Barry series finale: The Mask Collector
Barry flees accountability and seeks redemption, sort of, in a somber sendoff only this show could deliver
TV Reviews Barry
Barry has always been a tough show to get a handle on. Seemingly hellbent on staying three steps ahead of the viewer, the show positioned itself as Breaking Bad speedball. Ostensibly, a half-hour comedy about a disgraced Afghanistan veteran who becomes a hitman when he realizes his murderous set of skills has no real use in modern life. Well, outside of killing people for money. Still, Barry learns that maybe he could express some of his rage, PTSD, and the wide array of emotional problems that neither he nor the country that set him to war seems capable of solving through theater. Imagine what this country could be with an arts program as robust as its military-industrial complex. But it’s not. In the country where this recap is being written, Barry yells “Gun!” at a Walmart clerk, and neither she nor anyone in this bustling store of shoppers, clerks, security guards, and likely fellow veterans does a thing about it. Barry straps on two military-grade assault rifles, holsters his pistols, and walks purposefully through the automatic doors to his car unbothered by the heavy artillery attached to his person. Like the gangster who rides leisurely to NoHo Hank’s crime utopia earlier in the season, violence seemingly doesn’t register with people in the world of Barry.
Part of that, as the episode unravels, is the absolute hunger we as a society have for a clean narrative. This happened because of that. It’s been Barry’s guiding light for the last four seasons as one bad decision begets another, and so on, until NoHo Hank clutches the bronze hand of the love of his life, his last breath heard only by the few barely living soldiers bleeding out around him. Sure, now, Livewire sees the value of human life as he pleads with Groove Tube to wake up. But it’s the narrative that compels us, right? Why did Barry do all this? Why did Fuches? Hank? The answer to why men do the things that they do is innocuous, an everyday evil, a banal response from Fuches: “I was a man with no heart.” It’s a charge that fits the bill for basically every man on this show.
Barry has long been a show about a bunch of Hollywood assholes who refuse to accept accountability for their actions. That it came out in the middle of the first wave of #MeToo allegations makes its satire a little overblown and on the nose. In a world where no one cares that a wanted, armed killer is walking through a department store with a face like Barry’s and the means to do it, the blind eye we all turn to these mundane evils is as much a part of the show’s narrative as anything. Of course, Barry wants us to have fun with this idea too. It is funny, says the critic who has been enjoying the show’s descent into darkness while still finding the bright spots of humor the show’s best attribute. How fun are we supposed to have with this stuff? What’s so funny about all this killing anyway? Through Barry’s perspective, we always had a detached view of the subject, allowing moments of horror to happen casually.
In Barry’s final half hour, nothing’s really that funny until the narrative takes over. That narrative isn’t the one the show has been telling this whole time, the one with detours in the middle of nowhere or Hank’s NoHo hourglass. It’s the one that the people inside the world of Barry concocted to make sense of it. What do they do to the “Barry Berkman Story,” the tale of a lost veteran trying to understand himself through art and murder? They turn it into a Jack Reacher movie, an actioneer that could be charitably called “Paul Schrader lite.” After all, the only narrative left is the one where Barry is a hero, buried at Arlington Cemetery with full accommodations. I mused earlier this week about how I couldn’t see this show having its Taxi Driver ending, where he ends up the hero. And, aside from the whole getting shot in the forehead thing, that’s what happens. By the end of Barry, Barry’s a hero to the world and his son. That was God’s plan for Mr. Berkman.
And God answers Barry’s wishes. When the episode starts, we hear the same discordant sound cue we left off on last week. Hoping to draw that same line of intensity from the previous installment, we cut to The Raven, sitting pretty in his palatial tub when Hank calls with a deal. He’s got Sally and John, but Fuches is only interested in the latter. He’s barely interested in Barry.
While “The Mask Collector” has a very specific and stupid meaning come the episode’s end, it could very well apply to Fuches here. When Raven arrives at NoHobal to face off with Hank’s spectrum of goons that create a color profile that would make Roy G. Biv proud, he tells Hank that he had a come to Jesus moment in prison. After daily beatings, he realized exactly who he was: the aforementioned man with no heart. He sees the same in Hank. And while he calls Hank for what he is, a snake, he also demands that he drop the act, the denial that fuels Hank’s continued success as a businessman. And it crushes Hank.
Mostly told through a series of close-ups, the episode really gets a look at these characters’ faces, the lines, and the weariness. For years, Barry has presented masks of its characters as they pretend and insist they’re good people. Sometimes that mask is obscured through performance—this is a show about acting, after all. This is an episode about unmasking and what it takes to do that. Unsurprisingly, it’s Sally who gives the straight story first. In a tight profile with the back of John’s head hanging in the frame, Sally comes clean, telling John that she and Barry are fugitives and that she is a killer. She murdered a man, and it’s the first time she admitted it on the show, and God bless Sarah Goldberg, who looks as though 600 pounds had been slowly lifted from her chest, as she finally takes off the Emily mask and shows him Sally. He hugs her for the first time, and the two, in her honesty, share the second loving moment between child and mother on the show. It’s a moment of redemption for Sally and one that sets the course for her behavior in the rest of the episode as she becomes a more decisive and confident person. All it took was living through a firefight.
Hank isn’t so forthcoming. The close-ups between Fuches and Hank in their showdown were the moment when I missed Barry the most. How many shows are giving Stephen Root and Anthony Carrigan these lingering long takes to stare at each other, manipulating, crying, laughing, and saying everything without saying it? As with Sally’s mournful admission, Hader really lets the actor work while he simply captures their stunning performances with the camera. And they are stunning performances. Consider how far Carrigan has gone from season one, when he was mostly known for sending Bitmoji that undersell the danger they’re constantly in. Here, he’s a quivering mess, clearly and utterly devastated by Cristabol’s murder, with Fuches forcing him to take accountability, and he can’t. What follows is a quick firefight and one hilariously deadpan grenade that ends the conversation before it can happen.
As the scene comes to a close, with Hank’s last breath escaping his body, as dramatic as ever this one, Barry arrives with his arsenal just in time to catch Fuches and John on the way out the door. In the end, Fuches saved John and delivered him to Barry. Again, another pair of close-ups seemingly tells the audience that there’s an understanding between them now. In exchange for John’s safety, Fuches is no longer on the list. No words were exchanged. Fuches disappears into the night.
So Barry, Sally, and John escape the clutches of NoHo Hank, more or less, unscathed. Of course, John is fucked psychologically anyway because of who his parents are, but at least the better angles of Barry’s writers’ room won out. John, after all, is alive. Still, now with her admission to John on the table, Sally shows off her inner Fuches and pushes Barry to turn himself in.
Barry’s religion has really become the last level of evading accountability. Who is he to judge himself? Only the Lord can do that. What’s more, he was ready to exchange his life for John’s safety, and considering God spared Barry, maybe they should just continue on their awful way, regroup and find a new place to hide out for the rest of their lives. However, the new and improved assertive Sally has been reading about Cousineau’s situation, how the cops have pinned all of Barry’s crimes on him, and how unfair all that is. She pushes Barry to turn himself in, and when he refuses, she turns her back to him. The next morning, she absconds with John, leaving Barry to fend for himself.
Like many series finales, Barry’s has distinct sections, a few scenes for audiences to say goodbye to specific characters and versions of them. First, we said goodbye to Fuches and Hank, Barry’s crime world. The next one, though, is more personal, and like another season finale, it has a very abrupt finish. Barry arrives at Cousineau’s ready to do the right thing. Catching Tom as he sneaks out the door, Barry walks into Cousineau’s as his old teacher takes out Rip Torn’s pistol, a Chekov’s gun many times over, that has been the subject of one of Barry’s greatest sound gags and the source of one of its greatest cliffhangers. The latter was brilliantly memorialized by a Los Angeles Times headline in the episode. As Barry sits on the couch, he tells Tom to call the cops and begins to cry. It will be our last close-up of Bill Hader before Cousineau shoots him in the chest and head. It’s a stunning shot from the acting teacher, who must’ve done some target practice in Israel. But it seals the deal on Barry’s legacy.
The episode cuts to black, á la The Sopranos, immediately after the shot to the head. It’s so abrupt that for half a second, it felt like the real thing. Would Hader be so overt to court comparisons to television’s most prestigious prestige show? No, we’d fade back in and see Cousineau sit on his couch, seemingly serene. His nightmare is both over and just beginning because he’s going to jail, and to the rest of the world, he’s the masterful kingpin behind all these murders.
