BARRY Season Three: Five Quick Thoughts on “710N”

Freeway chases, Vanessa Bayer, and a classic rug pull! Let’s talk about Barry Season Three’s “710N”.

• The Taylor Chase. No need to bury the lede here. The showcase this week is Barry evading the Taylor motocross stars, to the point that HBO uploaded a whole “making-of” clip to the episode page on HBO Max. And there will be a lot of time for other publications to break it down beat-by-beat, and explain exactly why it works so well. But for tonight, I just want to say how effectively it illustrates Bill Hader’s unique comedic sensibility (and make no mistake, the making-of clip states clearly this was all him).

  It’s not so much tense and adrenaline-fueled as it is offbeat and strange, almost like a dream (it feels a lot like last season’s “ronny/lily” fight). Even once you catch on to the conceit that each motorcyclist is going to eventually eat it in a surprising, macabre way, it takes you by surprise every single time (the Ritter household favorite? The one that mishandles the machine gun handoff, then boinks themselves off their bike by running into a car sitting in traffic). Most importantly, the goofiness provides sufficient distraction from other proceedings this week so that the ending twist takes you COMPLETELY by surprise (more on that later), in that way only BARRY can.

• Acknowledging the sign from God. There has perhaps been no more defining character moment for Fuches up to this point in the show than him being plucked from the brink of death by almost literally the hand of God, being gifted a beautiful young bride who loves him, and yet another chance at a quiet, peaceful life, then immediately throwing it all away after being reminded by a newspaper headline that he was supposed to be enacting revenge. Classic Fuches!

• Vanessa Bayer! Okay! It’s just the SNL fan in me here, but I literally gasped when Bayer first arrived as the BanShe executive that eventually pitches Sally on joining the writer’s room for THE NEW MEDUSAS. And, look, was her entire scene just an excuse to work in that very specific Bayer shtick (making sounds that encapsulate entire moods and personalities)? Yes, absolutely. Do I mind at all? You bet your ass I don’t.

• Ben, yay! Adding to the dreamlike quality of “710N” is the magical beignet man from whom every principal character gets some sort of profound life advice over the course of the episode’s thirty minutes. It’s absurd, it’s almost kind of sweet (I hope Hank takes him up on his offer to help run his franchisee plan), and funnily enough…his advice tended to be pretty apt. When he tells Barry to tread lightly as he heads to the supposed marine veteran reunion he’s heading to at Chris’ widow’s home? Shoulda listened to the beignet man, Barry.

• Ben, no! I’ll admit, I was completely fooled. The reveal of Janice Moss’ dad as a potential source of Fuches’ schemes (as well as, oh, a ten minute surreal chase scene right before) was sufficient cover for what Fuches was really up to: revealing Chris’ fate to his widow, setting up a whole other revenge scheme that puts Barry in real danger. And as she places Fuches’ Kenneth Goulet business card on the table as he eats his poison beignet, Barry begins foaming at the mouth and collapses.

  And once again, I have no idea where the show is going to go. Just the way the show likes it.

Five quick thoughts on “all the sauces”: BARRY Season Three

Things are heating up this week. Literally! Because a house exploded! Here are five quick thoughts on “all the sauces”.

• Using comedy to enhance tension. Easily the star sequence of this week’s episode is Barry on the phone with the Detonate App tech desk. It stood out for a few reasons, the top one primarily being that the idea of an app almost certainly only used by criminals and terrorists would have a customer service desk (the tech hearing the explosion in the background and going, “oh good, it sounds like we fixed the issue” is top-tier shit).

  But! Consider the misdirect this sequence pulled off. It was expressly stated at the top of the episode that the bomb has to go off in the afternoon, during a midday meeting, since Cristobal is off doing pilates. My immediate thought at that point was, “oh, there’s going to be a complication and Cristobal’s going to be in the house when it’s detonation time.” And it turns out there was! But because the shit with the help desk was so unexpected and so funny, I completely forgot that it’s all of a sudden night-time. And when Cristobal comes home….well, my heart sunk.

• The Natalie disrespect continues. I’m glad Sally had a good night at her show premiere and, frankly, I’m happy she dumped Barry, since it shows she might indeed be growing as a human. But, fuck man, you can’t get your friend a seat in the limo?

• Annabeth Gish! For whatever reason, I was really happy to see her pop up in this episode. I’m not exactly a fan or anything, but after having to suffer through the final two seasons of The X-Files (plus a couple episodes of the revival seasons, I think? Those all feel really blurry to me for the most part) and costarring alongside Shaq in STEEL, I was happy to see her get a potentially meaty part on a great show. Especially since she’s part of Fuches’ insane revenge plan. Speaking of…

• “What are we, some kind of Suicide Squad?” Leave it to Fuches to come up with the most batshit idea ever, that of taking back on his secret identity of Kenneth Goulet, Private Detective and recruiting family members of Barry’s past victims to take arms against him. I have no idea how it’s really going to play out, but I’m imagining this Suicide Squad of hitmen so amateur they have nervous breakdowns about the path they’re taking in front of nonplussed gun store owners, and I get really excited. Considering these are characters that have nothing to lose (Gish’s son gave up on his entire career path as a result of Barry’s actions, as evidenced by the logo on his work shirt), anything could happen next.

