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Spoiler alert: This post contains key spoilers from Episode 5 of the Netflix show Dear White People.

It's hard to imagine that in the 2014 film version of Dear White People,Journal d'une infirmiere (1997) porn movie Reggie (Marque Richardson) was a peripheral character -- because in Netflix's 2017 adaption, he's the center of the episode everyone's talking about.

That would be Episode 5 ("Chapter V," helmed by Moonlightdirector Barry Jenkins), which focuses on Reggie's journey at fictional Ivy League school Winchester University. When a campus party leads to him arguing with a white classmate who sings along with the n-word (NO), the campus police arrive — and one of them holds Reggie at gunpoint.

The rent-a-cop's targeted, lightning-fast escalation takes a lasting toll on Reggie and everyone present, and sets the rest of the season in motion. On screen, the characters are visibly shaken -- there's no reason to think Reggie couldn't have been killed in that moment -- as is the audience, who don't have to think back too far to draw parallels to shocking instances of deadly police brutality against unarmed black citizens.

SEE ALSO: 'Dear White People' stars explain why now is the time for the show

For months before its release, creator Justin Simien and his cast knew that "Chapter V" would be pivotal, so much so that Netflix released screeners instructing critics explicitly not to describe the "climactic events" and "subsequent fallout."

"[It's] is a turning-point episode," Simien told Mashable in February. "The show is I think very lighthearted, and then we get to Episode 5." Cast members Logan Browning and Brandon Bell, who were there in the room with Simien, exhaled tensely.

Richardson also played Reggie in the film, which may be why Simien saw his potential and made Sam's kindred activist spirit the crux of this episode — and of the series, by extension.

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"There are other characters who kind of were nameless in the film, who now have names," Simien said of getting a bigger canvas for the show. "Reggie, who was kind of a side character in the movie, he helms an entire episode ... and you just really get into these different perspectives. It was just so fun for us."

The episode in question cranks the show's proverbial dial all the way up — and for Dear White People, that's saying something.

Like Jenkins' Moonlight, or even Jordan Peele's Get Out, "Chapter V" doesn't shy away from depicting the everyday struggles of being black in America at a specific intersection — both the verbal reality and the ubiquitous fear of how bad things can get.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"I read it at the table read; I processed it like an hour later," Richardson told The Hollywood Reporter. "I'm riding my bike and I just started crying. And I thought about it again like two hours later and I start crying. Then I read it again and I start crying again only because I've never had a gun drawn on me, but the notion that this is the reality of it broke my heart."

The seconds where campus security stares Reggie down with a loaded pistol stretch on unbearably. The camera cuts to his abject fear, his tearful friends, and the immediate, unignorable truth is that Reggie could be about to die. It doesn't matter that this is a comedy or that nothing violent was happening at the party; Reggie is a young black man in a perfect storm of bad circumstances, which begets tragedy far too often.

"It was dehumanizing," Richardson told Vultureof filming the final scenes. "I’d just had a nephew around that time, and what really got me was that though I live through this every day, my baby nephew is going to have to grow up in this reality. It broke my heart for him and my people."

The party leaves Reggie shaken enough to question his activism — when Sam comes to talk to him, he stays quiet and lets the tears and shock take over. Reggie is a fighter — he has to be — but Episode 5 leaves him feeling defeated.

"Every black person, every person of color is at an intersection, cause no one’s just their race," Simien told Mashable. "Everyone’s at an intersection in the show, even the ones that seem super comfortable, like a character like Reggie who’s a part of the movement, who’s a part of the resistance. He also is at certain intersections that make his life difficult and make it harder for him to know who he is, and harder for him to know what identity to put forward."

"Chapter V" opens with a James Baldwin quote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced." Those words shaped Reggie's life, and he and Sam share a fervent underlying need to change what they face. As lighthearted as Dear White Peoplesometimes is, the characters' experiences are a foundation upon which we can build that change.

The show is essential viewing for young people, for minorities, for allies — for everyone. Richardson's reality doesn't have to be his nephew's reality if every person at the party starts to imagine others complexly and listens to the words instead of trying to sing over the noise.

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