5 burning questions before Barry’s final season
There's plenty to unpack as the singular HBO series heads into round four
TV Features Barry
Now that Barry is set to return on April 16 for its fourth (and final!) season, let’s rewind way back to the simpler times of summer 2022 and dig into all of the questions we had after the sensational third-season ender “starting now.” That episode (helmed and co-written by Bill Hader) had a bit of everything we love about this HBO show’s season finales: a thrilling twist of an ending that made complete sense yet threw us in the moment, some darkly comedic violence, and excellent direction, all painting a more complex portrait of a main character we thought we finally nailed down. It also raised a ton of questions. Here are the ones we’re considering most as the series’ sendoff looms.
This article was originally published in June 2022 after the third-season finale of Barry. It was updated on March 30, 2023.
57 Comments
I assumed Sally went back to Joplin to get revenge on her ex. I think it’s interesting we only know Sally and Barry post trauma, as an audience we have no idea what Sally was like before she was abused.
I don’t think Sally went back to Joplin at all. There’s no way there’s a direct flight from LAX or Burbank or Long Beach to Joplin, MO! Why would there even be a sign for Joplin at any airport?
Obviously what’s REALLY happening: Sally is suffering her own psychotic break, and next season will be focused on Sally’s own Mulholland Drive-esque mindfuck. We won’t even see Barry or Noho Hank or anyone else til season 5.
next season will be focused on Sally’s own Mulholland Drive-esque mindfuck.
Hope she doesn’t go looking behind any diner dumpsters…
She was shown boarding a flight to Joplin, but we don’t know that she was at LAX. She may have just come off a connecting flight.
True… BUT- she was flying Frontier Airlines. The only airline that flies to Joplin, MO is United Express, and you can only get a connecting flight from Denver or O’Hare. Frontier only goes to Denver, and it’s a 12-hr flight with a layover in Vegas. IT DOESN’T ADD UP! IT’S A DREAM!
I literally said out loud, “There’s a direct flight to Joplin?” when I saw that.
So, Sally is going to become a lesbian and watch some lady cover Roy Orbison in Spanish?
At this point, would you really put it past this show?
My prediction: Barry is going to confess to a whole mess of murders while in custody. He’ll then find out Fuches has taken the credit/blame for them. Barry will then either feel indebted to him, or he may feel rage that he couldn’t gain absolution for himself. Whole lotta nothing, right? Barry either will or will not make amends with Fuches. Shows what I know.Meanwhile, Gene, while feeling he did the “right” thing by turning Barry in, will be racked with guilt about how he once again ruined someone’s life and threw them under the bus to save his own skin. This will lead Gene to going in and saying Moss made him set Barry up, or possibly even going after Moss himself. This will be the catalyst that sees Barry eventually freed and back on the streets.Hank and Cristobal will make it back to California, only to find that the big bosses from the facetime call are waiting there. (I forget their names or titles but, you know, the guys that watched the flower shop explode and all that) They’re gonna want Cristobal to exact revenge. I have no clue how this’ll play out. Hilarity will ensue, though.Sally is my wild card. She’s either gonna have completely left the Hollywood life and be working at a cupcake shop in Missouri, only to be dragged back into the fold when they discover her prints on the dead body, or she’s gonna be on her way to becoming the new Barry. I’m lost here on her next move.I could see Albert and Natalie not even being in the next season. They both played characters that only really existed as extensions of our main characters. They’re both expendable and really not that interesting. I’m not gonna bother even thinking about them.And for why Gene and Sally were on the beach. The people on the beach weren’t only just people that Barry had killed, it was peoples lives who he had ultimately ruined. And so he sees Gene and Sally there because he sees himself as having brought ruin to their lives. But that’s just my guess. It’s certainly a metaphor for something, and we all kind of project whatever on such scenes.
I don’t know that reconciliation with Fuches is possible, because I think he is legitimately a clinical narcissist.He checks off so many boxes: exaggerated sense of self-importance, a sense of entitlement for requiring constant, excessive admiration, expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements, exaggerates what achievements and talents he does have, is preoccupied with fantasies about success/power/brilliance/the perfect mate, has an inability/unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others… the list goes on and on.In order to reconcile, Fuches would need to recognize and acknowledge his own wrong-doing in the situation, and considering how easily he gave up potential paradise just so he could avenge his wounded pride (twice!), I think he may literally be incapable of doing that.
Agreed. Don’t make light of Fuches claiming to be “The Raven.” If Albert has a way out it’s a false excuse saying he was following a false lead. Not sure where that takes the plot but I could see it happening.
Sally stabbing that guy was gnarly as hell.
