Barry
“wow”, Season 4 Episode 8
Requested By
.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!
What do I know about this series going into it?
Based on the brief glimpse I got while clicking through, it’s a comedy-drama about a hitman. That’s all I really know.
Previously On
A bald man stares at a statue in an art gallery. A man with dark glasses “wanted to fix things”. Somebody’s client is Daniel Day-Lewis. There’s a guy named “Fuches”. Sally Reed wants to get to Cousenau [sp]’s. Gene hired Barry to murder someone.
Alright, that was way too quick to follow.
Recap
A tattooed man is enjoying his jacuzzi. His phone rings.
The caller is “NoHo Hank”. He’s the guy who fired a rocket in the Previously1, apparently at Jacuzzi, but now he wants peace.
“I’ll even give you Barry,” offers Hank, “if you come to my offices right now.”
Jacuzzi mocks Hank for the obviousness of the trap. But then Hank turns on video and shows Jacuzzi that he has two hostages: Barry’s girlfriend (the Sally Reed mentioned in the Previously) and Barry’s ~10-year-old son. Hank himself is the bald guy who was in the art gallery.
Elsewhere, a man walks into a Walmart-like superstore; based on the camerawork, I assume this is the titular Barry. He buys a lot of guns2, straps them to his back, and walks out to his car, having a bit of difficulty fitting into the driver’s seat because he doesn’t bother taking them off.
In a televised press conference, DA James Buckner is reopening the “Janice Moss murder case”. Janice’s father, standing beside him, accuses “Gene Cousineau” of manipulating Barry into killing Janice. Gene can’t believe what he’s seeing on the TV: “We were just discussing a movie!” So this Janice was killed based on a misunderstanding between him and Barry, and Barry thought Gene wanted her dead.
Barry’s son John3 asks his mother what’s going on. Sally explains that both she and Barry are fugitives, which is why they move around a lot. Barry was in prison for killing people - which John initially assumes is just “my father was a soldier” until Sally clarifies that she meant murder. She also confesses to having committed a murder of her own, and breaks down telling him this, apologizing for being a bad mother4.
As they embrace, Hank’s henchmen come in and separate them.
Hank and his crew take Sally to the lobby of the aforementioned offices, and get ready for the arrival of Jacuzzi and his crew; Barry is still on his way. The lobby is the place from the Previously that I thought was an art gallery.
When Jacuzzi arrives, he insists on seeing John in person as well, so Hank sends a henchman to go get him. There’s an awkward pause while they wait.
Jacuzzi, finally identified in captions as “Fuches”, accuses Hank of being extremely lucky. Hank says that as a businessman he has learned to capitalize on luck whenever it appears. Fuches dismisses this and opening up his heart to Hank, almost as if Hank is his psychiatrist, telling a whole story of who he thought he was and how long he was in denial about who he was, etc., none of which I can follow.
Hank insists he’s nothing like Fuches.
Fuches, offended, offers a new deal: Admit that you killed Cristobal, and that you fucked up. If you do, I’ll walk away and you’ll never hear from me again5.
Hank breaks down sobbing. “He was the love of my life, it was never supposed to happen.”
The henchman arrives with John. Fuches just stares at the kid wide-eyed.
Hank suddenly accuses Fuches of being a liar (no idea why) and declares the deal void. So Fuches draws his gun and shoots Hank. This starts a gunfight between all the henchmen, and all but three of them go down, seriously injured or dead. The three survivors only have a few moments of breath before one of the dying ones tosses a grenade at them.
Fuches tackled John to the ground just as it started, so the two of them survive; he slowly walks John out of the room, telling him to cover his eyes and ears as they walk past the corpses and the dying. Among the moaning and the dying is Sally, who calls out to John repeatedly and asks where he is, but Fuches ignores her and escorts John out of the room.
Finally, Barry arrives. He parks his car, offers up a quick prayer to God, and gets out, guns still strapped to his back. John calls out to his father and runs over to him; Fuches makes no attempt to stop him. He and Barry stare at each other in shock, then Fuches just gives him a nod and scampers off. Barry continues to stare, not sure what the hell is happening.
Inside the lobby, Sally is still calling out to John, while Hank sits wheezing at the base of the lobby statue. He grabs the statue’s hand for comfort (is this a statue of the aforementioned Cristobal?) and finally dies. Fade to black.