  And that’s where BARRY does its best work.

  (Also, my wife thinks the murder of Gish’s husband is a reference to the first hit we see in the pilot. Did anyone else think the same?)

• “fuck fuck” Fred Melamed, everybody.

Truth and Consequences: Breaking down BARRY, Season One

Why are people drawn to acting?

A lot of people will tell you it's the chance for self-expression.  For others, frankly, it's the great opportunity to get with women. For a surprising amount, it's because you've failed at everything else.

But I think if you were to ask a lot of actors, the thrill is the opportunity to be somebody else.  To put yourself aside and assume a new psyche, even if just for a minute or two.  It's no mistake, then, that performers tend to be some of the most self-hating people on the planet.  If you don't feel comfortable with your own soul, why not jump into someone else's?

The illusion is the point.

I don't watch a ton of television shows, so I feel pretty confident and qualified in saying BARRY is the best still-running show on television right now.  It has a delightfully odd premise that allows for equal parts meta-humor about "the biz" and tight conflict-driven tension: Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a loner hitman ex-Marine who receives his assignments from a family friend and defacto father figure, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root).  When he's not killing, he's typically enjoying a good cry in the shower, a prisoner of the one skill he's ever seemed to develop in his life.  A job set up by a gang of Chechens takes him to sunny Los Angeles, where he follows his next target to an acting class, ran by the great Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler).  He gets mistaken for a new student and is immediately thrown into a scene.  He has no idea what he's doing, but he gets polite applause anyway.

And that's it.  He's hooked.  The validation is enough.  He's almost immediately accepted by his classmates, and the most ambitious of the group, Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), seems to be sweet on him.  There's potential for reinvention here for Barry, a new thing that he could possibly be good at.

From there, the show becomes a series-long attempt on Barry's part to excavate himself from his old life to his new one.  As it so often happens, removing yourself from the world of crime is difficult, especially as one of the Chechens, Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) ,wants so desperately to be his friend.  Barry's predicament is compounded by the fact that his growth as an actor is stunted since he can't exactly come at it honestly.  How does one find truth when you're constantly forced to lie?

Created by Hader and Alec Berg, the creator of previous HBO comedy hit Silicon Valley, BARRY takes advantage of the unique talents its main man has.  Bill Hader was an immediate standout and fan favorite during his eight or so years on Saturday Night Live for his unmatched ability to dig into a celebrity impression no matter how obscure or audience-unfriendly it could be.  But like many comedians, he also has this surprising depth for drama.

But what has always stuck out to me is BARRY's deceptively simple approach to storytelling.  The vast majority of the show's sixteen episodes unfold as a result of its elite writing staff not shying away from the consequences borne from the decisions and choices made by its titular character.  When people reflect back on Breaking Bad, one of the things you hear about what made it so satisfying was the relative lack of coincidences in its plot (with maybe the only exception being Walt's brother-in-law being a DEA agent, but at some point, the conflict has to start somewhere).  For the most part, you're watching a series of characters make choices to get out of a situation, then make a whole new set of choices as a result of their old set.  

So it goes with BARRY.  Once you accept that Barry Berkman is not a guy that probably exists in our actual reality, it becomes a show about a man who decides to reinvent his life late in the game.  Too late?  We're still finding out.

In advance of the third season premiere on April 24th, I really want to take a look back at that initial first season, which aired all the way in 2018 (aka, a million years ago), and show how the show puts Barry and the people around him through the ringer in his pursuit of reinvention and finding himself through the power of performance.

In the event you're reading this without watching the show, you probably shouldn't.  There's kind of no way to break down a show like this without spoiling it in great detail.  Thus, I greatly urge you to pull up the first season and read this as you go.  It'll be more fun this way, I promise.

Chapter One: Make Your Mark

Television pilots can honestly be a little bit of a drag.  Even the best shows can have initial outings that are barely indicative of what they will eventually turn into, as writers and producers focus more on selling the premise and potential of a given comedy or drama, while trying to drill into the idea of how they ultimately want the characters to function, long before the grind of a weekly writer's room and actor input starts to unlock new possibilities.  Pilots are even more perilous when a given show is more plot-driven than your average thirty-minute sitcom.  What happens when plot lines set up from the beginning end up having to get tossed out as something even more fruitful emerges?