He should have killed that fed and fucked off
After three seasons (heck, from the first episode), it’s esafe to say Barry (the show)‘s best skill is backing itself into a corner only to smash the wall and embrace a completely different corner. I’m absolutely invested in what happens next, but completely unquestioning what form it’ll take, because surely it’ll be totally unexpected.Why were Sally and Cousineau on that beach?I think that was more a symbolic choice intimating that, just as everyone on the beach is someone whose life Barry’s taken through murder, he’s having a corrosive, similarly destructive effect on Sally and Gene’s lives.
I completely agree about why Cousineau and Sally were on the beach. I think one of the things that viewers are invited to ponder is the ways in which Barry, even when he’s trying to go straight, ruins those who get close to him. It started with Chris (and maybe even Ryan Madison), but Gene and Sally have been the longest-running example of this. We see Gene compromise himself and his love for Janice for his own selfish gain. Yeah, Barry threatened him, but Gene ran with the newfound success. And Sally really showed the full extent of Barry’s impact on her this season. There’s been a lot of talk about Sally’s PTSD from her first relationship, but I don’t know. I think this is all Barry. She had the baggage pretty well in hand before Barry came along. It was only once she was thrown into the toxic stew of her ambitions, her relationship with Barry, and his volatility toward her that she started lashing out. She endures Barry’s abuse and then starts reflecting it back onto the people around her. I really hope that Sally wasn’t on the way to Joplin to seek out some kind of revenge or violence.. I would much prefer her to be in a space like Cousineau, only with more trauma. I would like her to be at a place where she learns/realizes who Barry is and has to grapple with that and with the effect he had on her. For me, this season thematically did a great job of showing the ripple effects of Barry’s violence, and showing the ways in which Barry finally realizes that his violence does not exist in a vacuum. He’s lived a life of immediacy and compartmentalization. One job ends. The next begins. It’s only when he tries to put down roots in LA that he stays somewhere long enough for his work to catch up with him. As a result, he finally gets to see the results of his work not just on the victims and their families, but on the people around him like Sally who are totally unconnected to his work and victims.
Yes, and I think it was also a warning: that they will end up here if they stay close to him.
I would not be surprised if, in the next season:1) Barry founds a theater troupe in prison, and some really bad Shakespeare ensues.2) Fuches continues to try to manipulate and control Barry, perhaps hoping to set himself up as some sort of prison kingpin. When Barry resists this, an enraged Fuches tries to get Barry shanked. These attempts fail in comically violent ways.3) Sally leaves a string of corpses in her wake on her way from Joplin back to LA, convinced all the while that she’s in the right and they all had it coming4) Cousineau has everything he wants right in his hands, but screws everything up anyway5) Barry achieves a sort of peace in prison, but that’s destroyed when Hank stages a prison break because he needs Barry’s help with something6) The final scene of the final episode looks like a self-aware homage to the end of “The Shawshank Redemption,” but then everything goes suddenly south, Barry has an oh-shit moment when he realizes he’s about to die, and the screen goes black.
1) Barry founds a theater troupe in prison, and some really bad Shakespeare ensues.“The Winter of our discontent starts…now.”
i could see all of that happening in the first 10 minutes of the first episode.
I doubt any of this would cut it in “Barry” but I hear “The New Medusas” is currently looking for a staff writer.
Very much expecting a Hank-sponsored prison break.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they kill off Barry, but I don’t think he’s going to be executed. He’s a valuable asset for law enforcement agencies, and I suspect he’ll be offered some sort of deal for information. Plus, this takes place in California, and we technically don’t have the death penalty anymore, as it was ruled unconstitutional despite the law being on the books still.npr.org/2023/01/13/1148846720/california-says-it-will-dismantle-death-row-the-move-brings-cheers-and-angerWith that said, I’d like to see him go out fighting if he does end up dying. Fighting to escape prison, fighting to save Sally… something like that. As long as he takes out Fuches first.*edited to say I didn’t realize this comment is nearly a year old so your thoughts may have changed after seeing the new trailer.
Me before watching every episode of Barry this season: “Ooh, boy! I can’t wait for the latest episode about this wacky hitman!”Me after watching every episode of Barry this season:
Thinking about it a bit more today, I don’t think Albert is in any trouble. The LAPD in the Barry universe is too inept to connect them. He can just tell his supervisors he was following a hunch and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and that’s why he wasn’t the one to arrest Barry. That wouldn’t be a lie, either, though it’d be an incredibly veiled way of talking about what happened. Also, I bet he feels responsible for making Barry into a killer: he praised Barry’s first kills (for some reason I’m not convinced they weren’t just shepherds in a restricted area), and it was Albert’s getting shot that sent Barry into a vengeful rage and led to his first confirmed kill of an innocent (I might be wrong about the first kills). At the very least, he was too close to Barry to be part of the case, anyway. Fuches, on the other hand…I could see Albert wanting to stay on his case and really make it hard for him. If there’s any intentional biblical allegory, right now I’m thinking Albert and Barry almost have a twisted Christ/Peter dynamic. Fuches is the devil. Gene is kind of a Judas character.