But that’s not all. In a move that can only be described as for the Our Town heads in the audience, the show does another time jump, taking us several years down the line to an older, wiser, and yes, slightly more confident Sally Reed. Now a theater teacher lapping applause for a well-received adaptation of Our Town, she beams with pride as she accepts her flowers. Outside, she quickly shoots down a date and lets John go sleep over at a friend’s house. She doesn’t overthink it. All the bad men are gone. She’s no longer seeing Shane’s bleeding eye in the cold light of day. Sally seems content without Barry in her life. Though, the way she looks at the flowers on her ride home does have a reminder of the flowers that Barry used to bring—er, the ones she asked him to bring her on the set of “Joplin.” There’s a sadness to her as she stares at the empty passenger seat, but it’s probably better than her life with Barry.
It’s at this point in a very short episode of television (relatively speaking) that it starts to feel a little like Hader is spinning his wheels. How is this all going to wrap up? It’s starting to feel a little anti-climactic, as if there’s even supposed to be some grand unified Barry theory that makes sense of everything we’ve seen over the last four years.
In the end, there is. It’s all about narrative. It’s all about how we consume, venerate, and celebrate violence and the violent people in society. John (now played by Hader’s fellow It alumni Jaeden Martell) and his friend sit down to watch “The Mask Collector,” a sub-Lifetime adaptation of the Barry TV show. To pull another comparison to the Sopranos, its fidelity to show is very “Cleaver,” a bloody, cheap, and sensationalized account of the reality we’ve seen on TV. Moreover, it turns Barry into the hero of the story, the story that John’s heard before. It’s the story that, as Clark, Barry told John on the steps of their home. Poor Barry was manipulated by Cousineau and forced to do unspeakable things before saving his family and dying in a final confrontation. After years of telling people he’s a good person, Barry is the hero, a lost vet trying to understand himself and being taken advantage of by a capable older man.
Through that story, Barry escapes accountability forever. Print the legend of Barry, and that’s all everyone will ever know. It doesn’t matter that he was a man with no heart. It doesn’t matter about the truth. It doesn’t matter that Barry was a cruel, despicable human being who often killed because he didn’t have the skills for anything else. It’s a narrative that we can understand. That’s really what Barry was about. Violence is chaos, and in the process of making sense of it, we assign good guys and bad guys—a good guy with a gun takes out a bad guy with a gun.
Forgiveness needs to be earned, Hank reminds us in season three. Fuches seemingly earned it when he delivered John. Sally earned it when she told John the truth. Barry came ever so close to starting a path to redemption—well, sort of, Barry can’t really be redeemed—but it was too late. His crimes have already spawned another violent killer because that’s what violence does; it starts a cycle of violence, one we’ve seen play out numerous times on the show, particularly last season when the families of Barry’s victims disastrously tried and failed to get revenge.
Who knows what the secret knowledge of having seen “The Mask Collector” will mean for John. Maybe he’ll follow in his father’s footsteps. Or maybe he’ll be an actor like his mom. In its final frame, Barry asks us to consider what effect watching violence has on us as viewers. With John’s slight smile of relief, the mayhem that Barry presented is now fodder for mindless entertainment that belittle the real victims. At least Ryan Maddison’s father, who killed himself after driving Barry to the hospital, isn’t alive to see what Hollywood has made of his son and his son’s killer.
For all the darkness this season, it feels fair to ask one last time: Was Barry a comedy? Ultimately, it’s hard to laugh at the show because it started to look a lot like real life. The crimes on Barry aren’t so dissimilar from what we in the U.S. see on the news every day. In a country where multiple mass shootings happen daily, and domestic gunfire is a leading cause of death, what on this show is exaggerated? It takes Hank combing the ACME catalog and going full Looney Tunes to get a laugh out of this stuff. Over its short run, Barry became a show about the ways we perceive, mythologize, and try to shed ourselves of the responsibility of the violence around us. The ways we turn our heads from it and try to process it. Barry treated its characters as bad guys in a society that celebrates them. Barry was a bad guy with no heart, a product of a violent culture that gave him nothing but a gun and told him to kill. Now, he’s a hero. Tricky legacies.
Stray observations
- “I figured out my dad bought my house with drug money… So he shot me.”
- I’m starting a campaign to have the national anthem changed to a Bill Hader yelling “Guns!”
- Fred Melamed creeping out of Cousineau’s house was one of the few laughs tonight, but it was a hardy one.
- CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” gets a hell of a needle drop when Barry marches to the gun counter.
- I can’t say how happy I am that Hader gave us so much Fuches and Hank business last week. As great as it has been to watch Carrigan really stretch out, there’s nothing quite like watching Hank figure out or escape a murder.
- Alas, no more Larry Chowder from this show. I was really hoping that we’d get a taste of Chowder in a trailer when John started watching “The Mask Collector.”
- It would’ve been easy for “The Mask Collector” to go overboard with the Cousineau character, but I thought Michael Cumpsty found a real solid balance. It must’ve been hard not to go even harder with it. His restraint is appreciated.
- Thank you so much for reading our Barry recaps this season, and thank you for the great discussion in the comments, which always challenged my thinking on the show. It was a weird and difficult season, but more than other shows, I think Barry committed to its characters by not redeeming them, ultimately dragging the show down where it needed to be. It’s honest, in a way, about the type of show it is because none of this should really be all that funny anyway. That Barry could be so many things and do it in a half hour is an incredible achievement and a rewarding watch, even if it made us queasy sometimes.
182 Comments
Feels like everyone is too busy with the Succession finale to talk about Barry?I think it would be impossible for this show’s finale to satisfy everyone. I was happy with Sally’s redemption. Hank was most everyone’s favorite character but the show had written him into a corner where this was the best ending we could expect for him. Gene’s ending felt harsh but it was where his ego logically took him. I admit I was confused with Fuches just walking away, I think he deserved to be punished for repeatedly walking away from chances for happiness but he gets to just disappear into the night? That left me wondering if the show would end with one last joke of a fake trailer for a nonexistent “John vs. Fuches” sequel…
“That Barry could be so many things and do it in a half hour is an incredible achievement and a rewarding watch, even if it made us queasy sometimes.”Exactly Matt! (with a few exceptions.) Two observations1.) Stephen Root continues to be my most favorite character actor presently working, an opinion that was cemented by his performance in O Brother Where Art Thou. He commands the camera.2.) I can hardly wait to see what Bill Hader does next. He has proven himself a fine dramatic actor but more so, a phenomenal director His command of the camera, especially in action scenes are formidable. I hope Hollywood hands him a set of key and get his engines running. He deserves them.
!!! ROOT!!! Honestly this actor has been stellar for sooo many years. I gotta say tho— the tatted Stephen Root is the best Stephen Root!! I don’t care if I still here a Mike Judge animation in my head when I hear his voice, I still wanted him to bend me over and make me call him Daddy.
OK WTF is wrong with AV!! I spell the word Hear and it prints out as here!! Edit doesn’t work either.
It never displays the properly edited comment after you save the edit, but if you refresh the page (and the comments actually load) you will see the edited comment. Kinja, folks!
Omg, I thought ghost comments were just my old phone. Does the site refresh on its own and take you to the top of the page/article, too? That drives me crazy! Especially when in the middle of typing out an article.
Ha, sometimes, yeah. And a lot of the time the comments section just doesn’t load, period. Between how frequently broken the comments section is and the complete lack of moderation around the more unhinged behavior in it, you’d think they just don’t want anyone commenting here. Which is probably true for how VC thinks about websites like this one— “This place would be great if it wasn’t for the fucking readers.”
I’ve started typing out a comment in my notes app and copying it so I can quickly paste it here before the page refreshes in the middle of whatever I was trying to say.
It’s also impossible to load comments on my phone. It always ends up taking me to a totally different article.
Same. I just figured it was my old AF phone. I can’t get comments unless I am on my laptop.
With Jimmy James right behind …
Jimmy James is still one of my favorite sitcom characters, ever, and Root one of my favorite performances. (While somehow arguably not even being the best performance on that show. Man, NewsRadio was so good.)
I wish it was on some basic cable channel cuz I’d watch!!
Ugh, I know, right? I don’t even know if it’s properly available streaming anywhere.
Man are we the same age because he’ll always be Jimmy James to me as well….
Agree completely about Hader. His direction is superb and recalls the best work of the Coen brothers. Loved this series and thanks for pointing out that Michael Cumpsty played Cousineau (I thought it was Victor Garber!). But who played Barry in “The Mask Collector”?
