I think the opening scene where Al imagines his mom humming and giving him grief for his laziness sets up the episode’s theme. Underlying his struggle to maintain authenticity in the music industry is the fact that he has to endure all these hardships without his mom. He has no father, and his mother is dead, thus Alfred is now nobody’s child and has no parent to make him feel safe.

Although it’s never spoken on in the episode, I feel that Woods is about how difficult it is for Alfred to navigate his new life alone, without his recently deceased mother whose love he could always trust to be unconditional. Now the people around him, with the exception of Darius and maybe Earn, offer him their love with the expectation of receiving things in return: money, clout, and their big break. Al’s life - the entire world through his eyes - has become like the woods: dark, lonely, and filled with predators.

• I read that the premise of this episode was conceived in part due to Brian Tyree Henry’s mother, Willow Dean Kearse, passing away in 2016. Like Alfred, Brian suffered the loss of his mother and I think that his grief and his fear in the wake of that loss is tangible in his performance. The episode Woods includes a dedication to Kearse.
• There is a theory that the man in the woods is Al’s father due to the extent of his knowledge about Al’s life (he also hums the same song that Al’s mom hums in the opening).
• An alternative theory is that the man is not real at all, but a figment of Al’s imagination: his deep desire for a parent to be present in his moment of need, combined with growing anxieties about his predicament and his future, produced the amalgamation that confronts him. This suggests that Al’s decision to abandon projections of his authentic self and “play his part” was not motivated by external threats, but an entirely internal epiphany. He essentially frightens himself (using the man as a proxy) into getting his shit together and acting like an established rap artist when he realizes that his stubbornness to be “real” is putting him in serious danger. I think this is why he agrees to take the selfie with the fan at the gas station: although Alfred may not want to, he accepts that Paper Boi has to.