Yeah, I don’t think we need to see much more from Albert. No one knew he was with Barry or that he let Barry go. I was just relieved he got out of there alive.
I really hope we do though. he’s a great character and the law enforcement character side of the show needed a shakeup tbh
Haven’t seen him since he stormed out there and cocked his gun in front of us.
Sally and Cousineau on the beach read to me like he’s responsible for their souls being in jeopardy. After the vision he goes to her and tells her (paraphrasing) “I’ve seen where I’m going after all of this, and you don’t want to go there too.”
Failed trial. Prosecution may not be able to produce any evidence that Barry killed Janice. There were no actual witnesses, let alone physical evidence that connect it to Barry. Fuches is 100% unsympathetic and could be portrayed as the culpable villain; he is, afterall, the source of all of the hearsay that convinced EVERYONE, from Gene to Janice’s dad.
That said, it seems like an uncreative solution that is beneath the writing.
I wish I hadn’t been eating dinner when the tiger scene happened 🥴
past his betrayer Gene, who looked at him calmly in a loyalty-is-our-demise Shakespearean moment
At the risk of seeming uncultured, what the hell is “loyalty is our demise” a reference to? Google has nothing.
We’re now in end-of-Breaking territory, in which the jig is finally up for Barry and the secret half of his life is on full display.Good. It would’ve been really ridiculous if he kept getting away with it for much longer — and frankly, it was ridiculous that Walter White got away with it for so long. Barry is comparatively much tighter in focus and scope, and may end up better for it… depending on how they handle the next season.
“The brilliant, Sopranos-like move to have our main character stuck in a hell/purgatory/whatever dreamspace”I don’t know, this was one part of the season I didn’t care for. The “stuck in a dream/coma/alternate plane that looks like a beach/hotel/mental hospital” shtick is just so so old at this point. It’s always a waste of an episode, the character almost always escapes the same way with an emotional breakthrough that very rarely advances the plot. The only thing worse is ground hogs day/time loop episodes, it’s always the same why do they keep making them? Overall this was a great season though, and the finale could have worked as a pretty darn good series finale had it not been renewed.
I agree. Also it kind of spoils it a bit, as we know it’s probably going to come back at the very end of the finale to show Barry walking into the light or whatever horseshit
Who did a hotel, other than The Leftovers?
Did anyone else see Hank’s “oh shit” look at the end of the scene? It seemed like he was realizing something (Because of that look, I initially thought he was shot or stabbed as the camera zoomed out). Thoughts?
Yeah, I saw that, too. I’m surprised not more people did….my theory is that Cristobal died in his arms, and that was him realizing it.
This is what I thought, too
I am very curious about the backstory that season 3 was supposedly rewritten heavily after the pandemic put filming on hold and they moved on to writing season 4. What was the first draft of this season like?Believe me, I pretty much love about 80% of what this show does, but I’m a little perplexed at how the whole show’s premise of Barry failing upward in his acting career was pretty much abandoned halfway through this season.
I mean that’s the business. Up one day down the next. They are depicting it well.
It was a musical.
I’m sure they’ll discuss it once the show is over.
What’s next for Natalie? … REALLY? She wasn’t even in the finale. You must be joking struggling to come up with a 5th question.
should season 4 be the final season? i think it should. i love the show but i don’t think it can maintain this quality.
Fuches embraces the Raven role, loving the idea of being a criminal mastermind. Barry gets immunity for his testimony, then works with Albert as an FBI agent.
oh that’s interesting.
“Why are Sally and Cousineau on the beach?”If I’m reading it right, most everyone on that beach is someone Barry killed, with Janice Moss being notably absent. For the most part, the people Barry killed were scumbags and murderers. It makes some (dark) sense that they would be all together as what is heavily implied to be the gate to Hell opens in front of them. They are all damned (personally, I don’t believe in damnation and I’m skeptical that all but a few people in real life are truly irremediable, but this seems to be the show’s statement; these people are in for eternal torment). Sally and Couisneau are right on the beach because they are either damned or, at least, Barry BELIEVES they are damned. And they are damned because Barry brought them into a life of violence (though arguably Sally was trapped in one already because of her ex), just like Fuches dragged Barry back into a life of violence again and again. Barry is both Macbeth (a man manipulated into murder) and Lady Macbeth (a person who brought others others into murderous schemes). Given that fusion, maybe Fuches was right to say Barry is a “little gender liquid;” in “Macbeth” Lady Macbeth calls for herself to be “unsexed” so that she can bring about her violent ends.Barry has doomed his loved ones with violence, just like he was doomed by the violence of the Marines (an institution whose members cheered as he murdered men from afar) and the violence of Fuches.
