It is said that it is darkest before dawn. This, of course, is bullshit. The darkest a moment ago a little less dark. Just before the season finale, the seventh episode puts most of the characters in “Barry” in their darkest moments. Barry almost meets death from the side he is not used to, Sally burns every possible bridge, Hank finds himself in a jail cell in Bolivia and even Cuzano, who is finally getting some relative quiet this season, starts sweating. And by all indications, it’s only going to get darker by the end of the season.
The episode opens in a relatively bright place, a church where George Madison, Ryan’s father, remains. The amateur actor that Barry had to kill in the first episode of the series (in the end he was actually killed by the Chechens). The next, and perhaps last, member, of the Foxes Revenge Army. It’s just that at the same time Barry is generally squatting on the floor of Sharon’s house, throwing a towel at him and running away (not everyone manages to cope with death like Barry). This is a shocking scene, perhaps because we are used to seeing bullet holes rather than foam from the mouth, and perhaps because the proximity of the camera to Barry’s contorted (then covered) face clings us to his horror. Even the opening titles have a hard time dealing with the shock, and appear without the music.
Luckily for us, Cuzano is here to help us tackle one of the best comedy segments of the season, in the form of his master-class opening monologue. Henry Winkler has not had many uplifting moments this season (except for the scenes with Fred Melamed), but he does not need more than a minute and a half on masks to steal, literally, the show. And we even got the same guide again Lost Students on Stage, another wink in the episode for the first season and the core from which “Barry” started. He even succeeds in his ongoing apology program to his directorial girlfriend, but now that he’s finally starting to come to terms with his past, he has to deal with Barry’s as well.
Finally, the comic respite. “Barry.” Screenshot / HBO
Jim Moses (the wonderful Robert Ray Wisdom, who you may remember as Bunny from The Undertaker) was introduced to us in the previous episode as the father of Policewoman Janice, and from the dramatic exposure it was clear that he would no longer be a soldier in the Army of Revenge of Fuchs, but rather that he would disband the Army . And he does do so soon, distracting Fyox with stories of psychological warfare in Vietnam (Fyox is very busy with how to make a man commit suicide, and brags that he did so – roughly – his cousin) and brings him in a special delivery to the police. The landing of the “crow” in the interrogation room leads both Jim and Albert, each in his own way, to conclude that Barry is the killer, and it is interesting to see that Fox easily sells Barry, while Cuzno – perhaps willingly to keep his new way – tries to protect him. Unfortunately, he is not such a good player.
Sally and Hank have been given side plots in this episode that don’t connect to any other piece, with Hank barely getting a scene and a half, and still managing to be funny when he just arrives in Bolivia and calls Cristobal’s name, as if he just pops up in the market like a lost child, and innocently finds himself in jail. Sally actually chooses to dive into a metaphorical prison, making all the possible mistakes – she lashes out at Natalie for stealing a series from her (how exactly? Because they are both series about mother and daughter?) Bad damage when they still see themselves as the victim) and eventually alienate the only person left in her favor as she steps back towards total darkness.
Oh, and as for Barry, this guy who gives his name to the series, the driving force of diving into the dark. He survives Sharon’s poisoning, but slowly dies as he hallucinates a kind of limbo, which begins with a beautiful whip of sea waves crashing calmly on a suburban street, and continues to a dim dream in which Barry sits at sea, calm until he sees a group of people from a distance Their lives. You can see Goren Pazar (the head of the Chechen bakery who ordered the killing of Ryan Madison), Ruslan, or Wacha (the Israeli Mark Ivanir, whom we miss very much in the series) and especially Chris, his old friend whom Barry killed, one of his sins The largest. The spectacle ends after Chris ignores Barry, and above him floats the figure of George, the unfortunate father from the church.
And like the waves, we are poisoned. “Barry”, screenshot / HBO
But George Madison is unable to do that. He finds Barry on the street (similar to how the bikers found him just like that), picks him up in his car, drives him to the hospital and only then ponders whether to carry out his revenge. But instead of using a gun, he does a worse thing – he speaks to Barry about parental love, and the loss of a child, a topic that has come up more than once during this season, and then commits suicide, thus also saving Barry. In the framing of the episode, with the church at first, continuing from Limbo and George’s sacrifice, it can be said that Barry escaped the poison with supreme intervention. Now he will have to carry that too on his soul, and not that there is much time left. Albert is just stepping on his gun.
- Noah Hank’s Articles: “Yeah, that’s what I thought you were doing, but I did not want to be rude, so…,” Hank tells the trader who puts in front of his eyes an anesthetic arrow shot, then collapses to the floor. Polite until the last minute.
- According to Natalie’s series description on the Hollywood gossip site, Dov Patel is hosted there. A few episodes earlier, when Sally first learned what according to the algorithm would make people watch beyond the first few minutes, Dov Patel was on the list, and Natalie was recording everything.
- Here is the plot line for the episode “The New Jellyfish”, as can be assembled from Sally’s questions and the caption on the board: One of the jellyfish, my father, goes out to a club, where she meets a bartender who is courting her for a date. My father buys a hat to hide the snakes during the date, one snake peeks out of the hat (which is not supposed to be funny), he turns to stone, my father is still horny, so she sucks and then eats his penis.
- Sally’s screaming scene about Natalie is reminiscent of the one where Barry yelled at Sally. Injured people hurt people, and violence always rolls on.