Barry: yikes/bestest place on the earth (4x01/02)

We're back for the final season!

Cons:

When there's a show this good, I feel myself unequal to really talking about it or explaining the ways in which it's brilliant. If I had to delve into what isn't working for me so far in these first two episodes, the first thing I'd say is that Sally running home and then immediately coming back to LA was sort of odd. I guess I expected her to stay put with her awful mother for a bit longer. Would have been interesting to see how that played out.

I also think that Barry can go a little too hard on the meta stuff for my taste, and I know that's what the show is going for, I'm not saying it's bad, it's just... personal preference means that watching Cousineau play out his history with Barry in the form of a one man show felt a little more time-wasting than it did comedic to me personally.

Pros:

Over the course of the last season and now especially here, we see the way Barry has fully settled into this creepy, almost child-like serial killer persona. It's like he's just entirely shut down and is approaching everything from this place of... fun-house-mirror innocence, that I find super fascinating and very well acted. His call to Mr. Cousineau, where he asks if he's mad at him. His begging of Sally: "do you really feel safe with me Sally?" And the flashbacks we see of him as a young boy, meeting Fuches for the first time. It all creates this sense of child-like creepiness. And then you see his ruthlessness, filtered through this sense of how little he sees any choice he makes as being his own responsibility. He knows he's done bad things, and yet he's still twisting himself up to become the victim again, like when he baits a guard who was trying to be kind to him, into beating him up. And now, Barry has turned his back on Fuches's loyalty and decided to take a deal.

The scenes with Sally and her mother were chillingly awful. It made me sick to my stomach (in a good way?) to see her mother dismiss her pain and talk about how awkward it was going to be to have to explain to Sally's abuser's family about the TV show and the depiction of the abuse present in it. And her father awkwardly offering her affection and support without really being able to connect with or understand his daughter... it was really something else. The moment that sticks with me most is the mom not understanding the TV show and how it's based on Sally's experiences. "You don't have a daughter. Who wrote this?" Just like... her utter inability/unwillingness to study the piece for its emotional resonances, or maybe to examine why Sally felt like telling a story about a complicated mother/daughter relationship to begin with.

Then we've got Hank and Cristobal. I've gotta say, the scene where Hank has a bad dream that he's still locked up, made me gasp out loud and say to the screen, "oh, fuck no," because for half a second I thought maybe Hank killing everyone and rescuing his boyfriend was all a delusion, and he was still back there. And then he looks over and sees Barry and it's like "ah, okay, this is just a dream." This show plays around with perception a lot, we see it with Barry too as he imagines Sally and Cousineau there in the prison with him, but then it's Fuches who shows up, and he's the one who's real, but then we're also slipping through Barry's memories of him and Fuches in the past... it's so cool.

But back to Hank and Cristobal, I find their relationship so charmingly bizarre, and I like how they immediately want to get back into a life of crime. They just can't help themselves. Nobody who gets involved in this can ever successfully extricate themselves from it. We've also got Hank's moving and yet ultimately quite pathetic loyalty towards Barry, who probably wouldn't extend him the same courtesy. Hank wants to rescue Barry and Fuches from prison, but the minute he learns from Fuches that Barry is working with the feds, he ends the second episode declaring: "we have to kill Barry."

And we're off to the races! I already feel insane about all the stuff happening here. Fuches crying and cradling a bloodied Barry in his arms, apologizing and saying I love you? Oof. Not getting over that any time soon.

9/10