Barry: candy asses (3x07)

Well then. Just one more episode and the season is over? What is this nonsense, time is fake!

Cons:

This was probably my least favorite episode of the season? The pacing has been so frenetic and then this one really felt like a held breath, like a pause, in the midst of the chaos. While I expected that to be a good thing, it didn't quite come together for me.

Barry's only role this episode is to almost die and to hallucinate the people he's killed. I get that there were other things to focus on, but I'm not sure I learned anything new about Barry from this. He's dying, he feels guilt about the things he's done... this is not new information.

Meanwhile a lot of this episode was taken up with the investigation stuff over who killed Janice. I understand that for the purpose of propelling the plot forward, you need all of this. But Fuches telling Barry's big secret to yet another person, everyone getting rattled and angry at Barry for what he's done... there's really nothing new here, it's just turning the dial ever-so-slightly on stuff we've been watching all season. It's not that any of this is bad, it's just not quite as invigorating as I know this show can be.

The same sort of frustrating pacing issue happened with Hank as well. He's closer geographically to Cristobal, but we don't get to see them talk or start to figure out what comes next for them. Will we get to see that next week? I hope so!

Pros:

Despite all of this, it's not that I thought this episode was boring or unnecessary. There is an impending sense of doom as more and more people piece together the reality of Barry's past and all the people he's killed. But this episode felt kind of like more of the same, in terms of that impending doom continuing to grow, if that makes sense...

The most interesting stuff to me was happening over in the acting side of things. Sally screams at her former friend/employee when she discovers that Natalie has been given her own show, and Natalie records it. Sally then records a damage control pseudo-apology, and her agent decides to drop her. So things aren't going well for her, to say the least. Mostly I just love how the energy of the scenes about a woman's acting career are given this real narrative heaviness that puts it on par with all the murder stuff going on with Barry. At no point am I thinking "who cares, this isn't what matters" because it does matter, it matters to Sally and it matters in the way that the things that make up a person's life and choices always matter.

Similarly, we see that Gene is having some success with his new Masterclass gig. Things get a little tense when Jim Moss (Janice's father) talks to Gene about Barry as a suspect. Gene covers for Barry, but somewhat poorly, so it looks like another person has accepted the scary truth of the situation. It's so twisty, to have Gene in a position where he knows exactly what happened to the woman he loved, and while he badly wants revenge, for the sake of his and his family's continued safety, he has to help cover up the truth of his loved one's murder.

I don't have much more to say on this one. I'm anxious about next week's finale, there are a lot of things still in the air. I love to watch a show that is fundamentally about bad people, who I still find compelling to watch and learn new things about. Barry certainly delivers on that front!

7/10