Barry

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.

Who was this year's MVP? Did any characters achieve forgiveness? And where does the show go from here?

The only gore that you see is a pile of puke and that makes the scene even more gnarly! But where it ends, with Hank committing his first on-screen killings and then seemingly realizing that neither he nor Cristobal will ever be the same, may have been the most harrowing moment in a season loaded with them. But cut to the next scene, when Barry is ready to take out Jim Moss, and it’s clear that even that incredible gift can’t change him. I also fear the pivot to star-crossed lover may have been a bit too abrupt to fully work, in addition to shifting the show’s tonal balance even further toward outright tragedy. Him and Cristobal together, the bomb, the subsequent raid on their heroin operation, it was all a hoot. Sayles: The great irony is that Barry himself comes close to achieving some version of it, when Albert refuses to arrest him because he owes Barry his (and his daughter’s) life. A genuine act of bravery by a man who’s repeatedly taken the easy way out. Alan Siegel: Over the course of this season, Barry went from a show that I’d quote funny lines from incessantly to one that’s too scary to watch before bed. Also: There was nothing this year on par with the Chris or Janice Moss killings or the slaughter at the monastery that closed Season 2. Herman: Hader will get his accolades, so I’ll simply shout out Sarah Goldberg, who destroys the myth of the perfect victim one eyebrow twitch at a time. Siegel: Jim Moss, the perfect fresh set of eyes to see through the bullshit narrative built around his daughter’s murder. The algorithm must be happy: Barry just wrapped its darkest—and possibly best—season yet.

The Emmy nominee on Barry's latest game-changing finale and life imitating art as she becomes a showrunner herself.

Sally has turned a blind eye to things, but I think that she didn’t really know how violent he was or how violent the people around him were until this moment. I think they’re connected in some ways in that all of her messy innards are swirling, and then the worst possible thing that could happen at the worst possible time happens—and she snaps. And I think that there’s so much pent up in her, and un-dealt-with trauma, that I think something in that moment shifts and she turns pure animal. But I think that the murder is separate in the sense that it’s in a moment of self-defense. By the finale, Sally is reduced to asking her murderous ex-boyfriend ( series cocreator Bill Hader) for help…only to find herself in the exact wrong place at the wrong time when one of Barry’s enemies, biker gang member Shane Taylor (Anthony Molinari), storms the hit man’s house. (The line about how “cunt” is “widely used in Europe” was Goldberg’s suggestion, by the way.)