That was actor / writer / director Jim Cummings, best known for his work “Thunder Road” and “The Wolf of Snow Hollow”. Absolute treat to see him pop up as this shitty TV version of Barry.
Mr Root had me in Minute One as Jimmy James, and has had me ever since. I particularly love his one-episode masterwork as Gary’s closeted dad in VEEP.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he did a really good horror film right off the bat. I’m certain he has a Coen-esque nightmare vision in that ridiculously talented head of his.
I’ve seen multiple references to Hader wanting to make movies after this, particularly a horror movie. I think he has an idea already in his head if not already scripted for that movie.
Truly don’t even care if he acts ever again. He just needs to make more stuff.
Great finale. I wonder if Sally tried to clear Gene’s name? The movie painting him as the mastermind surprised me. I thought the authorities at leat knew that Barry was a hitman. That Fuches had given them information on jobs outside of LA and the chechen mafia’s spehre of influence. Though I guess the movie could have just ignored the facts.
I don’t think she did. I think that trying to convince Barry to turn himself in was as much about getting herself and her son away from him as it was about any strong feelings over the injustice of Cousineau’s predicament. I think that when it became clear that Barry had no intention of doing the right thing, she saw running off with John as the next best option — just leaving the last decade or so behind her, including the murder of Shane, for a quiet, relatively satisfying life. Honestly, I don’t blame her. She was well past any reasonable breaking point, and it’s understandable that she couldn’t bring herself to live in the world Barry’s actions had created for one minute longer. It was an act of survival.
That was my wife’s initial reaction as well. The reviewer seems to consider Sally “redeemed” because she came clean to her son, which… sure, but she still got away with murder and let an innocent man go to jail.
But Gene was not an innocent man, was he? He murdered Barry.
Fair enough. I feel like there’s a grey area as to whether that was vengeance or self-defense (probably a bit of both, though I think it’s plausible he assumed Barry was there to kill him), but the point is he didn’t get life in prison for killing Barry. He got life for being the perceived mastermind behind Moss’ death, the drug ring, attempting to kill his own son; all of it. Had the truth about Barry come out, Gene would’ve been handed a much lighter sentence, if any sentence at all. Gene’s a bit of a narcissist, for sure (pretty much all of the leads are in some aspect), but in this case the punishment doesn’t really fit the crime, IMO. But this is Barry we’re talking about, so par for the course. 😉
Part of me thinks that Gene is reveling in being considered the mastermind behind it all. I could see him not even arguing it that much. His career had been over for a while anyway. No press is bad press, right?
Just before Barry walks in we see Gene reading press clippings showing him that he’s lost the only two things that ever really motivated him: a credible shot at big, big fame and a loving relationship with his son. His life was over in every way that mattered, but he did manage to make Barry pay for Janice’s murder, something none of the assembled might of L.A.’s criminal class or US law enforcement was able to accomplish. I think you’re right that he’s satisfied with the outcome.
I’m not sure her word meant anything given the narrative they had created; and the man she killed was in self defense; let’s not forget that.
Sally didn’t commit a murder. She killed someone who was attacking her. Even though she used the word “murderer” for herself, her act of killing in self-defence is different from murder under the law — and, more important, morally.And there is nothing that Sally could have done to prevent Gene from going to prison. Gene foreclosed that possibility when he killed the only person who could have saved him, Barry, after Barry had agreed to turn himself in.Both Barry and Sally were redeemed. Barry was redeemed the moment that he understood Tom’s plea and decided to turn himself in. And Sally was redeemed when she admitted everything to John, and received his loving absolution in return. The fact that John is shown to have grown up well-adjusted, despite his trauma, demonstrates that Sally and Barry, despite themselves, were good parents.The most tragic figure is Gene. Gene came out of hiding only because he opposed the making of the movie about Barry. And his effort in opposing the movie was gaining traction. His egomania caused him to go back on that, as he performed his one-man show for Lon O’Neill, and he fell for the Daniel Day-Lewis / Mark Walhberg ruse. Worst of all, he killed Barry, perhaps gaining a moment of satisfaction, but losing the ability to let the truth be known, as well as losing his freedom. Barry spent most of the show running from redemption, until he embraced it in the final moments of his life. By contrast, Gene had redemption in his grasp, but he threw it away.
I have a really hard time defining what Sally did to the biker guy as “murder”. He was trying to kill her (and Barry), and she finished the job when she got the upper hand for a moment. Sure she could have fled, but that would have left Barry there to be killed if he got up. She may feel morally guilty over it because she’s not a bad person and killing someone (and never having a chance to talk about it) is going to mess you up, but I can’t see her being legally guilty.
Did Sally murder anyone? I mean, she killed a man but clearly in self defense. Her PTSD notwithstanding, I never thought she qualified for the “murderer” label.
Yeah, Sally letting Gene go to jail is terrible…but I don’t know if it is fair to completely write her off as a murderer. She had no clue who that guy was before he brutalized & choked the daylight out of her. And he was still up, mostly cognizant when she beat him to death. Terrible and gruesome of a killing, yes…but it’s probably the most sensible one of the show and I’m pretty sure she would have gotten off with it anyway. Her trauma over this incident (along with her proximity to Barry as a true killer) is the point – that’s what makes her unable to forgive herself for so long.
I thought the same thing until I realized that all the Feds Fuches & Barry spoke to when trying to save their asses died during the prison massacre. The FBI agents who were there were the ones who knew the truth about Barry’s role in everything. The only information the higher ups had were those agents initial reports and it isn’t a stretch some of what they learned was held back until they could really make the case and get credit for breaking up such a large criminal conspiracy. The fact that it happened because of a botched hit on Barry which was meant to shut him up, which fit into the narrative that he was a patsy, only burnished the fact that Cousineau was in league with the Chechen’s (or whoever it was in the story that Cousineau was working with) and was the one who ordered the hit. In the movie, Barry had to force his way out of prison to save himself from the hit. The actual truth of what happened, how easily the hitman snuck into a secure prison and killed all those cops, Feds, & I think even a member of either the DA’s office of the DOJ (if not both – I really don’t remember all the players who were their to take Barry into witness protection), was unquestionably covered up. Even if the agent who interviewed Cousineau when he resurfaced was easily swayed by the new “facts” that made Cousineau the actual mastermind which was either because he never got the full picture from the guys who interviewed Fuches & Barry and because it helped explain why everyone who was in that room in the prison were killed.
That’s really reaching to justify lazy writing IMHO. The easy prison escape, Sally’s inconsistent redemption, the dad’s disinterest in making Barry at for his daughter’s murder, three sloppy plot details that while not ruining the season but it did make it less enjoyable for me. It’s as if Hader knew how he wanted to end it and took shortcuts to get there. Soo How I Met Your Mother and Lost of him.
While I don’t dispute there has been some sloppy writing, I don’t think the prison escape & the fact that the authorities didn’t know the details about Barry’s guilt were sloppy. Barry, while he can often not be that swift about things, has shown he is pretty good at thinking on his feet when a situation goes south. I figured he escaped using whatever route the hitman in the ceiling used to get there. It seems to make sense and in some ways and felt almost obvious.I took the fact that no one was left who knew the full extent of Barry’s crimes after everyone was killed in the prison as an extremely dark and subtle joke once it hit me. I think it was absolutely intentional and again a way of letting the audience figure things out and appreciate the fact that Hader trusted the audience enough not to spell it out.
You left out John being 8 when he was clearly at least 12.
Thanks, makes sense.
the fact he killed Barry cemented his role as “the bad guy” and you throw the psychopathic father to make Gene say anything and you get this.
There could be a couple of reasons why Sally wouldn’t try to clear Cousineau. If she could claim was hiding from a dangerous Cousineau, that could be a defense on any aiding and abetting charges related to harboring a fugitive. She may also feel that he deserves prison for killing Barry.
As the movie was playing I understood all the “this was the only way this could have ended” talk by the actors lmao
Okay, we’ve gone this whole season with everyone saying she did but didn’t Sally not murder that guy? Doesn’t she gruesomely sever his optic nerve from the back and then Barry comes in and actually kills him?
As I recall she beat him to a frothy pulp with a baseball bat and then Barry came in and stopped her.
For some reason I’m so focused on the eye bit to remember the rest I guess.
Yeach, I can understand why Sally thinks that, but there are entirely too many people agreeing with it.
