Barry: wow (4x08)

I mean... "wow" seems like a pretty good word for it.

Cons:

Footage not found, honestly? This was more or less perfect television. The only shot I didn't like was the fade up on the clapping audience towards the end with Sally directing a high school production of Our Town. I think because we'd had a few very iconic, in-your-face shots leading up to it, and that one felt like it pushed over the edge for me, in openly acknowledging, I guess, the theatre of the whole thing? But that's the tiniest of nitpicks.

Pros:

Where to even begin? I think what I'll do is just run down the ultimate fates of the characters we most care about.

Fuches does this final act of services for Barry, absolving him of any wrongdoing in their relationship while doing the most redeeming thing he can in terms of his own role in the man Barry turns out to be. He rescues John for him. It's so interesting that they don't talk, they don't have any sort of final words with each other, and Fuches's final actions are to shoot and kill Hank, and then to pass Barry's son back off to him, a man that he has every reason to believe will just continue a cycle of violence. It's a gift that Fuches gives to Barry, but it's also a pretty bittersweet idea, if you think about it. But Fuches arguably gets the best ending of any character, in terms of escaping off into the dark of night to do who knows what else with the rest of his life. He doesn't seem to play a role in the film adaptation that we see, so he seems to have escaped his consequences.

Hank... I mean, watching him break down as he admits that he killed Cristobal, that final shot of him and the statue... Jesus Christ. Hank has been walking around without his heart for the past eight years, and Fuches forces him to admit the truth of that, then shoots him directly in his literal heart... it's just, it's horrifyingly beautiful. I was really fucked up by it if we're being honest. Hank also made only a very brief cameo appearance in what we saw of the movie, which just emphasizes how pointlessly tragic this story is (in a good way). Everything that Hank went through, all the pain of it, and it ultimately didn't even make the cut for the story of Barry and Cousineau. I love that we are thwarted from seeing any sort of final showdown between Barry and Hank, any final moment of reckoning. Because the truth is, Barry never gave a shit about Hank. Hank gave a shit about Barry for a while, but in the end, he only lured Barry to Sally and John in order to appease Fuches. I love how ultimately they were not really central to each other's stories.

Cousineau serving life in prison, being blamed for Janice's death, is the worse fate anybody in the entire show suffers, I think. It's poignantly pointless and terrible. His ego, his constant grasping for relevance, and at the end of the day he gets a movie made about him that paints him as the villain. He kills Barry not for attention but for pure and simple vengeance. But in doing so he kills the only chance he had to clear his own name, and for true justice for Janice to be found. Janice's father is never going to know or believe the full truth, and Cousineau is going to be remembered forever more as a murderer of not only a cop, but also a vulnerable, traumatized young man who asked him for his help.

Sally's ending is grim in a quieter sort of way. The fact that she never wanted to have a kid, that she didn't want the life she ended up with, has been clear to us these past few episodes. We start this one off with Sally just laying it all out there for John. Telling him they're fugitives, that Barry is a murderer, that Sally is too. She breaks into tears as she confesses that she's not a good person and she hasn't been a good mom. But after the shootout between Hank and Fuches's men, Sally calls for John, looking for him. And once she and Barry talk and she realizes that Barry isn't going to turn himself in, she leaves. And she takes her son with her.

We see her in a teaching role, working at a high school. It's unclear if she still yearns for glory, if she still feels herself reaching for something she'll never attain. The moment when John gets permission to have a sleepover at a friend's house really stuck out to me, because John says "I love you" to his mother, and she doesn't say it back, instead responding to ask him how the play was, seeking external validation for her talents. It paints the picture of a woman who is doing what she can to protect her child, but who never actually wanted motherhood, never mind single motherhood, to be thrust upon her.

And Barry...

Barry won, but he's dead so he doesn't know. Barry got that fantasy reputation, he got absolved of his sins as he requested from God, he got buried with full honors, he got lionized and glorified in film. He wanted to be an actor so he could shape the story of himself, and now somebody else has shaped it quite conveniently for him. That scene we saw of him sitting on the porch swing telling his son about his heroism in the war, that's what Barry was after. He was after someone, somewhere, telling him that he wasn't to blame for his own actions. The whole damn show, he ran from people who tried to tell him to own up. He tried to buy Cousineau's forgiveness, he exploited Sally's own shit to get what he wanted, which was a role as a family man with a wife and son.

And then Sally leaves him, taking John with him, and Barry has a moment where he says he'll turn himself in. It seems like he means it. We've seen him on the cusp of feeling full guilt and responsibility for what he's done in the past, but this is the real deal. And then he gets shot and killed by Gene Cousineau. He's remembered the way he wants to be remembered, but what does it matter?

God, the shot of Cousineau sitting down on his couch while dead Barry sits in the armchair... that was chilling. That's going to stick with me for a long time.

We get our final dose of... can you call it comedy? At the very end, as we watch John getting to see snippets of the movie made about his father's heroic life and tragic death at the hand of the villainous Gene Cousineau. It's a terrible, wooden movie full of god-awful writing and cheesy performances, bizarre and ridiculous and telling a story that bears no resemblance to reality, while using almost identical scene setups and scenarios in certain key spots, to drive home how the narrative was able to get twisted in such a way.

The best part, the most on-the-nose thing, was having Barry give the MacBeth speech in the movie. "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." INDEED. That's indeed the whole damn thing, isn't it???

That shot of John smiling at the movie before it cuts to black is also going to haunt me. He is reassured by this. By his father the hero, his father the victim. Never the bad guy. Barry is immortalized in the very lack of accountability that he always sought, and now we have to wonder what John is walking away from this movie with. A belief that everything his father did was actually okay, because Hollywood tells him so? Potential future alienation from his mother, if Sally dares try to be honest about their past, as she was during that brief moment in which they were Hank's hostages? Ultimately, Barry leaving a son behind in his death was such an important thematic element in this show, because it makes us question which cycles might possibly be broken, and which will continue from here.

This is a brilliant episode of a brilliant show. I'm astounded.

10/10

And to wrap up my over-all feelings on Barry... honestly, this show doesn't really have any major missteps. The things I didn't love about it where personal preference things, mostly around the actual treatment of Hollywood, which sometimes felt like the Whole Point and I was missing something, and other times felt like set dressing I couldn't quite understand. This is a show about the narrative, about how we shape the stories (and lies) we tell to ourselves and to others. I think it succeeds on every possible front when it comes to exploring that theme, and the writing is incredible, the performances brilliant. This gets pretty damn close to a perfect score from me, y'all.

9.5/10