[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Barry Season 4 Episode 7 “A Nice Meal.”]
Barry’s (Bill Hader) fear is coming true at the end of the penultimate episode of the HBO dark comedy.
“A Nice Meal” begins with Barry in Jim’s (Robert Wisdom) garage, praying to God to watch over his son, and Jim telling him he knows where he’s going after he dies, no matter how much he may have repented. Jim leaves when he hears about the $250,000 Barry gave Gene (Henry Winkler).
“The interesting idea for me was that in Episode 7, Barry’s caught and he kind of retreats and like Jim says, ‘You’re a man of God now, which is bulls**t.’ He’s kind of calling him on it,” Hader told TV Insider before the writers strike. “Barry apologizes to Cousineau in this kind of delirium. He thinks he’s going to die, and so he’s trying to repent for these things. Jim Moss says, ‘You’re going to see the people you love for the last time,’ and that’s what Barry’s afraid of. And he has that vision of his son and everything.”
After Jim leaves, Barry frees himself but then Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) calls to let him know he has Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and their son. He’s to come to the address he texts him if he wants to see his family again. The episode ends with Barry, understandably angry.
Merrick Morton/HBO
“It’s basically Hank saying, ‘Yeah, you’re going to see them.’ Now it’s for real. I always felt like that last moment of Barry is him angry out for vengeance,” Hader said. “We know what he gets when he gets mad, but it’s also a sense of maybe some guilt of, ‘This is what I brought upon everybody.’ What Jim Moss wants is going to happen. He’s never going to see his family again.”
As for why Hank kidnapped Barry’s family, Fuches (Stephen Root) wants Barry, and he’s proven that he can take out anyone sent his way. “He’s gotten what he wants, which is respect and people are doing the things he wants them to do. All he wants out of life was for [him and Barry] to continue their relationship. For Barry to do what he says, go do the hit, you give me the money, we’ll be doing that ‘til the end of time. But Barry decides he is not going to do that. And that upsets Fuches very much and starts the whole rigamarole going,” Root said.
And now that Fuches is out of prison, has his gang, and has respect as the Raven, “he has everything that he wants except — and this goes in a circle — revenge on Barry,” he continued. “That’s the big motivator for him all through the series, all through this season. But he has accepted himself finally. So it’s a very different character than what he was before because he doesn’t mind now being a killer. That makes a dangerous person once they’ve decided to do what they’re going to do and accept what they are.”
All Hank can do now is give Fuches what he wants. But can Hank really think this is going to work?
“I don’t think Hank has the wherewithal of whether his plans [can] actually [work],” Carrigan admitted. “Obviously the audience can look in and look at Hank’s schemes and say, ‘How could this possibly work out?’ Hank is so invested in what he’s doing that it’s his Achilles heel. He basically is unable to kind of track where things are going to go. That’s one of my favorite things about playing the character though, honestly, is playing a character that’s so invested in what he’s doing that everything else just kind of disappears.”
But hey, that’s worked for him so far because he’s still alive. “Yeah, for sure,” Carrigan agreed. “He’s made it this far. If you can get past a panther trying to eat you, the world’s your oyster.”
Meanwhile, Gene thinks he’s going to meet with Mark Wahlberg about the movie about Barry, only to find himself in a room with Jim, Leo (Andrew Leeds), the DA, and an officer being questioned about that $250,000. The new theory: Gene paid Barry to kill Janice and shot his own son because he found out his house was paid for with Chechen drug money.
Does Jim really think that’s what happened? “When you’re a product of training for war, anything is possible. So if there’s money involved, then it’s even more possible. And hearing that information the way that I hear it, I realize I gotta look into it,” Wisdom explained.
“I have to say, I was even surprised when I saw [that scene]. The look on my face is so perplexed. My brain has turned to cream cheese,” Winkler admitted. “I don’t have any idea. I am lost as if it was pitch black and I’m in the forest.”
Merrick Morton/HBO
Elsewhere, before Sally and her son are grabbed, she’s at Gene’s door, only he’s not home. And when she sees a cop, she approaches him to turn herself in, only to freeze, then decide against it.
“This is going to be some deep insider baseball, but it’s because she’s seeing the guy she killed. It’s the same actor. It’s Anthony Molinari. So she goes and sees the cop, and then when she realizes that it’s the man, she’s having a nervous breakdown essentially. And when she sees his face, I think she’s so confused and fearful that she’s halted in her tracks. I think if he had stayed that perhaps she would’ve come back, bounced back, and she would’ve turned herself in. But it’s him. It’s the fear of what she did,” Goldberg shared.
“At the beginning of the season when she’s dreaming and he appears, he’s haunting her,” she added. “He cleans up well in the cop outfit, so he doesn’t look quite the same as he does at the end of Season 3, with blood streaming down his neck and out of his eye. But yeah, it’s him. So I think she’s thrown and afraid.”
Something tells us that might be a good way to describe a few people in the series finale.
Barry, Series Finale, Sunday, May 28, 10:28/9:28c, HBO
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