Warning: This review contains spoilers for season 3, episode 5 of Barry.
Bill Hader’s genre-bending HBO hit Barry has charged into the second half of its third season with “crazytimesh*tshow,” directed by series co-creator Alec Berg and written by Emily Heller. The episode follows on from last week’s bombshell twist of Sally finally seeing Barry’s true colors and breaking up with him. Barry moves back in with his actor friends, who have since turned his bedroom into an “audition room” with a tiny space on the floor where he can sleep. This is Barry’s first taste of his post-breakup rock bottom, but it’s about to get a whole lot worse. Fuches is still impersonating a P.I. and telling the grieving families of Barry’s targets where they can find him, and there’s a hilariously anticlimactic payoff to last week’s cliffhanger of a widow and her son arming themselves to kill him.
With “crazytimesh*tshow,” Barry is back to combining deadpan laughs and intense thrills after a couple of episodes that were heavy on humor but light on action. This episode has both an explosive police raid involving a heroin-covered squad car and a Chechen suicide bomber, and some hysterical dialogue about a streaming algorithm that determines “taste clusters” with ridiculous factors like whether or not a character eats dessert in the season premiere.
In keeping with the season’s theme of the tug-o’-war between forgiveness and revenge, Gene goes on an apology tour to make amends with the people he’s wronged, possibly inspired by Barry’s ill-fated attempts to do the same. Most people graciously accept his apologies, but one woman, whose life was irreparably destroyed when Gene got her blacklisted from the industry out of spite, points out that he’s not really sorry and he’s only apologizing so he can stop feeling bad about his past misdeeds. Throwing tea in a runner’s face or fabricating rumors about Joe Mantegna or even ruining a director’s career isn’t as bad as committing mass murder, but Gene is making the same mistake as Barry in his quest for forgiveness: it’s all about him.
Constantly Raising The Stakes
From its opening scene, the latest episode of Barry stays true to the show’s promise of constantly raising the stakes. After a brief warzone flashback of Barry desperately trying to save a fellow Marine named Albert, Albert is reintroduced in the present day, played once again by James Hiroyuki Liao. Now a federal agent, Albert comes to L.A. to assist with the investigation into the murder of Detective Moss (Barry’s first point-of-no-return moment from the season 1 finale). Albert could prove to be Barry’s downfall. He doesn’t believe the cock and bull story about a Chechen assassin named “The Raven” and wonders if his old pal Barry Berkman could be involved.
But even with Albert joining the case and suspecting Barry’s involvement, the show is still just teasing bad things for the future instead of providing those payoffs now. The impatience of viewers shouldn’t factor into storytelling, but this has never been a show that makes its audience wait for payoffs. It’s a show that provides a shocking twist in episode 1, then keeps getting bigger and bolder from there. NoHo Hank continues to act as a sort of therapist for Barry (not because he wants to, but because Barry keeps showing up at his house and demanding advice). Anthony Carrigan gives a great performance as usual in this scene, creating a hilarious juxtaposition between Hank’s sincere compassion for Barry and the bluntness of his advice: “Barry, you have massive, massive rage issues.”
As with a couple of episodes from this season, “crazytimesh*tshow” is more of a stepping stone between bombshells than a bombshell in its own right, but certain travesties are starting to feel unnervingly inevitable. It’s only a matter of time before Sally sees the real Barry. When he mentions once again that she can never find out who he really is, Hank argues that living a double life isn’t sustainable. In one of the greatest scenes in this episode, Sally gets a glimpse of the monster hiding underneath the facade of an actor when Barry casually rattles off a bunch of disturbing psychological torture schemes to exact revenge against the executive who cancelled her show, like sending her pictures of herself sleeping or replacing her dog with a slightly different dog. This scene showcases phenomenal acting from both Hader as an oblivious sociopath and Sarah Goldberg as a terrified ex-girlfriend spotting red flag after red flag in quick succession. Sally might not have seen Barry’s killer instincts yet, but she’s well aware that there’s something very off about him.
Can Season 3 Still Pull All Its Story Threads Together?
This season has a lot of story threads in the air, including a couple that were introduced this week. Sally’s show has been cancelled, Fuches is assembling an army of hitmen to come after Barry, Hank has been separated from Cristobal by the dead Bolivian mob boss’ even more ruthless daughter, and Gene is having as tough a time earning redemption as his psychotic former acting student. And on top of all that, the cops now have a more competent lawman in their ranks. It’s unclear how all of these storylines will be resolved in the next three weeks, or how they’re going to connect to one another, but the writers surely have a plan to pull it all together.
The middle section of season 3 has struggled to top the rapid pacing and jaw-dropping plot turns of the stellar first two episodes. But the writers are striking a very tricky tonal balance with this show and the fact that they can even pull it off at all is a small miracle every week in and of itself. And if history is any indication, they’re building to something huge. After the first two seasons, this writing staff has earned every brownie point available.