Sally was definitely the one to kill him. But, given the circumstances, I go back and forth about if it was murder. He nearly choked her to death, which arguably makes her subsequent actions self-defense. She had every reason to believe that he would try to kill her again, pen in the eye or no.
I could be wrong but didn’t she NOT stab him in the eye? I could have sworn have the reason that scene freaked me out so much was she stabbed him more in like, the side of the head, and must’ve either damaged his optic nerve or his brain and made him think he was stabbed in the eye. Maybe I’ll have to rewatch it cuz I could be totally wrong but one thing I’m positive about is she definitely beat him to death afterward.
No, you’re right. She stabbed him through his head/neck into the back of his eye. It’s just easier to say “stabbed in the eye” than qualify it that way. Same idea.
It was self defense to stab him in the head with the knife, which went so far in that it blinded him by stabbing an eye from the back. However, after he got off her and wandered into the recording studio, it was arguably murder for Sally to take the baseball bat and beat him to a pup.
I completely agree, which is why I go back and forth about whether it was murder or self defense. Did she have to follow him into the sound booth and beat him to death? No. He was already at least partially incapacitated from the stab wound.But could she conceivably have believed that he was going to try to kill her or Barry again? Yes. I mean, he was still in Barry’s home after trying to kill both her and Barry. It’s not like he fled the scene. If Sally fled would he have killed Barry? Probably. So she has justification for her actions.Either way, it was horrific and I’m sure she feels incredibly guilty about it. How could you not? Especially if she ever found out the entire story: that she killed a man involved in a dispute about $1500 or whatever it was. The whole thing was so petty and ultimately meaningless.
given how the guy was ready to kill her; it’s still self-defense.
It’s no longer self defense after he stops attacking her and moved away from her. He may have died anyway from that stab to the head, but the beating with a bat was excessive an unnecessary for self defense. She did that due to her rage from previous abuse.
yes it was totally self-defense there’s no other way to see it, even if Sally let go of all the rage she had packed to kill the man.
I don’t know why that has been interpreted as “murder” this whole time. If you go back and look at that scene, a man tried to kill her, she fought back in self-defense, for a period of about 45 seconds he was severely injured but not totally incapacitated, and who knows whether he’d attack her again with whatever energy/anger he had left, and she came back at him and beat him to death with a baseball bat. All of this in a span of minutes. That’s not murder.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that Sally’s the only one who talks about it as a murder. I think it’s her guilt and remorse talking. Which makes sense – anyone with a conscience would feel horrible about the entire incident, justified killing or not.She also must have some negative feelings about choosing to go with Barry, so she aligns her actions with his. She’s obviously not even close to his level of murderous, but she’s not entirely in a rational place for most of this season.
I guess whether it was murder or self-defense is really up to her? I agree that it could be considered self-defense but who knows if that’s actually why she did it. Maybe after she stabbed him she was just angry at him for attacking her. If we’re talking what it would be considered in court I think it’d pretty clearly be self-defense (or at least that’d be a strong argument for her lawyers to make) but maybe part of the reason she feels so shitty about it is that she wanted to do it. Which, like, fair, probably a lot of people would want to kill someone who broke into their apartment and attacked them.
Hader has talked repeatedly in interviews about how Barry has gotten dumber every season (to the point where he started the final season literally calling Gene from prison to ask if he’d been tricked). In that spirit, “Oh, Wow!” are the funniest last words. I can’t stop laughing about it.
oh yeah that was really funny.
Oh that makes so much sense!
Dumber and more delusional. He just seemed less and less likely to grasp anything he’s done or inflicted on people.
Barry arrives at Cousineau’s ready to do the right thing.This is a misreading of that moment, I would say.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say “ready to do the right thing,” but when Sally and John aren’t there, he tells Tom to call the cops. I think it’s only after he realizes that they’re gone that he decides he might as well do the right thing because in his own fucked-up way he cares about Gene. Then Gene kills him.
I really loved how Hader played that moment. You get that long, intense silence where you can physically see the weight of his long, horrible journey settling on him (mirroring the bit earlier, where Hank has heard Fuches strip away every shred of his self-justification and crumbles) and then he opens his mouth and says, “So you really haven’t seen a little boy around here?”
“Better angles” of the writer’s room…?I thought this season was the weakest as far as plot, and we could have done without it. Bill has clearly become very skilled as a director, which is fantastic to see. But I will be pretending that this season doesn’t exist.
Thank god this mess is finally over.
Can we all admit that Barry was a great idea that fell apart in s3, and Hader essentially just spent all of s4 fucking with the audience for yuks? Insane cartoon logic; absurd plot holes; story threads dropped because, I dunno, guess Bill just got tired of that; and cringeworthy “humor” (ha ha he bought guns in a wal mart oh man that is some truth to power bill damn you really got capitalism with that fucking original and timely joke).
Watching this after the Succession finale was like chasing the best meal of my life with a microwaved pop tart.
I don’t disagree. It often felt like the show was a crazy action sequences in search of a story, and that Hader and crew were audition for a big-budget Hollywood action movie.
Great finale and ending that completely subverted expectations while sticking to the core theme of the show which is the banality and emptiness of violence and the consequences of it.
This show was great for bringing out the best and introducing to mainstream audiences and getting Emmy nominations for Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan, and Sarah Goldberg. Hope this means more bigger roles for those three in more prestige shows and movies in future.
I have no doubt that Root will be heartily rewarded for his work on this show. I’m really curious to see if anyone can find roles worthy of newcomers (to me, anyway) Carrigan and Goldberg. They were both so much better than I expected from their early scenes in season 1. So, so talented.
“I’m really curious to see if anyone can find roles worthy of newcomers (to me, anyway) Carrigan and Goldberg.”
Goldberg has a new show called “Sisters” that is, I think, on AMC+. It’s a dark comedy about a woman who finds out she has a long-lost sister.
This is the problem with people nowadays. Can’t you see that Cousineau is the real villain of the whole series?
Ah, I finally got the damn comments to load correctly.I dunno… I mean, it was an ending, I guess. I don’t have any strong feelings about it. This season has felt like a pretty mixed bag to me, so the ending was of a piece with that.I will say that I don’t understand why they turned Jim Moss from an intense guy and killer interrogator seeking justice in season 3 to someone who would torture and brainwash a reporter, an innocent person, in season 4. And I feel like once upon a time the show understood that something like that would necessarily have consequences at some point.I dunno. The finale felt pretty muddled to me in both a dramatic and thematic sense – it just didn’t feel to me like there was a clear throughline that tied it all together, whether that was the actions naturally following with what came before or the ending expressing the themes and ideas the writers wanted to explore. It’s kinda late and I’m not as articulate about this as I want to be… Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a clearer idea of what I want to say.
It definitely feels like they had no idea what to do with Moss post S3. Barry getting into his interrogation room only to easily escape within an episode stuck out there. I do kinda wonder if they maybe should’ve just called it at S3 as the ending, cuz I agree that this finale was muddled as you said. Overall this whole season felt kinda messy, not in production or acting or anything cuz everyone brought it and was amazing there, just like it felt like less coherent narratively to me. Like there was a ton of ideas they wanted to explore in 8 30 minute episodes that also mushed two major plot arcs that could have been full seasons on their own with the prison and post time skip that made things just kinda messy in the plotting aspect.
With all due respect, you missed the point on why Sally didn’t want John to watch the movie: he’d realize his mom was a charlatan who contributed to the wrongful imprisonment of Gene, among other things.Clearly Sally never came forward to try and exonerate Gene and tell the truth about Barry — she just went along with the narrative that he was the criminal mastermind and that Barry was innocent. Because of her confession to John, John knows that’s all BS (as well as the fact that he was there for the anticlimactic rescue).Obviously John’s first question to Sally after watching the movie will be: “Mom, why didn’t you tell the truth?” And now thanks to Sally’s selfishness, John is going to have to live with this lie for the rest of his life.Sally earned no redemption.
great show great ending great night of tv.
Not half as good as Get Shorty with Ray Romano.
One question that went unanswered.Who was the person in the truck that wrecked Barry & Sally’s house before she & John fled to LA?Or did Sally just hallucinate/dream all that?
I thought Michael Cumpsty found a real solid balance. It must’ve been hard not to go even harder with it. His restraint is appreciated.His “Cousineau” was such a great parody of every Michael Caine hardboiled mentor character ever, which I thought was hilarious. I only stopped laughing long enough at The Mask Collector to utter the occasional “oh, no!” because, you know, the way it mangled history and redeemed the legacy of a monster. Which was good(?) for John, but bad(?) for Cousineau. So many conflicting feelings, which is the perfect way to go out for such a complicated show.
