In the episode, Earn needs to bail Alfred out of jail following an incident in a hotel room at Amsterdam while Darius picks up Van from the airport.
While Earn and Alfred are exposed to the troubling colonial hangovers of Dutch culture, Van and Darius follow an address found in a second-hand jacket to a strange New Age healing centre, where they encounter a dying man believed to be Tupac Shakur.
Donald Glover submitted the episode to support his nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards.
He gets the venue owner, Dirk (Matteo Simoni), to give him money to bail Alfred out of jail but finds that he left his laptop in Helsinki.
Earn tells Dirk that Alfred won't perform due to health issues, but that the venue will make more money from the insurance claim anyway.
[1] Alfred's storyline, in which he was comfortable staying at a prison cell for its luxurious treatment, drew parallelisms to ASAP Rocky getting detained in Stockholm, Sweden.
The Daily Beast noted that Rocky's detainment drew "the assumption made by some people online that he was actually doing pretty well thanks to photos of Swedish jail cells resembling studio apartments in Manhattan.
The site's consensus states: "Catching up with the crew as strangers in a strange land, 'Sinterklass Is Coming to Town' is purposeful and taut as it shows these characters adrift.
Club gave the episode an "A" and wrote, "'Sinterklaas Is Coming To Town' includes one of the funniest and most darkly shocking moments in recent memory, and I won't spoil it just in case you're scanning this before watching.
"[6] Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone wrote, "Together, 'Three Slaps' and 'Sinterklaas is Coming to Town' are a reminder of everything Atlanta can be and do, whether it's the stark nightmare of the former or the back-to-basics ensemble shenanigans of the latter.
It tapped a deep vein of racial disparity and capitalist brutality, all while nailing the complete existential ruin of social media right before hating Silicon Valley went mainstream.
"[10] Kelly Lawler of USA Today gave the premiere a 3.5 star rating out of 4 and wrote, "there was never a question of whether there's a place for "Atlanta" all these years later.
"[11] Donald Glover submitted the episode to support his nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards.