lights out again.
Back at the party, Jones tells everyone that Scat is dead, and there’s a video of the hospital kicking Scat out without treatment. They’re going down to the Krown hospital’s headquarters to protest. A protester paints a mural of Scat’s face on the side of Krown headquarters, and it’s all too much for Felix.
He’s angry, sick with grief and lashing out at everyone, including the graffiti artist who’s painting Scat but never even knew him. Jones tries to calm him down but he lashes out at her too for organizing a protest when Scat literally died that same night. He insinuates that Jones is an opportunist, using Scat’s death to feed her “fans” in the activist space, and suggests if she wasn’t so wrapped up in community organizing, maybe she could’ve been around to help Scat.
It hurts, but Jones understands his pain and gives him grace. When she finally gets ahold of Cootie and tells him what’s going on, he and Flora join the protest in front of Krown. He’s asking how a hospital that’s meant to heal people can send them away to die for being poor. Jones stands on a car with a bullhorn to answer his question and in doing so reveals her own superpower: She can explain things and make people see and understand how things are connected.
Since episode one, Riley has been making the case for the destruction of capitalism, piece by piece. And in this episode, Jones brings all the pieces together, connecting Scat’s death to the system of corporate greed that’s also lowering wages and raising prices across all facets of their lives. The crisis of capitalism, she explains, compels corporations like Krown – like the power company, like the landlords — to raise their prices and lower the wages they pay to make more profit until people can’t afford it and get pushed out to die. But then, she/Riley explains the kicker: “We get justice for Scat by getting justice for us all.”
It’s a pointed critique of reformist movement demands that center on justice equaling getting “bad apple” police officers fired or demanding police officers arrest themselves. If the whole damn system is guilty, the whole damn system must be dismantled. The crowd of protestors understand and agree, cheering and marching in Scat’s name and their own, while the fascist police descend to arrest them. The police throw smoke bombs into the crowd and Flora jumps into her superhero bag, catching and throwing back the smoke bombs before the police know what hit them.
Cootie remembers one of his last conversations with Scat back in episode two when he said he wanted his name on the side of a building, so Cootie gets to work graffitiing Scat’s name on Krown headquarters. Before he knows it, the Hero (an increasingly absurd Walton Goggins) is right behind him, knocking him out cold. When Cootie comes to, he’s being dragged through the streets in chains by the Hero.
The boyoyoyoyoyoing! “Parking Tickets” show moment we’ve come to expect in the series comes when a fan of the Hero approaches him mid-dragging and asks the comic book publishing icon to look at the fan’s own comic portfolio. Surprisingly, the Hero stops and considers the portfolio thoughtfully before responding in earnest. “There’s no emotion in the faces,” he critiques just before he dawns his own pained expression as he continues dragging Cootie down the street.
Brooke Obie is an award-winning critic, screenwriter and author of the historical novel “Book of Addis: Cradled Embers.”
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