For a second I thought we might get a return to acting from Daniel Day-Lewis.
at least the better angles of Barry’s writers’ room won out*angels
a Chekov’s gun many times over
*Chekhov’s
The episode cuts to black, á la The Sopranos
*à la
At least Ryan Maddison’s father
*Madison
Great finale! The only thing that doesn’t add up to me is Sally not going to prison for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Perhaps they skipped over her prison time. Or she claimed Barry kidnapped her. Some missing details there. But I though the finale hit the sweet spot of being both unexpected and satisfying.
I think with everyone thinking that Gene was the mastermind the perception is that they were hiding from him, not the law.
Assuming the movie is the “official” story as far as law enforcement is concerned her lawyers could easily argue they were on the run from Gene.
I don’t think that would have mattered. Barry escaped from federal prison, which is a crime regardless and Sally aided his escape from the authorities. They maybe would have reduced her sentence because of the circumstances but she would have gone to trial and probably done time.
really did you see the ending? If Barry has been absolved of his crimes how can helping him escape of prison be considered a crime? nobody came after her because they completely switched the narrative. that’s the whole subject of the episode.
He switched the narrative in the eye of public opinion. The law doesn’t give a rats ass about public opinion. Barry was in prison. He escaped. That is A CRIME. It doesn’t matter if they believe he was in prison for the right or wrong reasons. The second he fled the jail, and Sally helped him, they both were criminals irrespective of their perceived guilt for the crimes he was committed for. And that’s assuming he was absolved fully. I don’t see any logical scenario where Sally gets off scott free and not even attempting an explanation for it was an omission. Obviously the public believes he was some kind of hero. As I said, that might have played a factor in what kind of punishment she faced, but I don’t see her getting off. I would have preferred it be addressed. Even two lines could have explained it — she did some time, etc. Would have been enough.
The law doesn’t give a rats ass about public opinionlol
He escaped from prison after an attempt on his life that claimed the lives of the people who were supposed to be protecting him. A good lawyer would eat that up.
you completely forget that Barry was entirely redemed; so he was not a fugitive but a hero.
A few thoughts on the finale:-It was good, and did a good job of hitting on two major themes woven throughout the show-the messed up ways our society perceives violence and the narratives built around violence, and the lies people tell themselves and the world to rationalize bad actions (“Starting……..Now!”). This season felt kind of rushed to me, so it feels like a stretch to call the ending satisfying as a wrap up for the characters. But it certainly was consistent with the themes of the show.-I have read a few different places on the internet that are lamenting that Barry was not really held accountable given his status to society as a hero at the end. I am not sure that is right. Barry lost his family, and knew it before his death. He was killed by his other favorite person in the whole world, and just as he finally had a chance to do the right thing. He did pay a high price for his actions, even if the societal perception of him turned ridiculous.-Anyone worried about accountability should be upset about Fuches instead. He might be the worst person on the show-he manipulated Barry and set all these events in motion for personal gain. He also had a chance to walk away and be happy with his goats, but actively chose revenge. I am shocked that the show just let him walk away. Side note: Stephen Root is a Certified National Treasure.-I have also seen a number of reviews questioning how Gene could have been convicted under these circumstances with so many holes in the idea that he killed Janice and an obvious self-defense issue with Barry in his house. This actually does not bother me. If there is one consistent thing in the world of Barry, it is that the justice system and police are full of idiots who will fall for anything. This seems pretty consistent with the role law enforcement has played on this show from minute one.-I know I am probably the only one who feels this way, but the scene where Barry walks into the WalMart and walks out with a bunch of assault rifles started this off on a sour note for me. I know it is consistent with the show’s themes, and that the getting into the car thing was meant for a laugh, but I am feeling really raw about all the mass shootings in this country right now. It is all fueled by easy access to guns, and it hurt to see it. It just hit a little too close to home for me in a way that the other violence in the show has not. I was surprised by my feelings there. -The Mask Collector is a reference to the lies people tell themselves and others to rationalize behavior, but also goes back to the video classes Gene was doing before, right?-Great show, good finale. Sarah Goldberg was particularly impressive this season, especially the confession to John.
Yeach, Fuches not just living, but also being the one to kill Hank is the main thing that doesn’t sit right with me. I think he should have stayed dead when the bikers shot him last season. On the side of the road, forgotten.Gene’s fate makes me feel bad, but it is all because he can’t stop himself from doing something to make himself feel big one last time.
Completely agreed, especially about Gene. His end was probably the biggest tragedy on the show. He was a jerk and an ego maniac, but not a monster. In the end, he just couldn’t help himself. I agree about Fuches from a story perspective. But as a fan of the show, I would not have wanted to miss Root fully embracing the Raven persona. So I am glad they kept him around. 🙂
Oh, absolutely – nothing against Root or his performance, Fuches’ story just ran out of steam when they kept ping-ponging his relationship with Barry back and forth.
Don’t worry, I know exactly what you were saying-the Fuches story did spin its wheels for a bit. Stephen Root is just awesome anyway.
Anyone worried about accountability should be upset about Fuches instead.A-fucking-men. I mean, Barry was dumb (willfully ignorant? arrogant?) enough to fall for Fuches’ lies, but Fuches was definitely in a position to actually help Barry post-discharge and instead took advantage of him for personal gain. What a terrible, terrible person. Without Fuches, so many people could still be alive. I mean, most of them were awful people, but still — that’s not Fuches’ or Barry’s call to make. If there is one consistent thing in the world of Barry, it is that the justice system and police are full of idiots who will fall for anything.And in the real world, expediency leads to unfair convictions all the time. The “Gene was behind everything” story is a fiction, but it explains all the things that need to be explained, and — crucially — it puts someone behind bars. You can’t get that with Barry, who is too dead to provide the requisite feelings of justice and closure.
I think it’s a plausibility thing for a jury. Without seeing what we got to see, all they have is: Failed Abusive Actor With Chechen Drug Money Kills Cop Girlfriend, Blames Then Kills Vet With PTSD. Why would they believe Gene? And would they even believe Barry were he able to confess, given Jim’s likely testimony?The question I’m left with is whether Sally testified at all.
Please take your anti-poice crap elsewhere. Some of us just want to read about a TV show.
Agreed about the Walmart scene—it was disturbing on a visceral level, and I found myself wondering how realistic that scenario would be. Living in the south I figure there’s a few rural Walmart’s around me that this would play out exactly like that.
It wouldn’t play out that way in California (I don’t think there are any Walmarts that have gun selections in California, for one thing), due to the delays and such required. But this is heightened reality, not our world.
I’m in Indianapolis, I haven’t seen guns carried around like that particularly in a WalMart, but I am constantly amazed at people openly carrying handguns. I live in a more liberal middle/upper middle class area, I know in other parts of the City near the rural areas, this would be the norm. A handgun was left in the bathroom of my Trader Joe’s. Luckily an employee found it, the mgr called the police, and a few hours later a woman came back in asking if anyone found it. So, yeah a woman was carrying a handgun into a Trader Joe’s (“What do you mean you’re out of Mandarin Orange Chicken!!!!!!???”) took it out of her purse and left it in a bathroom that children use. This is the world we live in.
Sadly, our world is a heightened reality at this point.
I think the gun thing was meant as a pessimistic commentary on the way things are going in this country. Remember, the show made an 8-year time jump a few episodes ago. Who knows what things will look like in 2031? And the fact that the gun department was right through the toy aisle was as dark as joke as this show ever made.
No. No there aren’t. Come on.
We’ll be sourpusses together. The Walmart scene is as pointed a satire as Barry has ever been about a single issue, and it might be amusing on its face, but I don’t know if I’m in a place where I can still laugh at gun jokes like that. Moments later a child was literally in the middle of a shootout. Maybe it’s not funny anymore? Notably, no silly music plays during that scene, so it’s open to be read either humorously or horrifying, and Hader could have done the same when he was buying the firearms. He opted for humor.
“More Than Words” playing when he walked out did make me quick-smile, but I agree the scene is meant to be horrific because it is so realistic. It was an excellent jab at current America.
This is exactly where I am-It is good satire, but I am just not comfortable with humor, even dark humor, applied in this particular area right now. I am not criticizing the show for doing it or anything like that-just saying the opening landed with a thud for me because of my own feelings.