So it's miraculous that BARRY's pilot feels much more like the opening chapter of a great book than it does a proof of concept (perhaps saying more about HBO's house style than your average network).  Because, to be honest, there are threads set up in this first half-hour that the show is still dealing with as we enter its third-season premiere, which makes revisiting these early entries so much fun.

Note: the fact that BARRY is still dealing with fallout of Barry's initial hit in this episode that kicks the whole story in motion might lead one to assume the show has been planned out back to front before the cameras ever started rolling.  Although this was an idea I used to think was possible in the world of television, the reality is that it doesn't really work like that.  Don't take my word for it; the behind-the-scenes features after every episode of BARRY make it clear that most of these connective moments are happy accidents that come from writer's meetings.

I think this is actually more impressive; it shows the tremendous amount of work and discussion and alchemy that goes into making even mediocre television shows seem seamless.  We tend to only notice plotting on shows when something goes wrong; we should acknowledge it when it becomes invisible, too.

The premise of BARRY was already detailed above, and that's essentially the plot of the show's first half-hour installment.  Along the way, we get introductions to Fuches (is there a more versatile actor in our lifetimes than Stephen Root?), Noho Hank (who hadn't quite formed himself into the fan favorite that he will soon become, Cousineau (goddamn, does Winkler so perfectly embody every sincere-but-vain acting teacher that has ever existed), and Sally, who is the one character that I think the show still sometimes has trouble defining, but immediately embodied so well by Sarah Goldberg as every ambitious actress you meet in an acting class.

I've also always liked the detail of making Ryan Madison, Barry's initial target and reason for traveling to L.A. (Ryan's crime: sleeping with the wife of a Chechan crime lord), kind of a dummy, exemplified by the obliviously bad scene he ropes Barry into, pulled from TRUE ROMANCE.  He's sweet in a surface level way, if not exactly harmless.  I think it might have been easy to make him obviously bad, in order to not make Barry villainous right away.

But Barry kind of likes him.  And Ryan isn't mean to him; he eventually gives Barry his copy of Gene's book Hit Your Mark and Say Your Lines.  And, even though he's god-awful on stage, Barry definitely likes that rush he feels with the lights on him.  And he definitely likes that, for maybe the first time in his adult life, there are people talking to him about anything that's not setting up the murder of another person.  This acting class doesn't know anything about Barry's real nature, which represents the chance at a fresh start.

Of course, the facile nature of the L.A. acting scene also rears its head, as it turns out his classmates are all, to a one, self-absorbed, up to and including the man himself, Gene Cousineau.  Demanding he prepare a piece before officially taking him on as a student, Barry freezes in front of this new potential mentor/father figure.  Eventually, he accosts Gene in the parking lot and bares his soul, for the first time in his life, about the first time he ever killed somebody.  Gene presumes it's from a show and takes him on as a student, an example of how truth can be a tricky thing in the world of BARRY. 

Of course, Barry has a task at hand, one that he's dragged his feet on for too long.  The Chechans shoot Ryan themselves, which causes Barry to freak out and blow the Chechans away in their car.  This move proves problematic due to the inexplicable presence of a lipstick camera inside the car, which has captured grainy footage of the would-be assassin...

Chapter Two: Use It!

For those who may be wondering, why yes, that mirror exercise Barry and Sally are doing in the opening moments is a very real thing, and yes, it does make you feel like a total goon, and no, it doesn't appear to have any effect on your ability to act.  Acting classes are a blast!

More of a table-setting episode than the pilot, Chapter Two still contains a couple of instant classic visuals, Barry on the phone with Sally as Fuches is getting his ass kicked in the background chief among them.  It's a great illustration of how BARRY can turn a tense, personal moment simultaneously into a hilarious one.

But, Chapter Two also establishes immediately that BARRY is not going to be a show that looks for easy fixes to its conflicts.  Instead, right in the very first scene, the screws to Barry are immediately tightened as Ryan's death is announced mid-class and everyone is sent home (although not before Cousineau makes it clear everyone is still paying in full for the day, a moment that only Henry Winkler could make funny rather than horrifying).  BARRY is a show that very much likes to rub the consequences of its character's actions in their face, and this stands as our first major example.

Chapter Two also establishes that simply quitting the hitman business isn't really going to be an option for Barry.  In the aftermath of the failed Ryan Madison murder, and Noho Hank's bizarre decision to bring that lipstick cam to the hit, the Chechans want revenge.  Barry is immediately put in the position of having to take on one more job before he can "quit killing", this time a member of a rival Bolivian gang.  Barry's unfortunately not in a position to refuse, especially since Fuches' life (and molars) are on the line. 

We also get introduced to our two detective characters, Moss and Loach, both who will be critical to the show in their own ways.  At the moment, they're serving the function of being the outside forces that are on the hunt for Barry.  Moss is presented as a little prideful and over-zealous, illustrated when she oversteps with the computer technicians and locks them out of the phone they pulled from the crime scene.  Loach is a little busy dealing with the crumbling of his marriage at the moment.

