Barry’s final season turns into the worst version of itself

Barry was so close it hurt.

HBO’s dark comedy is almost unrecognizable in design from the show that started it. What began as the quirky story of a hitman (Bill Hader) who wanted to turn his life around by becoming an actor (though he couldn’t completely shake off his hitman ties), is now, in its final season, a gripping exploration of the damage caused by the delusions of an evil man. In some ways it always has been. This time it’s just a lot less funny.

It’s fascinating to untangle the ways Barry possible to the current situation. Season 3 spent a significant amount of time grappling with Barry’s delusions about what it meant to be a good person. was motivated by a monstrous selfishness and thinly veiled anger that began to both infect and harm those around him.

In the last episodes Barry continues down the dark path that Barry Berkman set everyone on. Barry is incarcerated, eventually caught in a sting in which his former friend and acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) agreed to be the bait. Gene, a washed-up actor when Barry met him in Season 1, has since become a cartoonish self-centered version of himself, a self-righteous dodderer convinced the world needed to hear his story. Sally — barely coping with the shame of her relationship with Barry, a moment of anger that went viral, and the PTSD of killing a man in Season 3 — has given up her career in Hollywood to become an acting teacher who still calls herself as her greatest student sees. And NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), the hapless Chechen mobster who can’t completely extricate himself from Barry’s life, tries to go legit with his friend Cristobal (Michael Irby), only to find himself once again thrown into the criminal element.

While there are still good jokes in it Barry — an extended bit about how harsh the Fast & Furious movies are here, a joke about it CODA there – the show is very clear that it doesn’t operate in a comedy space anymore. The big, brassy musical sting that always accompanied the show’s title card is gone; silence takes its place. Characters are brutally beaten and make ugly decisions, sometimes in a way so shocking it seems contrary to the show’s previous seasons. The jokes are never so great as to question the morality of each character.

Everything is immaculately rendered by the show’s top-notch cinematographers and directors, most recently co-creator Hader himself (who directed all episodes of the final season). Barry has developed a distinctive visual language that makes it impossible to look away, even as it makes troubling or irate decisions about the story: a smooth, unemotional camera that moves back and forth across a set as characters enter and exit, a tendency to be dramatic violence to the background while mundanity unfolds in the foreground, and blocking that always gives actors plenty of room to express how a character feels in and about the space they occupy. BarryThe film’s camera conspires with the viewer, asking them if they noticed the same thing, when one character lies to another.

This is maybe Barry‘s fatal flaw: it has an answer to its questions, and those questions are not given a new dimension through its characters. Can a tiger change its stripes? Is starting over impossible once you cross a certain threshold? How could one possibly explain the damage they are doing to another’s life?

In hindsight, the tightrope Barry ran more successfully in his earlier seasons was a great achievement. The heightened nature of his comedy and the grounded consequence of his violence were always at odds; that the series has squeezed out two great years of television is nothing short of miraculous. At the conclusion of the run, Hader and the rest of Barry‘s writers had to make a choice: delve into their comedic character study, or dedicate themselves to answering heavy questions about the slow spread of toxicity radiating from violent men.

Barry’s final season is a relentless drive for an answer to these questions. In this admirably ugly but frustrating series of episodes, Barry arguably fails because the moral worldview constructed by Hader and his co-writers is at strong, and all his characters are subservient to it. Barry Berkman is the villain of Barry. He was charming for a while, but what he’s done can’t be reversed – and now we’re all on this miserable path with him, to the very end.