The comedic part of the scene is Hader barking “Guns!”. The part where that actually works and he walks out two seconds later covered in them was grim satire. It wasn’t funny because it wasn’t supposed to be, not because you’re a sourpuss.
not only does he walk out but absolutely nobody cares. I don’t know how american society deals with this but I know I would have probably ran away if I saw this. seeing soldiers patroling railway station already creep me out very much so imagine seeing a civil like this; people would riot.
People like you are already rioting and destroying businesses. Is that better than being protected by the fine men and women of the military and police? I don’t think so.
This season felt kind of rushed to me, so it feels like a stretch to
call the ending satisfying as a wrap up for the characters. But it
certainly was consistent with the themes of the show.
^^This.
Demanding accountability seems to fundamentally misunderstand the show. I’d argue that the main theme is the way we use stories to help us make sense of the nonsensical and find meaning in the chaos, to the point of preferring them to reality, with a lot of the comedy coming from how quixotic that is. But everything from Barry’s inability to do an acceptable stage monologue about bonding with his fellow soldiers over sniper kills to Sally attempting to mine her childhood trauma for an abortive prestige drama to the closing scene hits the idea that the truth is too messy, complicated, and frequently uncomfortable to fit neatly into convenient narrative arcs, while simultaneously identifying just why we like them so much. Asking the show to end with all the bad guys punished is asking it to betray its core perspective and essentially proving its point.
Regarding Gene’s murder of Barry, there was a witness, and the witness could testify (1) Barry was unarmed, (2) Barry was worried that his wife and child were at Gene’s house, (3) moments before being shot Barry said said he would turn himself in, and (4) Barry’s response to being shot was to say “wow,” indicating surprise. The prosecution could argue, (1) Barry went there to save his wife and child from a murderer, ergo, not self defense, and (2) Gene didn’t want Barry to turn himself in, because then Barry would implicate Gene in the murder of Gene’s girlfriend.Also, Barry’s comments “I tried to make it right by giving Gene $250,000 dollars” can be interpreted as “Gene scares me and I tried to give him money to get on his good side.”Note that Gene was only convicted of the murder of Barry and Gene’s girlfriend. I enjoyed how it could all fit together well enough for a jury to convict on those two charges.
I see your logic here, and your post is well articulated. I just want to say that I was a criminal defense attorney for the first five years of my legal career (which is now 18 years and counting!). Even given the points you make above, I could make a very compelling defense out of a guy who escaped prison and ended up in the house of a man he has a deep history with. Especially when the guy escaped from prison after being arrested for attempted murder after breaking into another guy’s house. Give me those facts for a jury all day long. The whole “there is a case that Gene is actually the murderer!” is the part of the finale that makes the least sense. It would all fall apart instantly in the real world after everything that happened the last four seasons. The only reason it kind of works for Barry is that law enforcement and the justice system has been shown to be cartoonishly incompetent since the first episode. But you are applying way more logic to this than it deserves. You are doing a lot of work filling in the blanks that the show itself didn’t actually do.
And of course Barry is played by an amazingly handsome actor (not negating Bill’s good looks), but that, and making Barry heroic, is so Hollywood. I didn’t even think of The Sopranos during the black screen, or at any time. And there are way too many prestigious dramas to state The Sopranos was the most prestigious. Maybe the first, but not the most.
I never wrote that the Sopranos was the most prestigious of all time-are you replying the the right post? I like the Sopranos, but give me Deadwood as my favorite show of all time.
Sorry I was referring to a comment the author of the article made
Oh I see, no worries! Thanks for your comment!
Ur welcome!
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, for me.
You have great taste. Both those fantastic shows were filmed in my home town! The restaurant where I went on my very first date can be seen in the background of the pilot episode of BB.
The Sopranos was overrated. That last season was the worst thing ever on TV. And it wasn’t a bad ending, because they don’t bother having an ending. They just stopped the cameras because they made enough money.
“it hurt to see it”Then again, that’s what the episode wanted. They wanted to make the episode hurt, from the Walmart gun buying scene to Fuches escaping and never being held accountable to Barry being glorified and John seemingly buying that glorification. I can get why many Americans would find all of this quite painful to watch. It all being so easy, so accessible, so normalised, with real accountability never really happening. That ain’t comfortable. But the show was never really interested in being comfortable, so that’s fitting.
It isn’t really the general discomfort part that bothered me so much-as you say, Barry has always been about that. It is just the humor parts that were thrown into that sequence that didn’t land with me. The screaming of “GUNS!”, hiking through the toy aisle and not being able to get into his car were all dark humor notes, but I am just not in the mood to laugh about anything concerning the wide availability of guns in the United States. We just passed the anniversary of the tragic Uvalde shooting, and I am just sad.Again, I want to be clear: I get that this was included as commentary and satire, and it probably doesn’t work without the dark humor notes thrown in. I am not mad at the fantastic Bill Hader and fantastic writers for including it, and I am not judging anyone who liked it. I can see why it is there, and most of the violent humor of Barry works for me. For example, I thought the grenade was the funniest part of the episode.This is simply a personal thing for me. The wide availability of guns and the ongoing drum beat of mass shooting in this country is depressing me like no other issue. So instead of typical Barry humor, this just made me sad from the get go and kind of took me out of the episode for the first bit. I don’t expect many others to feel that way, but that is how it landed for me.
“but I am just not in the mood to laugh about anything concerning the wide availability of guns in the United States. ““this just made me sad from the get go”Those feelings, to me, sound like the moment landed for you like the writers intended it to land The entire episode is twisting the knife, that moment included. The whole episode was sad and painful, one of the darkest things I’ve seen in a while.he thing about gallows humour or laughing at some kind of absurd, awful situation is not that you laugh because you’re in the mood for laughing. It doesn’t happen because a funny situation was set up. Hader & co didn’t want you to be in the mood to laugh with that scene, or the entire episode. It’s that you laugh to cope, laugh to somehow deal with the horror. It’s a very typical response, very human. Laughter, jokes and humour are more complex things than just things done for amusement. It sounds a little odd to fault Hader for working with those emotions and within that framework with that scene, or the entire episode for that matter.
As a lawyer, you know that 99.9% of all gun fatalities in America are done with illegal guns, and let’s be honest, due to gangs or drugs.
I’m seeing a few comments where people don’t seem open to the possibility that we weren’t meant to laugh, or that we weren’t meant ONLY to laugh at the gun scene. Four seasons of Barry with laughter not rooted in darkness isn’t a thing. This was of the darkest moments, a satire of how damn easy it is to get guns in this country, and at the same time a damning comment on how easy it is to get guns in this country. If your mind wasn’t buzzing with this, and then, as he walked out of the store with them strapped on his back like the Punisher, or John McLane, the fact that the woman with the baby he passed in the aisle didn’t blink at this is a nod to the blatant madness of Open Carry laws, then perhaps the point was missed. One of the reasons Barry’s been such a great ride is it doesn’t rest on easy zero-sum either/or motivations/conclusions, and neither does it shy away from topics that might trigger viewers (pun intended).
Indeed, as a non American (who nonetheless lives next door to the US, I can literally see the US from my backyard) I found it disturbing and funny. It was commentary, you are supposed to feel uncomfortable at how easy it is to get guns in the states. I don’t get the criticism that it makes one feel icky.
“I am feeling really raw about all the mass shootings in this country right now. It is all fueled by easy access to guns, and it hurt to see it. It just hit a little too close to home for me in a way that the other violence in the show has not. I was surprised by my feelings there.”I believe that was entirely the purpose and I’m sure Hader probably feels the same way you do
No doubt. It just made it hard for me to get into the goodbye for the series.
Disappointing. I think Bill Hader’s very talented, but the show became muddled when he took over as series director. A few gems this last season, but generally I found that to be a meh finale paying off a pretty meh storyline, and I didn’t really feel much watching it. I did like the indignity of the story getting the Lifetime movie treatment. Barry’s a unique show and I’ll miss it for that uniqueness, but I doubt I’ll revisit the 3rd and 4th seasons much.
Agreed. It felt like it just lost a lot of plausibility in building its events, and the chronology didn’t make much sense. I can see how some of the things that happened could have happened, but it didn’t make much sense how they got there. Even the Gene stuff… Barry tried to kill Jim Moss, two assassins came for him in federal prison and murdered half a dozen federal agents, Barry escaped, there’s a guy out there who knew about the hit and knows more pieces to the story… and they still think Gene is the mastermind? Gene’s son is telling the press Gene shot him because he found out where the money came from, when he most certainly had not when it happened, and when it happened Gene’s son knew he was hiding out in fear of Barry? He might have been an easy target, but it just made no sense the way it played out— it felt like the writers suddenly became unaware of the chronology and series of past events in their own story.
