Barry

The Season 3 finale may not be the end of the road for the HBO show, but it did seem like a tonal point of no return.

The twin looks of shock on Barry’s face — first as he sees Albert appear like a ghost and then as he’s being led away in his final moment —are not only the clinchers on a raw bit of season-long mental decay. Hader as the director of the episode presents mirrored repetitions — Gene in the garage with Jim, Albert (James Hiroyuki Liao) telling Barry his extrajudicial murders have to stop, Barry drilling an alibi into Sally’s consciousness — as plainly as possible. And Gene ( Henry Winkler) has to face his own compartmentalized guilt, face to face with Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom), the father of his former love. It might be an odd thing to say about a vicious episode that features a man choking Sally, has Hank wielding an automatic weapon, and closes with a jumbo-sized tactical team carting away the show’s title character. Even if Sally and Gene aren’t actually dead on the shore like Barry sees in his hospital room vision, the damage he’s done in their lives is more irreparable than ever. As the life of Barry Berkman ( Bill Hader) becomes an increasingly damp sand castle losing a new turret week by week, the HBO show has been laser-focused on it crumbling in his hands.

In the season finale, Barry's quest for forgiveness gives way to his instinct for self-preservation one last time. A recap of 'starting now,' episode eight ...

Hank may not have gotten a ton of screen time in season three, but what he did get had some of my favorite material for the character yet. When Elena and the dancer suddenly drop and Hank materializes before his eyes to delicately embrace him, Cristobal’s small smile shows a measure of relief. But when the guards come in and unleash some kind of terrifying animal, a violent scuffle follows, and two of Hank’s only remaining buddies get killed. The only story during this episode that doesn’t concern Barry is Hank’s, who’s still cuffed to a radiator, waiting for his buddies to break free and help him. When Barry looks over at Gene in pain and disbelief, he sees the catharsis that Gene has been chasing all season. It’s the last time we see Sally except for one scene a bit later, when Barry tells her he loves her over the phone and she quickly returns it before boarding a plane back home to Missouri. This has been a rough season for Sally, and in many ways she’s become a monster. This is one of the rare circumstances where Barry has utility as a partner, in a way, and he immediately takes control. Barry may have faced his demons head-on this season, but he’s still not a good person, and there’s no way he could allow his true self to become public knowledge. But Albert is also framed as a messianic figure as he stands over Barry’s kneeling body as he weeps and screams, completely spent, guilty, and sick of himself. In a literal sense, he’s an old friend, a credible choice to both take Barry to task and to offer him unexpected grace, if not forgiveness. Barry’s story is told in three acts this episode, and fittingly, each act centers on his relationship with a character he hasn’t spoken to in a while. That’s the sensation that’s fresh in her mind when she reaches for a baseball bat (off-screen) and beats Shane down, screaming and swearing as she does it.

Bill Hader in Season Three of 'Barry.' Merrick Morton/ HBO. This post contains spoilers for the third season finale of Barry, which is available now on HBO and ...

It’s that once Barry is willing to take everyone and everything to this intensely dramatic place, how exactly can you bring any or all of it back to a place of comedy? It’s not just that Barry’s secret identity is now public, that he is incarcerated (as is his bitter ex-handler Fuches, still so wonderfully played by Stephen Root), and that so many of the other characters are scattered to the wind. Barry has barely done any acting this year — the showbiz portions have largely followed Gene and Sally as each has experienced extreme Hollywood highs and lows — but the whole premise of the series is to examine the thin line between killing onstage and killing in real life, and using acting as a way for Barry to confront the cost of who he is and what he does when he’s not acting. It is not, of course, and Hader did a round of interviews insisting that he, Berg, and the other writers know how the series can continue to function after this point. The gist of the sentence is the same each time, but the ways in which Wisdom delivers the lines, and the small variations in phrasing, utterly transforms the meaning until of course Gene’s resolve shatters and he tells this imposing man (it helps that Wisdom is vastly bigger than Winkler in every way) everything. As Barry is burying Shane out in the desert (in the same spot where he killed two people in the season premiere), Sally is understandably flying home to Joplin, Missouri, to get away from what she just did (and from the man who put her in the position to do it), and Hank is stuck in that dungeon, Gene is reluctantly meeting with Jim Moss (the great character actor Robert Wisdom), Janice’s special forces interrogator father. It is so much scarier that way(*) than if the show had done something with a CGI panther (even a realistic-looking one), and it perfectly sets up the moment when Hank’s fear gives him the strength to break the chain on his handcuffs, take a rifle away from one of the Bolivian guards, and shoot the panther through the holes it created in said wall. That distinction would probably belong to Barry’s ex-girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who has returned to him hoping to enlist his help in getting revenge on her former assistant Natalie. Barry, having recently awoken from a traumatic dream in which he was confronted by many of his past victims — a vision that at the end warned him that Sally and their acting teacher Gene (Henry Winkler) might be next — wants no part of this, for himself and especially for Sally. After spending most of the series’ run oblivious to the consequences of his actions on both himself and others, Barry finally understands that he is going to hell when all is said and done, and he doesn’t want Sally to join him there. Albert confronts Barry about the whole murder-for-hire business, and particularly about Barry’s decision to kill their old comrade Chris back in Season One. (As with Janice, Chris died for the sin of putting Barry’s exciting new life in Hollywood at risk.) Barry has just had an emotional breakthrough — the first one since he joined the Marines, if not the first of his life — and understands just how monstrous he is, and what fate awaits him when he dies. As if to demonstrate how much rougher things have become, the finale — directed by Hader and written by him and Alec Berg — even put Hank into nightmare territory, shackled to a radiator in the dungeon of the Bolivian drug cartel, listening in terror as his colleagues Yandar and Akhmal were mauled to death by a panther in the next room. As a director, Hader has become diabolically clever about how to depict the violence that is present in every aspect of Barry’s world, and here he makes the correct choice to present the panther attack entirely from Hank’s perspective in the next room: an aural ordeal that is on the verge of bursting through the wall. When Barry said “Starting… now!” right after murdering Janice and right before that episode cut to its closing credits, it was a complete summation of the show Barry had become by that point: tragic and horrifying, but also very darkly amusing.

[Editor's note: Do not read on until you've watched the season-three finale of Barry.] Well, that was … something else. Last night's third-season finale of ...