We end with another screw-tightening moment for Barry.  The episode culminates in the Ryan Madison tribute at the local bar, where Barry is due to appear in a scene from Doubt with Sally (a scene where he plays a character who also has secrets to hide).  And yes, the idea of turning a funeral into an acting showcase is very "theatre student".  Things take a turn when Ryan's father comes up to give a speech, until he becomes too heartbroken to continue speaking, instead exclaiming "who would do this to my boy?"  Knowing the answer, Barry has a panic attack and steps outside.  Sally asks what's wrong and he quietly says, "I've never seen that".

It's the first actual opportunity for change for Barry Berkman.  Never having to really stick around for the fallout of his line of work, he is now faced once again with stark consequences of the impact he's made.  Now he needs to decide what to do about it.

Still, his line of work continues.  He drops Sally off at her home although, to her confusion, not coming inside.  One of the Chechans (Vacha) snaps a photo of them from afar, establishing that Barry's acting life will not be a secret for much longer.

Barry leaves to kill a Bolivian.  

Chapter Three: Make the Unsafe Choice

Chapter Three opens with a great example of the way this show can layer conflict right before your eyes.  We open with Barry camped out across the street from his latest mark, sniper rifle in hand.  Noho Hank calls him with a request.  He's mailed a bullet over to the Bolivians, revealing Hanks's eye for theatrics (and, maybe, his desperate need to make a mark).  He's used DHL and wants Barry to pump the brakes on killing (insert name) until the bullet arrives.  Problem for Barry since he has a rehearsal to get to, and he has a clear shot right now (seriously, the guy is doing stretches in his driveway).

Barry needs this job to be done as soon as possible so he can make sure Fuches is safe, and he can jump into this acting thing with both feet.

But Hank is adamant.  He must wait, nothing else to guide him out there but his copy of Cousineau's book (the chapters of which are where the first season episode titles are derived from).

This turn is great, because mailing somebody a bullet without giving any context as to what it's supposed to mean, is a very funny idea, and tells us a lot about Hank.  But, we now have pressure pushing up against Barry in several directions.  Sally is on his ass, the life of his "only friend" at the moment is in danger, and he needs to hurry up because the Chechens are calling in a ringer to take out the Bolivians.  The number one assassin in all of Chechnya, Stovka, has landed.

This episode, if nothing else, is a great showcase for Stephen Root and the used-car-salesman quality he gives to Fuches.  Once Stovka arrives, we see that is an old and disillusioned old man (45 years old, in fact).  Fuches immediately starts up the bullshit, offering to show him around Los Angeles, and letting Stovka know that he's in the land of opportunity now, and can do anything he wants.  What Stovka decides to do, I'll redact (in case you really are reading these without watching first). Needless to say, it's a prime example of BARRY's ability to bulldoze their way through the corners it writes itself into. 

We also get introduced in Chapter Three to a narrative function unique to BARRY's first season, that of Barry's fantasies of his life together with Sally.  In these fantasies, Barry is the fucking man, walking arm in arm with Sally, picking out soups in the grocery store.  These scenes are great because they're funny, and lets us see the Bill Hader we remember from the SNL days.  But they also serve a purpose, as they juxtapose how far Barry is in reality with his fantasy self (aren't we all).  In reality, he can't even imagine a can of soup in an improv exercise in Cousineau's class.

Chapter Three also gives us the show's first real, intimate kill.  Now that night has fallen, the long-range sniper route isn't going to work.  Barry instead decides to enter the house, but fails to get the drop on his mark.  After a quick chase, where the Bolivian nearly hops the fence over to a dinner party next door, Barry slowly chokes the life out of this stranger he is forced to kill.  The Bolivian speaks a phrase in Spanish before succumbing to his assassin.  

The phrase rattles in Barry's head, and Sally catches him muttering it to himself.  In one of the show's few moments of coincidence, Sally knows a few phrases in Spanish and happily translates for him:

"You don't have to do this."

Chapter Four: Commit....To You!

This episode contains a moment I've actually written about before, where Barry cheerily performs Alec Baldwin's "coffee's for closers" monologue from the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross.  I won't repeat myself, except to say that it's the go-to example in my head of the logical conclusion of the "let actors interpret as they wish" school of thought.  Sometimes there's only one way to read a scene, everybody!

Chapter Four sneakily sets up the back half of this season very nicely.  Sally encouraging Barry to change his last name to Block (Barry Block!) and create a new Facebook profile, causing him to reconnect with his old Marine friend Chris Lucado, can be directly tied to the endgame of the first season.  And it's established without you really thinking about it.  This is also where Barry gets assigned the task of raiding and taking over the Bolivian stash house in a ground-grabbing move by the Chechens, a task that will eventually prove critical. 