Yeah the writing has felt more in service to the themes of the show and various directorial showcases and set pieces than it has to the characters and the actual world of the show.
Totally agree. And if I’m being honest, I’m still not sure what the themes they were trying to express were. I was pretty clear how much Bill Hader was showing off his directorial skills, though.
Even the Gene stuff… Barry tried to kill Jim Moss, two assassins came for him in federal prison and murdered half a dozen federal agents, Barry escaped, there’s a guy out there who knew about the hit and knows more pieces to the story… and they still think Gene is the mastermind?
This doesn’t seem that crazy to me if you’re working under the assumption that Gene was tied into the Chechen mob and Barry was just a hit man he hired to clean up the Janice mess. Gene could have ordered him to kill Jim Moss, he could have sent the other assassins after him in prison (you’re already believing that he hired Barry to kill, so this isn’t far off), and “The Raven” is a known associate of the Chechen mob so him knowing about the prison hit makes sense too. Then, you use the fact of Gene being known as a good actor to cast doubt on anything he tells you (because he’s “acting”, after all) and it’s not that big of a reach.
Yeah, I mean, I guess you can cook something up that’s plausible. But I felt like the finale relied on us to do that far too much. And I just think any real examination into Gene that didn’t come with a pre-ordained conclusion would make it fall apart quickly. And then there’s details like what his son said, which doesn’t seem realistic for him to believe given the chronology of events.I dunno, to me, it just felt like the Gene story was just designed to steer to a conclusion that makes points about the themes or what have you, rather than feeling like it logically flowed from what came before.
The third season is one of the best of any television show imo, some truly scathing critiques of Hollywood, which keeps us indoctrinated into finding quick answers for lifelong traumas, and the violence that erupts from those suppressed traumas.the 4th season felt rushed sadly, but I’m glad Sally finally did something to get out of the cycle by leaving.
When the third season was good, it was phenomenal. But it felt to me more like individual scenes which achieved greatness versus the show as a whole. Just my opinion obvs.
I think it’s telling that, according to Hader, they wrote the first two seasons pretty much by the seat of their pants, while they had a lot more time during COVID to plan out the last two seasons. I think that’s part of the reason the first two were more intense and, strangely, made more sense to me overall— the writers just wrote to the thing that had to happen next, rather than planning out what they “wanted to say” or where they wanted to end or anything like that.
Yeah, honestly I’m probably being hopelessly plebeian here, but I feel like Bill Hader is one of those guys like Nicolas Winding Refn who actually do benefit from having studios and producers tamping down on some of their tendencies and excesses.
Ew.
Agree – he was getting good performances from fantastic actors, but I didn’t really care about the characters at all by this point, so it was all hollow and pointless.
I like to think that the main reason Sally doesn’t want John to watch “The Mask Collector” is because they gave Barry the “Tomorrow And Tomorrow” soliloquy that she nailed on that Shakespeare showcase.
Good review, but a note: The title of this episode was “wow”, not “The Mask Collector”.
Yea, it says “Wow” on my HBO Max thingy, too
I don’t see where the review claims the title of the episode was “The Mask Collector?”
The headline seems to imply it, buuut maybe he was just referring to the in-show movie. *shrug*
I can see how the colon might give that impression. The headlines don’t use that format though. It could have easily read “Barry Season Finale: that’s a wrap” or something.
My biggest disappointment was not realizing until this season how incredibly funny the ‘next time on Barry’ gags were. I thought I was actively avoiding spoilers for this show the whole time (HBO tends to put a little too much info in their previews for my taste) but I finally had to know more info about the ‘time jump’ and discovered the gag…and of course I’m wondering if it’s been doing that from the beginning or just this season. Maybe enough to go back and check someday, but probably not…
I believe that they did a similar gag last season (though I think they showed a single random line, rather than a silent shot like this season), but before that they did normal teasers.
Mad Men was like that as well, with the “Next Week on Mad Men” scenes being totally random bits like “close the door”
Mad Men’s text descriptions of the upcoming episodes for like the tv guides were also hilariously lacking meaningful information. Stuff like “Don has a problem at the office. Peggy goes out to lunch.” I don’t know why but it cracked me up.
John Mulaney had a funny Weekend Update segment where he described the Mad Men “next time” segments as being like an ESL class. “This is the door. The door is red. Shut the door.”
Print the legend of Barry, and that’s all everyone will ever know. It doesn’t matter that he was a man with no heart. Where is this coming from? “Hitman with Heart” could be this show’s alternate title. Barry was living in a perpetual state of guilt the entire run of series, and that was more or less his character dilemma. He couldn’t process his emotions, and if this show had a theme that resonated with me most, it was mental health. Anyway I’m glad Cousineau went to jail, but he seems to be the only surviving character who actually pays for his actions. And even if there’s a twisted irony in pinning Janice’s murder on Gene, I thought it was a funny idea for the police to entertain, but not actually something that would hold up. The fact that it’s the official conclusion to that arc feels kinda flimsy. I’m bittersweeet on the finale because of these things, but overall, the rest of it feels right for what this show was going for, so I land on the side of liking it.
I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. Barry had a lot of guilt, but he was almost comically unable to empathize with others. He felt guilty and uncomfortable over what he was doing because of what it did to him, but he never had even a sliver of compassion for his fellow human being. It was apparent even outside of his killing: that scene where he yells in impotent rage at Hank refusing to do his bidding even though Barry is literally in the middle of selling him out is a perfect example. Barry didn’t try to redeem himself or stop killing because he wanted to be good, he did it to stop hurting. That’s very relatable but isn’t equal to having a heart in the classic sense. He had heart in the sense that he had emotions that could mostly be hurt, but he wasn’t a man with any real love in his heart for anyone except himself. He took an abusive, complicated route towards that, but at the end of the day he’s not redeemable because he doesn’t actually care about redemption.I find he contrasts nicely with Fuches. Fuches’ “redemption” wasn’t in saving John or anything else, it was about finally accepting that he’s a piece of shit. Much of what he did was all about shedding responsibility until he finally accepts that he’s a bad man and that all the excuses don’t serve him well. This is a show about holding folks accountable in front of others but also themselves, and Fuches and Sally end the show on that note – accepting who they are, what they’ve done and dispelling delusions. It doesn’t make them good people at all, as Fuches’ personal “redemption” is embracing that he’s the worst person in history, but it does make them free.A lot of this show is a Hollywood #metoo allegory and Barry seems to represent all of the tortured bad men who can’t apologize. Some evils can’t be forgotten or fixed, but at least we can face the music – Sally and Fuches let in some honesty towards others and themselves and they can move on to some degree and stop hurting others, Barry, Gene and Hank just never get there.
*angels
Hey, maybe a couple of the writers have some serious cheekbones.
I have read a lot of reviews and comments that consider Sally ‘redeemed’ by telling her son the truth and retiring to a quiet life somewhere. But not only did she know the real story about Gene and still let him go to prison, I was struck by the last scene she had with her son. As she was leaving he told her he loved her and she barely heard it, instead asking him if he really thought the play was good. She’s the same person she always was. She learned nothing.
I think looking for redemption is such a Hollywood plot device that doesn’t hold up to actual people in the real world, and the show challenges that. Sally obviously learned enough to know she had to leave Barry to break the cycle, and it seemed she accepted a quieter kind of validation from her art. Her tendencies to be selfish will always be there, but it’s not fair to say she learned nothing. She’s a depiction of how real people grow, slowly and forever, and never linear despite what Hollywood tells its audience.
Yeah, I thought that was really missing in the review. She’s not that much wiser.
A few thoughts:Sally is not a murderer. She fought off and killed an attacker who broke into Barry’s home and temporarily disabled him, turning his attention to Sally who witnessed the assault. She would never be sent to jail for that. Sally’s peculiar resolution glosses over her aiding and abetting a fugitive from the FBI. She would definitely be sent to jail for that. So her ending doesn’t make sense within the rules of the story, just makes sense for her character.
He escaped from prison after an attempt on his life that claimed the lives of the people who were supposed to be protecting him. A good lawyer would eat that up.
As for this finale and last season; the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. Imaginative and skillful direction (that might have gone TOO far) and fantastic acting from everyone. Some brilliantly written individual scenes. But overall the writing lost the plot.