Sometime later, Sally and Barry are lying in a bed in a hotel room, John asleep between them. Sally tells Barry he needs to turn himself in so that Cousineau doesn’t go to jail for Janice’s murder. Barry demurs: “I don’t think that’s what God wants for me.” Because he was supposed to die in that firefight - and since he didn’t, clearly that means he has been redeemed.
Sally tries again: the only way to be redeemed is to take responsibility for what you did. Barry breezes past that: “We’ll leave LA and figure out the next chapter of our lives.” She’s unhappy, and turns away from him.
When he wakes up in the morning, Sally and John are gone.
Back in Gene’s house, Gene’s friend Tom6 knocks on his door. It’s locked, and Gene is inside, obsessively reading through the news stories accusing him a murderer.
But there’s a good reason Tom doesn’t break in: He’s packed a suitcase and is trying to sneak out without Gene noticing. Unfortunately, he opens the door to find Barry about to knock. Tom recognizes him, but Barry has no idea who Tom is.
Meanwhile, inside his room, Gene pulls out a gun.
Tom tries to convince Barry to save Gene by turning himself in. But Barry lets that wash over him just as he did when Sally said the same. He’s looking for his wife and son, and he knows they’re here.
Finally, when he realizes they aren’t, Barry gives in. “I’ll turn myself i-”
There’s a gunshot. At first we think this is Gene killing himself in the other room, God yet again setting things up to keep Barry from turning himself in. But then Barry realizes he’s bleeding, and stares at Gene (who just entered the room) in shock. Barry slumps into a chair, and Gene shoots him in the head. Cut to black.
Fade back in, Gene is sitting there in the living room, resigned to his fate, and Tom is frantically calling for an ambulance.
Sometime later, Sally is working as a high school drama teacher (and using her real name?!). An AP History Teacher named Robert praises her work and wants to take her out for a drink. She turns him down.
John, now a teenager, asks Sally for permission to stay at his friend Eric tonight. She agrees, gets in the car, and drives away.
Eric offers John alcohol, which John turns down. They sit down in Eric’s house to watch a movie called “The Mask Collector”. John is for some reason extremely nervous about this.
Cut to a marine returning Stateside from having been in combat. He joins an amateur theater group, whose director introduces himself as Gene Cousineau - but he’s much younger than the Gene we know.
For a moment I wonder if this is a flashback, but then we cut to John’s face: this is the movie that they are watching.
In the movie, Gene’s guidance has helped Barry find inner peace from the trauma of combat. But Gene turns out to be evil; he murders one of the other actors, and then murders Janice Moss when she arrives to investigate the first death. He tries to force Barry to help him hide Janice’s body, but Barry refuses; Gene then frames him for the murder.
Barry is thrown in prison, then escapes, and kills a whole bunch of Gene’s henchmen before confronting Gene himself. But Gene pulls out a gun and shoots Barry dead. The film ends with a title card: Gene Cousineau is currently serving life in prison for the murders of Janice Moss and Barry Berkman. Barry was laid to rest in Arlington with full honors.
Watching this, John cries.
Lingering questions
Whatever happened to Fuches?
Was Sally injured in the shootout or wasn’t she? As Fuches took John outside, she didn’t exactly get up and chase him down to get her son back - but she seemed perfectly fine in the next scene.
Why did Sally rebuff Robert?
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; high ratings are not necessarily better and low rating are not necessarily worse. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 5/10. The two main plots (Fuches-and-Hank; Barry-and-Gene) were straightforward; there’s not much to say about them.
I applaud the ingenuity of using the in-universe fictionalized version of Barry’s story to tell us both 1) what happened to Gene and Barry(’s corpse), and 2) how history ends up misrecording their story.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t freaking weird, though. The framing device they used to present it (random new actor playing an older John, spending the evening at the house of a random friend who probably hasn’t been seen before either) gave it a certain disconnect from the rest of the episode. It’s too bad, because it was an original and daring choice and could have paid real dividends if handled a little better.
Writing: 4/10. The writers clearly knew what they wanted to do, but they didn’t always execute it very well.
They wanted Sally tearfully admitting her and Barry’s history to her son. But they failed to set it up properly, and she ended up spilling her guts in response to an unrelated question. (Fuches, too, gives a Shakespearean here-are-all-my-motivations monologue in response to nothing at all.)