Barry gets assigned this job under duress, as he spends much of this episode trying to move forward in his life without Fuches.  He accosts Fuches at an indoor driving range and tells him to fuck off.  All this results in, though, is Fuches showing up to a party being thrown by Natalie (D'Arcy Carden), one of Barry's acting classmates.  A party, by the way, that is being thrown as a way for Natalie to impress, and possibly get in the good graces of Zach Burrows, an actor who's "made it" (as an animated Pinocchio, whose voice and image will be replaced in post, which puts into question what it even means to "make it").  Fuches crashing the party is a grim reminder that Barry's old life is always in danger of encroaching on his new one.

Speaking of, it must be said that D'Arcy Carden is a tremendously gifted comedian that doesn't always get a ton to do on BARRY, at least relative to her starring role on The Good Place.  But Chapter Four puts her at least tangentially into the conflict, as Barry's misguided decision to also invite Chris to her party, who subsequently invites two especially meat-headed Marine friends of his own, has put her on edge.  Barry gets drunk and sees Sally chatting it up with Zach, and decides to get all alpha-male and defensive, telling Zach to stay away from his girlfriend.  This turns out to be a mega-misread on where he and Sally stand.  

This also turns out to be a huge glimpse, not for the last time, into the rage monster that lives inside Barry's head and what can happen when he refuses to put it in check.

To Natalie and Barry's horror, she leaves the party with Zach.  The two marines start wrestling each other and end up causing property damage.  Barry needs to get them home.  As they climb into the car, one of the Marines, Taylor, puts together from Barry's outfit and from the wads of cash Barry has in the car that he's hiding something.  He's seen the packet on the Bolivian stash house and he wants in.  Screws tightening.

Checking in on other characters, I've always really loved the scene where we finally see Gene on an audition.  It's for a background, one-line role, and it's suggested that he auditions for a lot of these.  In his theatre class, he is a god where aspiring young actors give him standing ovations at his mere entrance into the room.  Here, where it counts?  He's just another guy, someone who gives two versions of his single line and then shuffles on back to where he came.  It’s kind of bleak.

Oh well, at least Gene seems to be having success seducing Agent Moss, who recently showed up to the class with a picture of the guy the cops have seen on the lipstick cam footage (although too fuzzy for anyone to identify that man as Barry).  The scene where Gene essentially tricks Moss into going on a date with him, as hairy as that sounds, is one that shows off how charming Henry Winkler can really be. 

Speaking of auditions, Sally suffers a heartbreaking one here.  I've alluded above to the fact that I'm not always sure if Sally is truly maximized in this series.  What I mean by that is that I'm not always sure if we're supposed to be on her side or not.  She's presented as self-absorbed, although no less than anybody else in the class, but she's also clearly set up to be the most capable and talented of her classmates.  It leads to moments where Sally is ambitious to the point of selfishness, and it's not always clear to me if we're supposed to be seeing her as complex or not.  This will come to a head more at the end of Season Two, but you can't help but see her as kind of a bad friend to Barry in the first couple of episodes, seemingly using him as means to an end for her career when it's convenient.  Again, at least to me (your mileage may vary).

Anyway, even I can't help but feel terribly for Sally here as she gets her first taste of what women have to go through to get a break in this business.  One might look at her scene with her agent, who reveals his true intentions in sort of a testing way, seeing if Sally will play the game in order to move forward with her career, and say it's a little on-the-nose.  And honestly?  I think often situations like this are a little on the nose in real life.  Powerful men don’t need to be subtle behind closed doots. The agent basically saying he sleeps with his clients, Sally balking, then the agent going "wow, I was just kidding" completely tracks to me.

Of course, as we learn with Barry, standing up for yourself has consequences, too.  And when Sally gets dropped from her representation right before her audition (where she notices the other actresses in the room are all especially well-endowed), well, the show's intentions as to our feelings for her are clear.

We're on Sally's side.  How could we not?

P.S: Chapter Four also gives us one of the more unexpected Jon Hamm cameos I've ever seen.

Chapter Five: Do Your Job

Our first big action set-piece episode.  Barry hasn't been able to shake Taylor, who serves his role as this fantastic chaos agent in Barry's life.  He ends up having to take him along on the Bolivian stash house raid (although Barry is under strict instruction to kill him when the job is done, lest there we any loose ends that could blow their identities).  The sequence itself is nasty and blunt, with people being shot and dying onscreen, before our very eyes.  The weight of it all is visible on Barry, which makes Taylor's experience of the raid all the more startling.  Life is one big video game to Taylor, and he plays it so well.  Barry gets sidelined and knocked unconscious early on, but it makes no difference.  Taylor's taken everybody out, and found a sack full of dirty money to boot.