They should have skipped this trend of time shifting storylines. It killed the momentum of the final season, resulting in a lot of desultory set pieces and general boredom, compared to the frenetic action and humor of past seasons. It pulled also separated characters and actors who we all loved to watch interact. And didn’t amount to much of a payoff for having gone there. It would have been nice to revisit Hader’s brilliant beach scene as he genuinely prepares for takeoff from this Earth. Instead we got cheesy action movie stuff.
And to tell the truth, for a second I thought the grown son was heading off to put a hit on someone..Great show overall. Gonna miss it.
“The Mask Collector”? “Cristabol”?The episode’s title is “wow”. And the character’s name is “Cristóbal” (because “Cristabol” is not a name).Also, at the Walmart-like store, Barry says “Guns!”, not “Gun!” It’s written in the damn captions.These reviews can be as maddening as the show is great. Someone who cannot get the title of the episode right or the name of an important character right, and who also cannot be bothered to turn on the captions, should probably have left the reviewing of this masterpiece of a show to a person willing to make the miminal effort to do a good job.
Forget it, Ferdinand. It’s Schimkowitztown
Barry didn’t kill Ryan Madison. NoHo Hank and two other guys did before he could. I mean, he was going to, but it still wasn’t him.
This was great show for a few seasons, before getting bogged down in its own self-seriousness. In the last few seasons, it tried so hard to be Great Television, that it lost much of what made it fun.
Still a little disappointed there was no Daniel Day-Lewis, but a good conclusion to a great show (and maybe slightly underpar season).
I’m starting to realize one of the strengths of the time jump was highlighting how Barry hasn’t changed. Sure, he’s religious now, but he’s still running from himself and his past actions. He’s still making decisions in the moment only to benefit himself.Meanwhile, everyone else has gone through the crucible and returned changed. Sally can say a kind word to her son. Fuches can admit how terrible he is. Hank found a kind of toughness in denial. Even Gene is trying to make amends until he faces the ultimate temptation of Daniel Day-Lewis.Barry still resorts to guns whenever there’s a problem. And I’ll guess we’ll never know what motivated his decision to call the cops at Cousineau’s house, but I think it was probably the most expedient move at the time. He could be reasonably sure of getting a deal again, after all.
I enjoyed it.That is all.
Thank you, Mr. Swanson.
I was fully expecting to see Daniel Day Lewis playing Cousineau.
Prima facie, “Barry” is just one big collection of American cinematic tropes, oddly tweaked by satire. Greed and base survival begets violence and oppression of the weak. It is in our nature to be prone to violence. Thousands of years of Darwinian evolution has favored this propensity. Cousineau and the theater narrative pretentiously abhor this trait yet in the end glorify and honor it. Does theater and media contribute to the propagation of violence in America? It appeared to have the opposite effect on Barry at first but inexorably the ubiquitous and malevolent forces in our world conspire to ever more violence culminating in a climax of violence and dying. Finally, the media tidies things up a bit with some “glory and honor” hoorah. and John and the future are pleased.
I think the ending is right. Barry dies as he is about to turn himself in, maybe, forever putting and end to his “starting…now” self-deception. Fuches hands John over to Barry and makes it look like he’s doing Barry a favor. While he’s apparently on about a theme of tearing down facades, which definitely happens and seems to be a bit helpful in John’s relationship to Sally, I think he’s just saving his own skin. Hank dies the death of a criminal in a blaze of…something other than glory…at the feet of his tribute to Cristobal. Jim Moss is mislead by misinterpreting information he acquired through torture. Sally grows just a bit (she’s probably not relationship material) but is still distant from her son despite all the potential trauma bonding; still valuing the fading flowers of adulation over the love of someone near. John gets the relief of not having to hide when he sees his dad’s story told, and realizing that despite its importance to him, it’s basically a forgettable made-for-TV movie. Gene, either in spite of it or aided by it, finally ends Barry’s destruction of all those around him. The main thing I walk away from this show with is to ponder the relationship of intentions an actions. Can you mean well but do bad things? Can you be evil at heart but do good things? Does what you want really matter?
But did anyone learn how to make a sandwich?
That the most evil character, Fuches, lived on is consistent with the theme of the story and irks, as was obviously intended. Root’s was also the best of many great performances in the series. Sally is the hardest character to understand for me. From the very beginning to the very end, totally self-centered, her ostensible sacrifices make little sense – something about her is never revealed.
Was John so young he doesn’t recall what his father was really like by the time he’s a teenager? It seemed a bit off to me. Barry is a true dramedy. The first few seasons reveled in the absurdity of violence and Hollywood, then pivoted to show the consequences of everyone’s behavior. The tone darkened as a result. A perfect slow gradiation of mood. Sally not saying “I love you” back to John was the final gut punch. She is truly a disconnected soul.Baller to killer your title character half or two thirds of the way into an episode — and in the dumbest, most abbreviated way possible.Further to that — no show has ever staged violence like Barry. The action is so comical but also so visceral. The pain and damage and absurdity of violent acts are perfectly captured. (I kind of think The Raven wanted the shootout to occur as it did, eliminating both sides and allowing him to rescue John.)
It was inevitable that Barry would die in the end. He’d done so many bad things and was not willing to do the work of atonement until his son’s life was on the line. It was ironic that the moment he decided to take responsibility for his actions was just before Gene pulled the trigger.It was also ironic that Barry was the one man who could clear Gene of the accusations Moss, the LAPD and the Feds were making against him. All he accomplished by killing Barry was to earn himself a prison sentence.
It was also inevitable that NoHo Hank would die. Honestly, he was never cut out to be a crime lord. Both he and Cristobal were kind souls who were in the wrong business. As for who was redeemed, Sally actually did what The Raven had demanded of Hank—admit to herself who she actually is and embrace it. In doing so, she earned her son’s love and respect.And the Raven? Prison was his crucible. It burned away all the bullshit lies Fuches had been telling himself and The Raven was what was left. He boiled his existence down to the few things he really cared about. He never really wanted revenge on Barry, but to settle things with him. He was ready to take responsibility for making Barry what he became. Protecting John and safely delivering him to Barry was atonement for failing to protect Barry when he was young and vulnerable. Is he absolved of his sins? Of course not, and he knows it. But at least he can sleep at night knowing he ultimately did the right thing for John.
I wanted John to be coming home from his shift at a Beignets by Mitch franchise.
“His nightmare is both over and just beginning because he’s going to jail, and to the rest of the world, he’s the masterful kingpin behind all these murders.”I completely disagree with this take. I think he was completely satisfied and content to have taken his revenge, and I don’t think we’re meant to infer that he cares anything for the consequences
I am so sick of these Left-wing Liberal writers ripping the very people who give them the freedom to write their anti-American tripe. Oh you don’t like the “military industrial complex” in America? Well, if it wasn’t for that military, you would be writing this article in German. Or you wouldn’t be writing it at all because you wouldn’t have that RIGHT. Why don’t you just go thank a veteran for the freedom that you enjoy instead of spitting on them with writing like this. Nobody wants to be beaten over the head with your political views. We just want to read about a TV show. Get over yourself.
A strong, suitably f*cked-up ending to a slightly disappointing final season. I heard Bill Hader on a podcast say he initially had a five season plan for the show, but decided to wrap it up with the fourth season as they began writing it. I have no clue if this is true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he initially planned for the prison storyline to play out over a full season and the post-time jump storyline to unfold in the fifth season. That would explain to me why this felt so rushed and compressed to me.But of all my issues with this season, the one I struggle with most is Jim Moss’ turn on Gene in the last two episodes. Over the course of two seasons, we’re led to believe that he’s an almost supernaturally gifted reader of people, unmatched in his ability to wring the truth out of his subjects, and the antithesis to the bumbling, inept law enforcement we see throughout the show. Why would he put together this cockamamie version of events just because of one line Barry says? It totally lets down the character arc for me, even if it did open the door to the wonderfully dark epilogue of Gene serving a lifetime prison sentence for Janice’s murder.
This wasn’t just a bad season finale, it was a terrible episode of television in general. All of the characters dying is not character resolution or story resolution.This was like a wet dog fart clearing out the entire room. It’s clear the show was just done for Hader, he didn’t know how to end it, and he cleared the audience out of the theater with this stinker as a sort of joke.
“but at least the better angles of Barry’s writers’ room won out. John, after all, is alive.”Which angles? Acute, obtuse or right?