They wanted the classic scene where two mobsters break a deal with each other and all hell breaks loose. But they didn’t think step by step through the flow of the conversation; Hank ends up announcing, nonsensically, that he’s breaking a deal whose terms were “Fuches walks away without Hank having to give him anything”7.
It’s not all bad; in particular, the character work was very well done (see below). But the flaws are pretty noticeable, like when Sally is calling out to John and not noticing that Fuches is simply walking him out of the room.
Production: 7/10. The episode made excellent use of oners - with the shootout scene in the lobby a standout example. Kudos to the director for doing an excellent job with that.
I’m also impressed that the director was able to communicate to me which character was Barry within a few seconds of his appearance on screen, without him or anybody else even saying a word. And the awkward pause while the two gangs wait for John to be brought downstairs was hilarious.
The actors were for the most part excellent, especially Sally. Unfortunately, Hank is an exception: he puts on a different accent for every line of dialogue, and it’s incredibly distracting. If not for him I would’ve scored this higher. There are also some questionable editing choices in the way we bounced between The Mask Collector and John watching it.
Characterization: 9/10. I am fascinated by each of the main characters and their relationships to one another. You have Barry, the devout Christian hitman who willfully reinterprets everything that happens in his life as a sign that God supports his current course of action8, and who notices criticism the way I notice fashion trends. You have Fuches, who seems to hate Barry and is fully supportive of Hank’s desire to kill him - and yet carefully rescues Barry’s son and delivers him to his father peacefully. You have Sally, the caring mother and murderess who has been on the lam with Barry for years and seems to have undergone a massive (and recent) change of heart. You have Tom, professing his support for Gene even as he secretly packs a suitcase.
Even characters like Hank, on whom I failed to get any kind of handle at all, were clearly three-dimensional. I may not have enough information in this episode to know who they are or what they want, but there is depth and complexity on display.
Accessibility: 6/10. Thanks in large part to the excellent direction, I was able to follow the bulk of the episode - character and plot - with very few problems. Most of my questions pertain to parts of the backstory that weren’t fully elucidated:
How many murders has Barry actually committed? Just the two for which Gene is blamed in the movie, or more? Are he and Sally fugitives only for Janice’s murder, or do the police know about any of the others? Whom did Sally kill, and at the end of the episode why isn’t she still wanted for that murder? Was she a fugitive solely based on her association with Barry? What’s up with Fuches, and why did he actively rescue Barry’s son and return him to his father when moments earlier he was prepared to help Hank kill him?
Closure: 9/10. There are a couple of lingering plot threads, like what happened to Fuches. But not for nothing did I praise earlier the use of an in-universe movie to tell us what happened to the main characters. Having the title card be inside the movie rather than explicitly for us viewers was a very effective method of delivering that information without breaking the fourth wall.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s pretty good, but I fear that the writing isn’t quite up to snuff, and the plot doesn’t seem very interesting. I’m eager to learn more about the characters but it’s difficult to picture what the rest of the series might actually have been about.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
I noticed it but didn’t have time to mention it in my notes.
This is obviously done for comic effect, but later it’ll be established that they’re in California. No way does a man walk into a superstore in California and walk out with a gun that same day.
Identified in captions
While I’m appreciative that the show took the time in the middle of its finale to explain its premise to all of the viewers who never watched it before9, I only realized while editing my notes that this response makes no sense in context. John wants to know who these guys are and why they kidnapped them. But in going on about Barry’s criminal history, Sally doesn’t even make it to the part where she explains the kidnapping.
Gotta be careful when mob bosses offer you the “You’ll never hear from me again” deal. There’s more than one way to keep that promise…
Identified in captions
I’m treating this as a writing mistake but it may well be an editing mistake instead. Hank announces that he’s breaking the deal shortly after he gives Fuches the tearful apology that Fuches demanded - which, as I said, makes no sense. But as Hank does so, he also grabs onto John’s shoulder, pulling him back towards him as if to say “you’re not going anywhere”. Were there additional lines of dialogue that were cut, where Fuches demanded custody of John along with the apology?
“God saved my life because he wants me to continue killing people” is certainly an unusual choice when the alternative is “God saved my life because he wants me to give myself up to stop an innocent man going to jail”.
i.e., me.
“God saved my life because he wants me to continue killing people” is certainly an unusual choice when the alternative is “God saved my life because he wants me to give myself up to stop an innocent man going to jail”.
Whatever you didn’t get, this sums up Barry as a character so well.