And here's the thing: Barry and Taylor make a good team.  Taylor actually treats Barry on equal terms, more than Fuches ever has.  He's just as excited to split the money with Barry as he is to find it.  Barry has a decision to make: does he kill this man, just because he's been instructed to?  By another man who maybe doesn't care about him as much as he seemed to think?

More than anything else, however, Chapter Five continues set up the stakes for everyone involved.  Gene and Moss are starting to fall in love.  We spend a scene of significant length with Barry hanging out with Chris and his beautiful family. And all the while, Fuches is putting the full-court press on Barry to take this Taylor guy out.

Chapter Five is as good a time as any to point out how critical Root is to the functionality of BARRY as a whole. Monroe Fuchs is essentially an avatar for the devil himself. Root, Berg/Hader and the entire writing and production staff understand that Satan can often be charming in his own way. Fuches is a guy who, against all odds, tends to talk himself out of situations and get what he wants. Root never plays Fuches as a scenery-chewing villain. He’s more of an icky used-car salesman. Or a distant uncle with a dark secret.

Fuches can tell you to kill a man with a smile on his face, and there’s a chance you’ll walk away thinking it was your idea.

And for Barry, he's been assigned a scene from Macbeth for Cousineau's upcoming Shakespeare Showcase.  The choice of play and scene is telling, as we see Lady Macbeth potentially grapple with the guilt of taking a life ("out, damned spot" and all that).  As the class argues over whether that kind of spot can ever truly be cleaned, Barry quietly tries to object until erupting.  What if you were just following orders?  Is that better or worse?  Can you really just never come back from murdering, as everyone in class seems to imply?

One of the themes of BARRY that is laid bare in Chapter Five is whether or not there is a time limit on change.  Barry is having to deal with the idea that maybe he's already reached the point of no return, and the fact that he's been instructed once again to end another life....well, I don't blame him for erupting.  Although everyone in the class assumes he's referring to his time in the military, only Barry knows the truth.

Other little things I like in this episode include Hank trying to plead to Barry for some sympathy in regards to the trouble he's now in for bringing that damned lipstick camera to the Ryan Madison assassination ("Come on, you know I'm a total gearhead!").  Hank's admiration for Barry, as well as his little-kid soul at heart....it's no wonder Anthony Carrigan has become the fan favorite of BARRY.

As the episode winds down, Fuches is horrified to learn that Barry has not, in fact, gone through with killing Taylor.  Instead, he's made the choice to not take another life.  In fact, Taylor might just represent a possible exit strategy for ol' Barry...

Chapter Six: Listen with Your Ears, React with Your Face

Barry spends much of this episode trying to convince Taylor and Fuches that they would be good together, a possible replacement for Barry, who could then make a clean break into acting without disrupting anything.  In his mind, he's doing the right thing.  

Alas, it's a plan doomed to fail.  Fuches thinks Taylor should have been dead and buried a long time ago.  And Taylor...well, Taylor asks the question that probably should have been asked already: why exactly does Barry need Fuches, anyway?  Why does he take orders from him?  Why does he gets a majority cut of the money they make?  Why not just take him out, walk away with his cut of the money they stole, and build his acting life with a big bank account?

Taylor may be all id.  They may be sitting in the middle of his apartment, playing pornography on his television at full volume.  But he's not wrong.  He's still maybe the only one who has Barry's interests in mind, even if Barry won't recognize it.  Taylor stuffs Barry's cut of the money into his backpack behind his back, dropping Ryan's copy of the Cousineau acting book onto the floor in the process.  Barry and Taylor's fates are now intertwined.

New problem!  The head of the Bolivian gang is coming in, none too happy that his stash house has been taken.  Barry's been assigned to take him out at the airfield he's due to land in, and he wants to do a quiet, surgical take-down.  Taylor, naturally, suggests doing a good old fashioned bum rush.  Their two natures aren't going to mix, which causes Fuches to insist he be killed sooner than later.  On the other hand, Taylor keeps leaving voicemails asking when they're taking Fuches out.

Which of the two devils on his shoulder is Barry going to heed?

Back at the acting class, Sally is grabbing for power.  Natalie was previously playing Lady Macbeth before being usurped by Sally.  Now Sally wants the big role: she wants to play Macbeth herself, in a scene that reduces Barry’s role down to one throw-away line.  Although the show is positioning itself for the next episode or two, this is another example of Sally coming off as maybe too self-interested to be sympathetic. 

Barry, who has found the dirty money in his bag and shoves it into the bathroom ceiling in a panic, is proving to be an unreliable scene partner, even with his one line ("My lord, the queen is dead").  This leads to a repetition exercise, an old Meisner technique which Hader and Goldberg play to perfection (repeating "I love you" to each other, each time with a different inflection to tell a complete story).

