Review: Barry, "wow" | Season 4, Episode 8

Bye bye, Barry.

Photo: HBO

I’m going to miss this show. 

Watching tonight’s series finale, which featured a lot of death, a few good jokes, and more than its fair share of absurd misery, I made my peace with Barry. Reviewing this final season has been an odd experience; lots of fumbling, lots of uncertainty, lots of doubting my own instincts. I could never quite settle on how to take what I was watching. Was it good? Was it coherent? Was it too short, too fast, too dark, too goofy, too bizarre, too scattershot, too violent, too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯? Reviewing the final season of any show is tricky business, but Barry’s seemed especially fraught. I came in as a fan convinced that Bill Hader and his creative team could do no wrong. Then I spent a while thinking, hm, maybe they can do wrong. And now, having come to the end, the only definitive thing I can say is, well, that’s over and I watched all of it.

I don’t think the final season worked. It’s not a cohesive whole; the limitations built into the story, the restrictive half hour format, the fact that there were only eight episodes to accomplish everything, plus a whole other host of factors, made for an ambitious but frequently disjointed experience. I appreciate that the creative team decided to keep going after Barry got arrested at the end of season three, and I won’t argue that season four shouldn’t have existed. If anything, it’s a purer expression of the show’s goals than the previous three seasons. The problem is that “the show’s goals” weren’t something simple like “tell the story of a hitman who wants to be an actor” or even “show the rot inherent in American systems.” It was more about starting with a premise and fucking around and finding out. It was about experimenting and throwing everything at the wall, and refusing to back down from any potential dead end. 

There are, of course, plenty of shows like this on TV—weird oddities that run long past their expiration date, shows you don’t hear much about unless you happen to bump into a fan online; shows that almost, but not quite, capture the zeitgeist. The shows that aren’t Succession or Mad Men or Breaking Bad. One of several things that makes Barry unique is that it actually did break through for a while, but the success never changed the intent. This never became a safer show, or one content to stick to a single premise. It always had a bit of that outsider vibe to it, which is a big reason why I’m going to miss it. Call it the upside of that half-hour episode length; even at its strangest or most disconnected, I was never bored watching Barry, and I was never exhausted by it. It retained its novelty even as its plotting became increasingly esoteric, and even as the central story lost most—if not all—of its connection to actual emotional reality. 

What I’m saying is that I loved the experience of watching Barry even as I recognized the show didn’t ultimately succeed in the classic sense of dramatic art. Take the last scene of tonight’s finale, “wow.” John, who’s aged into Jaeden Martell (who Hader likely met filming IT), stays over at a friend’s house to watch the movie version of his dad’s life and death. The movie, The Mask Collector, tells the story of a manipulative acting teacher (British in this version) who frames a war vet for murder, ultimately killing him. It’s a clever, entirely appropriate way to the end the show, and the fact that the movie has absolutely no bearing on reality only makes it that much funnier.

It’s just, well, what’s the point here? That Hollywood lies? That Barry’s son is going to think his dad is a hero? Or maybe it’s that Barry, in finally—finally—accepting his sins a few seconds before his death, got the ending he always wanted. There are ways to justify this, angles of analysis that seem at least initially promising, but the further you go down any particular trail, the harder it is to ignore that there’s just not enough to support any real thematic conclusion. Sally took John away from Barry when he was younger, and they both seem to be doing okay now, but we don’t really know for sure. Is this supposed to be a happy ending? It certainly isn’t happy for Gene, apparently serving a life sentence for Barry and Janice’s death. Gene did sin by taking the money from Barry, and Sally is comparatively innocent, so I guess there’s some kind of rough moral accounting here, but it doesn’t feel moral enough to really be saying anything beyond exactly what it is. Nor does it feel immoral enough to be making a point about the absurdity of life.

Ultimately, it’s a show that never quite managed to be greater than the sum of its parts. It’s just that those parts were, by and large, a delight. Whatever I may think of the finale as a whole (and I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure where I’m going to land on this one), I loved nearly every scene on its own. Loved watching Fuches explain where he got his power, loved watching Hank struggle and finally die unable to accept his culpability in Cristobal’s death. Loved watching Sally apologize to John and regain some kind of selfhood, even if that selfhood leaves her alone and scrounging for scraps of praise as a high school drama director. I loved that Barry finally, finally decides to do the right thing, and then gets shot and killed (“Oh wow”) by his former mentor, because deciding to do the right thing doesn’t automatically mean you’ll actually get to do it.

Honestly, that’s the smartest, best choice that “wow” makes. Barry never gets to save the day. When he arrives at Hank’s headquarters loaded down with guns, the fight is already over. Hank and Fuches’s men shot it out, Hank is dying, and Fuches, in one last moment of unexpected generosity, saved John and brought him back to his father. Barry was never the hero this season, and, apart from the prison break, we never saw him fire a gun. The movie version was how he wanted to see himself, but the actual story never gave him the chance he wanted to be righteous. 

It’s a nice touch, and it’s possible that with some distance, I’ll find all of this more cohesive on a rewatch. Right now, though, it feels too abrupt, too much a jumble, to sit quite right. I don’t think Gene’s storyline this season ever really worked, and while I appreciate that the finale didn’t linger, it was too scattershot to quite stick the landing. But then, I don’t think sticking the landing was ever really the goal; I think, by its nature, this was as good an ending of Barry we were ever going to get. Barry is dead, so, apart from that one last funny/sad/upsetting glimpse of the future, there’s nothing left to say. 

Stray observations

• I’ll miss how crazy inventive the series could be, and how I could never tell where it was going next. Its unpredictability was both a strength and a weakness–resisting more traditional story beats made it feel fresh, but also robbed any one storyline of the cumulative impact you hope for in a comedy/drama. I’m extremely curious about whatever Hader does next; he’s got a great eye for direction, and his sense of humor is something that could play great on film. Hell, it would be interesting if he decides to do another TV show at some point—I’m sure he’s learned a lot from this one. (Not pretending Hader was the only voice that mattered behind the series, but it really did seem like his baby by the end.)

• Thanks for reading! It’s been a pleasure reading your comments this season.