BARRY Season Three: Five Quick Thoughts on “forgiving jeff”
Welcome back, BARRY. We’ve missed you.
This season, I’m going to try to post immediate reactions on Sunday night, episode by episode. Here are the first five, all about the premiere, “forgiving jeff”.
The show is moving quickly! I suppose I should have expected it, but I genuinely was not prepared for basically everything in the Season Three trailer to be from this first episode, up to and including the first confrontation between Gene and Barry (more on that later). I am so appreciative of when shows are able to put a clamp on its contents getting leaked out (the episode 2 preview on HBO MAX is hilariously, defiantly vague). I genuinely have no clue where the next seven episodes are going. In the age of YouTube trailer dissections, how often does that happen anymore?
Hank and Cristobal! It hasn’t even been an hour yet, and the number one thing people are talking about about BARRY is the reveal that Hank and Cristobal are now in a relationship, and one that seems pretty comfortable and healthy (at least as far as a relationship between two gang lords can be). Look, I envision an immediate future where the Monday discourse on BARRY will be all about thus, followed by a nasty counter-discourse by Tuesday about how BARRY caved into the “woke mob” or how HBO are now “groomers” or something, because that’s the world we currently live in.
But, fuck it, it’s satisfying to see Hank finally happy after two years of taking shit from others. He’s got a nice place now, and he doesn’t need to be throwing Barry any work out of pity. And after surviving his first interrogation by the feds, hasn’t he earned a little bit of happiness? We have all season to drag him back into the shit. Let’s just enjoy this while it lasts.
Keeping tabs on the others. Fuches is hiding out in a shed in the Chechen mountains, chomping on some knock-off cereal. He might have the hots for the woman bringing he and his guard their groceries? Not a lot on the Fuches front this week, to be honest.
Meanwhile, Sally is hard at work at her autobiographical drama Joplin and trying to get it sold to a particularly unfocused network executive. The show does a nice job at portraying the workload something like this entails, but we also can clock Sally trying desperately to mold an image of herself now that she is tasting something resembling success. She is giving explicit instructions to Barry on how to bring her flowers to set, she’s treating Natalie as essentially an errand girl. She doesn’t even notice that Barry is falling part in front of her eyes, a defining feature of their relationship. Do you blame him for hallucinating a bullet wound right in the middle of her forehead?
Justice for Natalie? After two years of continually creeping into center stage from the background (and her penchant for always hovering being nicely brought back this episode), it sure felt to me like Natalie is being set up for some catharsis by the end of the year. Otherwise, I don’t know what the reason would be for the knowing close-up as Natalie gets passively scolded and then dispatched for petty chore duty by Sally. I realized that this is the first run of episodes for D’Arcy Carden where she wasn’t also doing THE GOOD PLACE, which might mean she’s available for a little role expansion? Here’s hoping this thread continues.
Forgiveness. Can you imagine? The theme of forgiveness and how it’s given is obviously in the forefront of the premiere’s mind. In the opening hit, an unnamed cuckolded man ultimately bails on the killing of his wife’s lover, Jeff, by forgiving him. The man is sort of even-handed about the whole thing all of a sudden; his wife is no bed of roses, either, after all. Barry is forced to kill them both to close the loop. But I’d also like to think he killed them both out of rage. Why should Jeff get forgiveness so easily? There’s no forgiving Jeff.
Which is what makes the surprisingly immediate confrontation between Gene and Barry so emotionally heavy.
(By the way, yes, I was expecting some sort of subversion in Gene’s office; there wasn’t a chance the episode was going to end with Barry dying or going to jail. However, I wasn’t expecting the gun, the one he received as a gift from Rip Torn, to completely fall apart in Gene’s hand. Unique, unexpected, and one of the only genuine sources of laughs in a quite dark episode. Bravo, BARRY.)
Now that Gene is wise to what happened, Barry knows that the loop has to be closed again. They drive out to the same remote location where Jeff was killed. As Gene pleads for a way out, he hallucinates another bullet wound, this time in Gene’s head. He is succumbing to the darkness.
What throws him for a loop is Gene’s willingness to forgive him (of course, this comes after staring down the barrel of a gun, so who knows who sincere this is). Barry says it has to be earned. Gene yells at him to earn it, then.
The first ray of light Barry has had in a long time, Barry seems to have an idea as to how he’s going to do that. “Get back in the trunk.”
And so will we. At least for this week.