The Ending Of Last Night's Barry Episode Left Me Very Confused
(There will be spoilers about last night's episode of Barry. If you haven't seen it yet, you've been warned.)
The last few minutes of Barry left me about as confused as I've been watching a television show. It's even more pronounced when you realize that there are only two episodes left.
Let's look at the final 25 seconds first. Barry spent most of the last half of the episode stalking Gene to try to kill him. Right before he gets his opportunity, this happens:
Wait a second. After he gets the bag thrown over his head, why is Barry clean shaven and wearing a different shirt when he's with Jim Moss? His receding hairline also bounced back. Did they just do a flashback? Did the flash forward we've been watching the last two episodes even happen? Is this some weird Jim Moss hypnosis?
It's easy to theorize that this Jim/Barry interaction happened right after he escaped prison eight years in the past but he had a black eye and was all bruised up by then. That timing doesn't line up. But it's pretty clear that we are looking at a younger version of Barry with Jim.
The other confusing (and in this case terrifying) thing is this scene with Sally:
When the figure in black is screaming about his eye, that's exactly what the guy Sally killed last year said. So is that person even there? What happened with the house being picked up like that? I expected to see a large truck with a huge flat bed, not a pickup. It made me question if this is even happening? Could it be that she got blackout drunk and trashed the house? Or knowing what we know from the last scene, is all of this in Barry's head?
We know Jim has the ability to really fuck with someone's head. He made that journalist speak German. It's pretty ballsy of a show to introduce all of these new questions with only two episodes left in the series. I do have confidence that Bill Hader has a clear ending to this. One thing that excites me is that critics were only able to see the first six episodes of this season. That tells me that some wild shit happens in these final two episodes that they didn't want to get out there.
As far as the rest of the episode, it didn't totally land for me. Sally getting her son drunk was more sad than funny. I believed Fuches would be a hardened version of himself but NoHo Hank is now absurdly wealthy? Gene went to Israel for eight years and didn't come back for his son but only when a movie is about to made. I thought Gene was learning to be less self-centered? This might be more a critique on time jumps than anything else. But I am trying to reserve too much judgement because there is so much we still don't know.
This show has been pretty carefully planned out and I have a lot of confidence in Hader. The ending of this episode, while confusing left me more excited than I've been about this show since the season started. Thus far, this is the season of Barry I've liked the least by far. But, I am very hopeful (with maybe some blind faith thrown in) that it's all going to play out towards a fantastic ending.