For Barry, the acting class keeps being invaded by his hitman life.  Vacha, who has been surveilling Barry since Chapter Two, has hilariously had his hard work thrown back in his face by his fellow Chechens, who've known for awhile that Barry is in an acting class. I love subverting plot lines like this.  This whole thing had been built up as a huge revelation for a few episodes in a row and then…they just laugh at him.  Fuming, Vacha goes down to the studio and encounters Agent Moss, leading to his demise in a gunfight.  Once they find a bunch of dirty money in the bathroom ceiling, a link between the acting class and the Chechens is now undeniable for our law enforcement characters.

(I also love the little moment where Vacha wanders onstage and imagines himself singing to an imaginary crowd.  Even gangsters dream of validation.)

Barry appears to have settled things with Taylor, telling him the bum rush idea just isn't doable with the two of them, and it would be best if Barry did it alone.  So it is to Barry's horror that he comes downstairs to the lobby of the hotel he's staying at to find Taylor in full camo gear, ready to give him a ride to the air field.

Then he gets in the car to find more Marine buddies.  Including Chris.

Chris, who's under the impression they're on their way to "scare the shit out of someone".

As Taylor hauls ass to the airfield, Barry begs Chris to get out of the car. Chris insists it’s no big deal. Hold on to this.

As they reach the tarmac, the plane has already arrived.  Barry and his caravan are too late.  But Taylor, all id and ready to commence the next level of his video game life, forges ahead.

In the distance, three men fire their guns.

A few seconds later, in a backseat POV shot, the windshield shatters and the car goes flying.

Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast and Keep Going

Oof.

Given the harrowing ending of Chapter Six, Chapter Seven opens with a surprisingly charming twist: Cristobal, head of the Bolivians, turns out to be a pretty nice and chill guy, at least relative to other ganglords.  This is a revelation to Noho Hank, who is used to being abused and undermined by his Chechen compatriots.  The scene also manages to find an angle of humor of what is otherwise a grim bloodbath.  Taylor and Vaughan are dead.  Barry only escapes with his life due to the slow actions of Chris who, despite his military background, has to kill someone for the first time.

In the end, though, this episode comes down to two sequences for me.

The first is the sequence with Barry and Chris, days after the aftermath of the failed bum rush.  Chris has been freaking out the entire time.  This isn't his life.  He wants to go to the police and turn himself in, maybe the worst thing that could happen to Barry.  Despite his pleas to stop talking and to go home and relax, Chris keeps going until he inadvertently gives himself away.  His wife doesn't even know he was going to meet Barry.  He told her he was going to the gym.

“I told you to get out of the car.”

Chris, aware of the mistake he's made, tries to negotiate. His death is made to look like a suicide.

It's a harrowing sequence on several fronts. First, Hader plays it all so simply, and Chris Marquette plays his panic so realistically; as a result, you can track every single movement in their minds, and can clock everything that’s not being said. Secondly, the scene isn’t just tense and fraught with emotion, but it dares to punish Barry for making the supposedly moral choice in Chapter Five by not killing Taylor. As it turns out, killing or not killing Taylor was beside the point, and no option would lead to anything good.

He's been trying to do the right thing, but the wrong way. The only correct option is to forget self-preservation and face the music. Which, of course, when dealing with Chechens and Bolivians, is no option at all.

The second sequence is the Macbeth scene, the night of the Shakespeare Showcase. Barry’s been struggling with it all week. Ever since the shootout at the airfield, his mind has been elsewhere. Gene thinks he’s on drugs. Sally doesn’t know what to expect from him at any given moment.

And now, on the day of the showcase, he shows up at the last second, sans costume, on the verge of a major breakdown. Sally has no choice but to go on and start the scene. She begins her technically well-rehearsed but somewhat uncommitted performance.

Backstage, as he waits for his cue, Barry becomes consumed with thoughts of what he just did. The scene replays in his mind over and over. Beyond that, he imagines Chris' funeral.  He imagines his wife, his beautiful wife, getting the call.  His wife telling his young child.  He imagines it over and over again, the situation now completely out of his control.

Then, he is called onstage.

And he recites his line.

"My lord, the queen is dead."

Distraught, broken and tears streaming down his face, he says the line with full commitment.  He's terrific.  In the midst of a breakdown, he does the best acting of his life.

More than that, he brings Sally into the zone.  Her performance takes this turn, now full of genuine emotion and reflection.  Sarah Goldberg plays that moment where the speech turns so beautifully, differentiating between the two halves of Sally’s monologue perfectly. 

Barry’s life in shambles, he becomes an actor for the first time.

Chapter Eight: Know Your Truth

AKA the episode where almost everything uncharacteristically gets tied up with a little bow on it. Or so it seems.

Barry finds himself in this cycle where he has no release from his pain.  After his performance at the Shakespeare showcase, Sally and Gene have encouraged him to "find that place" every time (a place, for the record, that required him to have a mental breakdown over having to kill his friend, a breakdown that leads to him shattering mirrors and punching walls in the rehearsal space).  Acting and performance is no longer the release and escape from the horrors of his real life.

