Barry: starting now (3x08)

Uhhmmm. Billiam Hader can we talk? Jeezus CHRISt on a cracker.

Cons:

I think the introduction of the Albert character this season was probably the weakest point structurally. When we get to the big climax and Albert is pointing a gun at a sobbing Barry, I just kept thinking that this guy isn't someone I really feel connected to, in terms of his personal investment in Barry's fate. It's a small thing, but that's one element of the season and this episode that just doesn't click with me as strongly as everything else going on.

Pros:

Let's start with Sally. I love that I predicted something of this a couple weeks back, without knowing I was making a prediction. Sally is back, and she wants Barry to torment Natalie, the way he'd offered to do to the streaming site lady earlier. Barry tells her no, that he doesn't want her to go down that path of violence. Then, we get an intruder breaking in after Barry. He tries to choke Sally and kill her, but she manages to stab him with a knife and then beats him to death brutally with a baseball bat. The killing mostly happens in a closed sound booth so we get to see it but not hear it. When Barry wakes up from being knocked out, he grabs Sally and tells her that he did this, that it was him, that she needs to leave and pretend she was never there.

A few episodes ago I had said I wondered if Sally was considering Barry's crazy offer of vengeance, but of course she wasn't really down with it. Now, here, having reached a breaking point of her own, she's ready to snap. The utter randomness, the violence, the intensity of the strangling and the baseball bat scene... let's just say I was utterly horrified and mesmerized the whole way through. The cycle of abuse continues. Sally gets yelled at, Sally yells. Sally gets beaten, Sally beats someone to death. We hope she can escape this, but it's hard to imagine how.

Meanwhile Cousineau's career advancements are forestalled when Jim Moss interrogates him about the truth, and uncovers Barry's involvement. Serious props to the performers in this scene. The dialogue is a lot of repetition which only increased the horror of the moment. We see Gene crumbling under the face of his love for Janice, his lack of love for Barry. Why are you protecting him? Jim asks over and over and over again, and eventually we get our answer, and the undoing of that protection.

But before we get to that ending, there's also Hank. Everybody in this whole episode did just such good face acting, I don't even know what to tell you. We get to watch Hank react as a tiger eats the other prisoners on the other side of the wall. He manages to escape and kill the tiger with a machine gun, and the amount of terror and gruesome audio we are treated to in those few minutes is honestly stomach-turning in all the best ways. Then, Hank finds Cristobal, being electrocuted by his wife in a horrifying one-on-one example of gay conversion therapy. He kills Elena and the man who was dancing around to help with the de-queer-ifying of Cristobal, but we are left incredibly uncertain of their fate. Just as Sally has been forever changed by what she's done, so too has Hank, by the lives he's taken. We're not even sure if Cristobal is still conscious; it's possible that he's brain dead due to the electrocution. And that's where we leave them, reunited but utterly destroyed.

Barry ends the episode in custody, Fuches is already in prison. Cousineau has betrayed Barry for Janice's sake, at Jim Moss's prompting. Sally is fleeing, the blood of a bad man on her hands, forever scarred. Everyone is at a ridiculously low point. I saw somewhere that Bill Hader wanted this episode to feel like a panic attack, and I think he achieved that. There were so many scenes where I thought I sort of knew what the deal was, and then that wasn't it at all. Hank locked up, hearing men being eaten in the next room? Sally and Barry having a disturbing conversation and then suddenly Barry is unconscious and Sally is being choked to death? Barry and Cousineau having a tense exchange about Jim Moss, and suddenly Barry is arrested and the whole game is up? Everything went further than I thought it would, everything coalesced to the breaking point for our characters. I am so, so excited to see what fucked up things happen to them all when this show comes back for a fourth season!

9/10