Critic's Notebook: Bleak Series Finale Brings 'Barry' to a Satisfyingly Unsatisfying Close

Critic's Notebook: Bleak Series Finale Brings 'Barry' to a Satisfyingly Unsatisfying Close,Bill Hader's Barry ends its run after four seasons on HBO by giving its titular hitman the heroic narrative he always wanted. Sort of.

Critic’s Notebook: Bleak Series Finale Brings ‘Barry’ to a Satisfyingly Unsatisfying Close

Bill Hader in ‘Barry.’ Courtesy of HBO

Just before he confronts the gangsters who’ve abducted his family, Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) takes a moment in the parking lot. “Lord, I’m gonna die tonight. Please give me the strength to sacrifice myself so that my son can live a long and pious life,” he prays. “And that by doing this, all my sins will be washed and I will be redeemed in your eyes, and I will be able to sit next to you in my rightful place in the kingdom of heaven for all eternity. Amen.”

As it turns out, the encounter never actually comes to that. Barry’s barely out of the car when Fuches (Stephen Root) ushers Barry’s unharmed son John (Zachary Golinger) straight to him, then disappears into the night without a word. Hader’s face registers less relief than disappointment. Dying for John would’ve been hard, but it would’ve been straightforward. At least it would have allowed Barry to see himself as the martyr he wants to be.

Barry, though, has no interest in letting anyone off the hook that easily. The episode does eventually serve Barry some version of the forgiveness he’s always longed for. But it does so in a way that highlights the gap between true atonement and the cheap made-for-TV version of it, and that purposefully undermines any satisfaction to be found in Barry’s would-be redemption arc.

From the start, Barry has been a story about the stories Barry wants to tell himself, about himself. Never mind that he’s a contract killer whose body count has only ballooned over four seasons — Barry’s always clung to the delusion that one more “starting … now” might reframe him as a savior, as a protector, as a good guy whose bloody past has been wiped clean. It’s why he’s spent the season stewing over Cousineau (Henry Winkler) telling his story, why he gives his son an ultra-sanitized account of his time in Afghanistan, why he was so drawn to Hollywood in the first place. What better place for a man trying to rewrite his entire life than an industry built around selling lovely little fictions?

But even as the type of critically acclaimed dramedy that its characters might once have (mostly metaphorically) killed to get cast in, Barry has been more interested in puncturing those fictions than upholding them. Throughout the show’s run, we’ve watched Barry go from simply trying to outrun his past to seeking forgiveness for it — not by owning up to what he’s done but by, for instance, showering Gene with money and professional opportunities.

The Barry we find in the finale hasn’t gotten much better at atonement. The morning after his non-death, he decides to turn himself in for Janice’s murder. Tellingly, he wasn’t interested in doing so when Sally had urged him to do so hours earlier, informing him that Cousineau might otherwise go down for Barry’s crimes. It’s only when Barry’s backed against the wall, with Sally and John having left without a trace and Tom (Fred Melamed) pleading that only Barry can save Cousineau, that he finally relents.

But Barry snatches away his final opportunity to play the hero, having Cousineau kill him before he can confess. Going out in a blaze of Chechen gunfire or a swarm of police would’ve suited the white knight Barry needs so desperately to believe he is. Instead, Barry’s moral accounting spits out an unceremonious end to fit the unworthy man he truly was. “Oh, wow,” he remarks after Cousineau’s first shot to his shoulder. He doesn’t have time to add anything else before Cousineau’s second and final shot to the head.

Barry’s not the only one damned by denial. The fourth season has particularly put Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) through the wringer, as the formerly lovable gangster ensures his own safety at the unthinkable cost of his boyfriend’s life. But compelled at gunpoint by Fuches to acknowledge he killed Cristobal (Michael Irby), Hank, who has since reinvented himself as a savvy businessman, still can’t bring himself to face what he’s done. In the end, he bleeds out while clutching the hand of the statue he’d had erected as a tribute to the man he had loved so much, but not quite enough to keep from having murdered.

Yet in the midst of all this bleakness, Barry still finds pinpricks of hope that the truth might set one free. Ironically, it’s Fuches’ acceptance of himself — not as a tough soldier or a benevolent mentor but as “a man with no heart” — that enables him to spare Barry and let John go free; having truly understood what he did to Barry, he opts out of the cycle of revenge and manipulation that’s bound them for so long. And it’s only after Sally (Sarah Goldberg) confesses to John who she really is and what she’s really done that she feels empowered to leave Barry for good. In the closest Barry has to a feel-good ending, a time jump reveals she’s become a beloved high-school drama teacher who enjoys a warm relationship with her son — thus breaking the cycles of personal abuse and professional rejection that had previously defined her life.

But that same future also reveals Barry’s final, and possibly darkest, joke. In the final minutes of the series, a now-teenaged John (Jaeden Martell) watches The Mask Collector, a true-crime thriller that paints Gene as the villain convicted of murdering both Barry and Janice, and Barry as the noble hero laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. We know it’s lazy bullshit that has little to do with the flawed characters we’ve spent four seasons following, or their complicated, painful, often futile gestures toward absolution. But it’s the sort of story that Hollywood loves to tell, that Barry would have wanted to tell about himself. And based on John’s little smile at the movie, we know which version is likely to stick.

In some ways, it’s a vexing end. Barry’s death is anticlimactic. Hank’s is heartbreaking without being cathartic. Sally ends up with a totally mundane life, after all the craziness she’s endured. Gene faces a prison sentence wildly out of proportion with any wrongs he actually committed, while Janice never gets real justice. John remains less a character than a vague stand-in for the next generation. Tonally, too, Barry’s fourth season has veered further and further away from the absurdist showbiz satire of its early episodes. Those who used to like this show for the droll jokes might be turned off by the finale’s existential searching, if they haven’t already dropped off a season or two earlier.

Yet these frustrations feel oddly appropriate for a show that’s evolved into an earnest attempt to wrestle with the impossibility of redemption, and a sharp piece of self-reflection from a machine more used to churning out easily digestible Mask Collectors. Barry knows well what kinds of stories we tell to comfort ourselves. In its final half-hour, it refuses to become one itself.