With a new steely determination, Barry finally, emphatically, stands up to Fuches, punching him square in the face and finally taking a proper cut of the black money he's been owed this whole time.  He's moving on.

"Starting now."

As we've learned (and will continue to learn), Fuches is not a man who tends to go away quietly.  His next move is to immediately sell Barry back out to the Chechens, who reward Fuches by zip-tying him to a chair and leaving him to be chopped to bits by Ruslan (Vacha's twin brother, played by the same actor in a joke I love for its purposelessness).  This is mostly set-up for a great joke where we hear a bunch of screaming and buzz-sawing in the garage offscreen, and it turns out Ruslan is wasting time creating wooden stocks instead of just killing Fuches ("it's part of the torture!" Ruslan pleads).

With Fuches again about to be killed, Barry is implored to "make one last kill", only this time, it's inadvertently by Noho Hank.  Hank has been belittled by Goran and made to feel like a fool for the last time.  Thus, Hank calls Barry and tells him to run (specifically, to "fly like Bugs Bunny in SPACE JAM").  The full range of where Anthony Carrigan can take this character will be more fully explored in Season Two, but there’s such a remarkable sincerity he brings to Hank, a character who honestly could have gotten annoying after awhile (a lot of his laugh lines are based around him saying things wrong). All of that shines through in this phone conversation.

(Not to worry about Hank, he and Cristobal are about to become fast friends soon enough.)

But Barry just can't do it.  He can’t run yet. He has to close the loop.  He swings back to the Chechen garage, crouches down beside a window and takes out every single Chechen (save Hank).  He takes Fuches down to Bob Hope Airport and tells him to get out of the car.  The two of them are done together.  

"Starting now."

From there, a series of assumptions wind up miraculously clearing Barry's name.  The angle from where the bullets were fired indicate a very short assassin.  Thus, Moss and Loach assume this was the work of the Bolivians (a famously short people, the show has taken the time to establish).  Law enforcement finds the acting book in Taylor's apartment, which has Ryan Madison's name written on the very first page.  With this and the money the confiscated from the class bathroom, Moss and Loach come to the conclusion that Ryan Madison, along with Taylor, were working the Bolivians and the Chechens against each other ("like in Yojimbo", they clarify at a subsequent press conference).

Barry's free, even if he isn't quite ready to open up completely.  Sally mentions over drinks that she had been in a prior marriage a lifetime ago, in an attempt to get him to reveal something about himself to her. 

But he's not there yet.

He may never be.

Yet, everything seems to be going his way. Sally wants to do THE FRONT PAGE, a snappy, quippy comedy, with Barry. But the show has trained us by now to never let our stomach unclench completely.

We then reach the final scene, one which is shot to almost resemble one of those fantasy sequences from earlier in the season. We see Barry and Sally taking a break from rehearsal at Gene's cabin.  They are close to opening THE FRONT PAGE for the first time.  Moss arrives and a great barbecue-filled evening is had.  In the midst of night-time red wine conversation, it's mentioned that Barry Block is actually a pseudonym for Barry Berkman, something Moss didn't know.  Gene also talks about how impressed he was at his monologue about being a hitman, all the way back in Chapter One.  

Barry sees Moss clock this.

That night, Moss flips through Facebook and figures out pretty quickly that Barry was deeply connected with Taylor.  It all clicks.  The picture of the guy on the lipstick cam is obviously him, now that she knows him.

All of this leads to a lakeside confrontation between Moss and Barry.  Barry now has a choice to make.  Does he face the music?  Or does he try to survive, in order to preserve this life he has?

He begs Moss not to do this.  That he's changed.  He's not that murderer anymore.

Moss tells him bluntly that he is.

The choice that Barry makes changes the show forever.  And as we see a rifle taped to a nearby tree, followed by the flash of gunshots out the window as we re-enter Barry and Sally's room, it becomes clear that Barry has chosen the much more destructive path.

"Starting now."

Thus, we end Season One on a note that makes us very much question if Barry is actually redeemable. And we’ve reached this point due to a series of choices our lead character directly makes in order to obfuscate, or even change, the truth about himself.  Yes, there are convenient corners cut here and there, especially in that last episode, but I'd argue it's to really, really twist the knife.  This magical resolution to the Bolivian/Chechen/Ryan Madison stuff only serves to lull Barry into a false sense of security. He has the girl, he has the dream, he has the life.  And he doesn't have Fuches.

And now?  Now that it’s all come crashing down and he’s chosen the path of self-preservation? Who knows what he has?

Well, I do.  And probably a lot of you.  I mean, Season Two's been out for, like, three years.  But rest assured, for those who haven't seen it, the killing of Moss becomes a driving force for the subsequent eight installments.  BARRY doesn't provide easy answers like that.

As you'll see in Season Two.