Review: Barry, "tricky legacies" | Season 4, Episode 5
A time jump leads us into a future where Hell is only people...
As we all more or less knew: the time jump was real. Last week’s episode ended with Barry and Sally hiding out somewhere, with a kid and a house and a lot of open land; this week’s episode, “tricky legacies,” spends its running time showing us what their lives are like now before telling us explicitly how much time we skipped—eight years—and concluding on a cliffhanger that will bring Barry back to LA. For once, we aren’t faced with pinning down half-a-dozen seemingly disparate narratives in hopes of finding a through-line that brings them all together; for once, we get a half hour (I think this might be technically the longest episode of the season so far, but that only means a couple of extra minutes) that doesn’t feel rushed or compromised by the show’s structure.
The result is… well, pretty fucking bleak, all things considered. The bleakness isn’t surprising; you’d have to be incredibly naive (in a particularly romantic kind of way) to think Sally’s decision to leave tow…