[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the series finale of Barry, “wow.”]
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the series finale of Barry is how little Barry was in it. But while this might feel like a bit of an anti-climax of an ending, “wow” (with a period) features so much to unpack about what director/co-creator/star Bill Hader has been trying to say this whole time — not just about what it means to be an actor, but what it means to be a person.
Picking up where last week’s episode left off — Sally and John captured by NoHo Hank, Barry on the warpath — it’d be easy to expect another carefully choreographed explosion of action from Barry, a la the monastery massacre from Season 2. Instead, Barry’s late to the party, as Fuchs takes care of business, the sole survivor of the firefight between his and Hank’s respective gangs.
That final confrontation between Fuchs and Hank does stand out as one of the few Hader-directed action sequences which has some issues — mostly the feeling of missing coverage, especially with Sally’s place in the action lost beyond some off-screen cries for her son. The one wide shot, capturing the full scope of the showdown and its grenade-assisted conclusion, is a masterwork of staging, but the chaos feels less intentional than usual.
Still, it’s a minor complaint, given the other tableaus that Hader gives us throughout the episode, and the tragedies that offer both warm and cold catharsis for the viewer. Barry would probably have stayed alive if he’d turned himself in when Sally suggests it, but “I don’t think that’s what God wants for me,” he says then. “For some reason, he spared me.” It’s not the hand of God, though, because it’s a selfish idea on Barry’s part, an avoidance of consequences — the one way in which he’s always been a coward. He might want to believe he’s been redeemed, but that’s not actually possible without, as Sally says, actually facing the repercussions for his actions.
To be clear, he could have just kept running on his own. Instead, not being able to let Sally and John go is what led him to Cousineau’s house — and Cousineau’s bullets.
Barry (HBO)
