Every time you think you have Barry’s number, the show manages to pull off a twist that reminds you that you don’t.
Season four, episode five, “Tricky Legacies,” takes this to a whole new level. When we had last left off with the characters, Barry (Bill Hader) had just escaped from prison and tracked down Sally (Sarah Goldberg). In a split-second decision, she decides to go on the lam with him. (If your boyfriend is an unreformed assassin and wannabe actor who just broke out of federal prison? That’s a dealbreaker, ladies.)
When this episode of Barry picks up, it’s eight years into the future. The two go by the aliases Clark and Emily and reside in the middle of nowhere, smack dab in the center of land so empty that the endless sky could make you just a little bit crazy. One has to wonder if the scenery was inspired by Hader’s Plains State upbringing.
Crucially: they’re now the parents of a young son named John.
Barry has devoted himself to homeschooling John, teaching him lessons about Abraham Lincoln and making himself out to be a war hero. Meanwhile, Sally, always the striving actress, lands the role of a lifetime: she puts on a brown wig and a treacly Southern accent every single morning to hide in plain sight at her waitressing job. Sally is miserable. Barry is thrilled at the opportunity to have someone in his life who believes he’s good (he just needed to create him).
So how did this staggering time jump come about? In a conversation with Hader last month, he told GQ that as the team was writing the season, they were trying to determine whether to follow Barry and Sally in real time.
“I remember from season one, Barry has this daydream about he and Sally and a little boy taking a family photo together. It was like, this is what he wants. He just wants to have a family. And so, in thinking of that, I was like, ‘What if he gets what he wants? What if all these characters are going to get what they want? And then we’ll see what happens,’” Hader said.
Sally, too, would technically be getting what she wanted. “We thought it was very interesting that they’re all playing characters,” he added. “Sally’s literally putting on a wig every morning and playing a character.”
In order to pull off the time jump, they knew they needed to go big or go home.
“I felt like you needed a lot of time to go by so these people could be very in their lives and get everything they wanted, and to go: ‘They have everything they wanted, are they happy? Did they really change or did they not?’” Hader explained. “The things within us that we don’t like about ourselves—can we change that or are we just masking it?”
The entire premise of Barry at first was wondering whether Barry could change. Throughout the seasons, the answer clearly became no.
“And then in season four, he somehow becomes dumber, which is really saying something,” Hader said.
So then what?
“He turns to God,” Hader continued. “If he can’t be redeemed by these other people, he could be redeemed by God. The idea of liking God is what he’s into. He gets the Bible stories all wrong and he’s not really paying attention. Barry’s not that deep of a thinker.”