I see a prison bus trundling across a lonely desert, loaded with gang members, Barry, and Fuchs. A gang raids it looking to spring their comrades but EVERYONE dies in the shootout – except Barry and Fuchs, who are free to wander away. And maybe even disguise their own deaths? Eh??? Bus goes up in flames full of bodies? ((I know that shouldn’t possibly work with DNA and dental records- but they just had a lion eat some people and Barry survived an apparent cyanide poisoning attempt, so….) Barry lives..and he’s got a few more chips on his shoulder. Back in business.
I don’t see a legal procedural happening at all, as it doesn’t fit the vibe of the show. Leaving him in jail isolates him from too many characters and plot advancement.
I like a lot of the commenters’ predictions, but I’m going to disagree with folks saying we won’t be seeing more of Albert. I think he’s going to be Chekov’s Policeman for the end of this series, whenever it comes.
He knows, better than anyone on this show — probably even Fuches, who has shown no interest in how Barry’s mind works — what’s going on with Barry, the good, the bad and the ugly, knows how to track and stop him and is wrestling with his own demons about whether or not to let Barry go.
When Barry inevitably gets out of whatever prison he’s forced to share with Fuches and more carnage ensues, Albert will be paying attention, knowing he’ll have to act in some fashion if Barry starts killing again.
And when the killing begins again, one of Barry’s friends and unit members, with whom he has an intensely personal relationship, will have to come off the bench and finally stop Barry.
If season four isn’t the final one for Barry — and I bet not, because this team is likely going to have a ton of fun with Barry and Fuches imprisoned together — this reckoning will wait. But I’d be it’s coming. It’s the only narrative reason I can see for bringing Albert back into Barry’s story, having him learn everything and then letting him go for now.
6. So is that it for Katie? She picked up right away that Barry was bad news, but that just fell by the wayside when Sally lost her show. I was sure she’d play a key role in Barry’s downfall. 7. An actress of Laura San Giacomo’s caliber should have a lot more to do. How will Annie fit into the story more prominently next season?
7. An actress of Laura San Giacomo’s caliber should have a lot more to do. How will Annie fit into the story more prominently next season?
Albert returns the favor with a surprising display of mercy, holding the groveling hitman at gunpoint before demanding he change and ultimately letting him escape. If Barry had only listened to Albert, he would’ve told Cousineau his killing days are over and he never would’ve gone into the house (and never would’ve been taken into custody).
Meanwhile, I’ll continue saying “No more killing… starting now!” every time I squash a bug.
I think Barry will confess to his crimes, but I also think that will cause more problems for him because of one big reason: The LAPD’s narrative about the Chechyans. They’ve built up this big story about the gang, including that stupid fucking Raven, AKA Fuches. But, Barry’s confession will refute all of that. The LAPD believes that Ryan was some big-time gangster who tried to take down the Chechyans and failed. But, the truth is that Ryan was just some dumbass personal trainer/aspiring actor who fucked the wrong guy’s wife, which got him killed. Barry will prove that. And, with Barry’s confession revealing the truth about Fuches and him being blackmailed by Loach to kill his ex’s lover, it will make Chief Krauss look like an idiot. So, there might be some kind of cover-up that will cause a big conflict between Barry who wants to be punished and The LAPD who want him to go away so they won’t look like fools.
When does Bill Hader get a three picture deal and whoever he wants to cast? He’s developing into a fantastic director who knows where to stick a camera and how to pace things, and man does he know how to coax mesmerizing performances from actors. If he can pull this off on tv budgets and compressed shooting schedules, get this man more money after this to do whatever he wants please!
When does Bill Hader get to be Roger Corman in “The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes?”I saw a script reading and he was fucking brilliant. Utterly nailed it. Roger was beaming.
You know the beach isn’t real…right? It’s a dream Barry has. It’s not predicting the future, it’s a representation of his fears. He sees Sally and Cousineau there because he’s afraid that he WILL kill them. If he killed Chris, why wouldn’t he kill them? He almost did kill Cousineau in the season premiere. It’s not, like, an oracular vision sent from an actual afterlife.
“Good riddance” to Sally? Hard disagree. Sally and Cousineau carry this story and are what I’m most excited about when it comes to Barry. Sally is such a fantastically complicated, brittle, unsympathetic victim, one of the best performances on TV, and hands down the best performance on this show.I wouldn’t be surprised if, with light irony, some of her monologues become audition monologues.