Spoilers for Barry ahead.
Barry Berkman has always sought redemption. In the first season of Barry, the former marine-turned-hitman found it in his theater class. When it became clear that pivoting from assassin to actor wasn’t going to happen, he tried his best to appeal to God. In the Barry finale, he gets what he’s been looking for. He’s just not around to see it.
“I knew how the ending was going to be from season two,” Bill Hader told me when I spoke to him last month. “Weirdly, how we got there is completely different than what I thought it would be, but then the actual ending is exactly what I thought.”
At the time, he was in the home stretch of editing the fourth and final season, which he had also directed. “I feel very proud of accomplishing this, and I’m very happy with the way the story turned out, but I’m also really excited to do something else,” he also said, sounding like the weariest man alive. “I’ve gotten to a place where I never want to type the word ‘Barry’ ever again.”
In a way, this final season gave all of the characters what they wanted. [Monkey’s paw unfurls.] After a time jump several years into the future, Barry (Hader) and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) are fugitives with a young son, John, who doesn’t know his parents’ real names or backstories. Sally, on the run from the law, has to put on a wig and accent every morning just to go to work—landing, in essence, the meaty role of a lifetime she’s always desired. NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) becomes a fearsome crime lord. Fuches (Stephen Root) emerges from prison as “The Raven,” ripped, tatted up, and finally respected. And Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) has been on a kibbutz, leaving Hollywood and ostensibly curing himself of his narcissism and self-involvement.
Barry is able to whitewash his past when he talks to his son, casting himself as a former war hero. It’s all well, if not exactly good, until he learns that there’s going to be a movie made about the murder of Detective Janice Moss, Cousineau’s ex-girlfriend, at Barry’s hands.
The finale finds Barry back in L.A., trying to kill Cousineau to stop the movie. Cousineau, in the meantime, is under suspicion by the police of having been in on Janice’s killing. Sally and the kid get kidnapped by the Chechens (classic situation) and caught in a shootout between them and Fuches’s guys. NoHo Hank dies, bleeding out on the statue of Cristobal he erected—after he admits to having killed the love of his life. Fuches grabs John and uses him as ransom to meet up with Barry … before silently dropping the boy off and walking away.
When they’re reunited, Sally urges Barry to turn himself in to the police. Barry, instead, is certain that he’s been redeemed since Fuches didn’t off him.
“The only way to be redeemed,” she tells him, “is by taking responsibility for what you did.”
It falls on deaf ears, and he hunts down Cousineau anyway. But, when Barry finally arrives at his house, he has a change of heart and suggests they call the cops. Gene emerges from the bedroom, gun in hand, and shoots him once in the chest. Barry’s last words Cousineau shoots him in the head? “Oh wow.”
“I was touched that I was the last scene of Barry, forever,” Henry Winkler told me. “He yelled ‘Cut!’ Then Bill hugged me and whispered in my ear, ‘thank you for being such a great collaborator.’ Now, he might have said that to other people because I was not with the other actors. But, I’ll tell you, when he said that to me, my heart flew out of my body.”
It’s often been pointed out that, over the course of its four seasons, Barry went from a dark comedy to just really fucking dark. The coda to the entire series is more in line with the show’s original spirit.
But first, another time jump. An older Sally has happily scaled down her ambitions, working as a theater teacher at a high school somewhere colder and snowier than L.A. John is now a teenager. After Sally has a successful staging of Our Town, John asks to sleep over at his friend’s house. There, they engage in the time-honored sleepover tradition of watching something your mom doesn’t allow. In this case, it’s something highly personal: the movie based on his dad’s story.
The Mask Collector, the film that Barry was going to commit murder to stop, is flattering from its first frames. Barry is introduced as a lost soldier returning from Afghanistan. The actor who plays him is buff and handsome, square-jawed and bright-eyed. He chances upon his acting class, scarred by combat and looking for a community. That’s where he meets Cousineau—who, in the movie, is inexplicably British. Barry is beloved in his acting class after passionately performing a soliloquy from Macbeth. “Barry, that was wonderful,” Cousineau tells him. “You just had your first breakthrough.”
But then, Barry walks into Cousineau’s office and finds him linked up with the Chechen mob. In the movie, it’s Cousineau who drags Barry into the criminal underworld, not the other way around. Cousineau who kills Detective Janice Moss and frames Barry for his murder. The acting is terrible, some of the finest purposefully bad acting ever seen, and the dialogue stilted (but still not as great as “I must be loyle to my capo”). Barry has always been at its best when parodying the industry, and this is no exception.
The Mask Collector ends with a dramatic scene in which movie Cousineau kills movie Barry with several bullets. In the postscript, we learn that Cousineau is serving life in prison for Janice and Barry’s murders. Barry was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery with full honors. And so Barry is redeemed after all—at least in the court of public opinion. God might be a different story.