Editor's Note: this article contains major episode spoilers.
"He who seeks revenge digs two graves, Barry."
-Gene Cousineau
I wish I could tell you that the ending of Barry is fair.
In a series whose central themes are accountability and acceptance, I wish I could tell you that the series ends with Barry (Bill Hader) in jail for the crimes he committed throughout the series, or at the very least, dead and remembered as what he was: a deluded, psychotic murderer.
Neither of these things happen in "wow." Barry dies, shot in the head by his former teacher and father figure Gene (Henry Winkler), but nobody can prove that Gene isn't the criminal mastermind he's being framed as. (Except Barry's marine friend, and the widow of his other friend that he killed, and the wife and son of a victim from season three...the twist falls apart a little if you think about it, but it is nevertheless a good twist.) Now, Barry gets to die a pitied victim, while Gene is imprisoned for crimes he didn't even know about.
"wow" spends its half hour gleefully thumbing its nose at the audience one last time. Barry delights in throwing expectations out the window and doing whatever it wants—look at the back half of this season—so of course Barry would show up to a fight he's ready to die in to find everyone already dead. He wasn't going to die in an insane action scene that the series has become beloved for, he was going to die from getting shot by an angry old man.
Of the five main characters in Barry, only one of them gets a happy ending. I was hoping at least one character would see the error of their ways and make it out, but never in a million years did I think it would be Fuches (Stephen Root), who I was so sure was wearing a wire two episodes ago. But Fuches did what I was so sure I never thought he'd do, which I'm sure is exactly what Hader wanted: he changed. When he confronts opposing crime boss Hank (Anthony Carrigan), he doesn't use his dangerous manipulation tactics to hurt him. He uses them to get Hank to see the light.
"Denial, it's tough," he muses. "I used to think I was a soldier."
Fuches's monologue about posing as someone he wasn't before realizing that he was "a man with no heart" speaks beautifully to the series' obsession with acceptance. Fuches has always been presented as someone too weak to fight for himself, but he does his time in prison and emerges stronger. The characters of Barry could never accept their faults, but Fuches recognized his greatest strength was his ability to turn people and used that to make himself better.
And he's proven wrong about his heartlessness—he jumps on Barry's son John (Zachary Golinger) to save him when the meeting erupts in gunfire, and returns the child to his father. Root's performance is shockingly beautiful here—his eyes glimmer with tears as he watches John with the man he took advantage of for so many years—and his character feels truly complete as he leaves without a word, having surprised maybe even himself, but able to accept it.
The opposite can be said for Hank, who was once the series' wisest and most likable main character. Fuches uses his "people skills" to reduce him to a weeping mess, finally expressing regret and pain over the death of his boyfriend Cristobal. This was not malicious on Fuches's part—he wanted to make Hank see the error of his ways. But Hank is so dug into the idea of the strength a boss like him has to command, he pulls his gun but is shot down by Fuches, prompting a quick gun battle that ends with almost everyone dead. Hank dies at the feet of Cristobal's commemorative statue and takes its hand as he bleeds to death. The final look in his eyes is that of realization, as though he concluded too late that he could have been happy staying with Cristobal in New Mexico.
Barry's wife Sally (Sarah Goldberg) insists that instead of running away like he usually does, he should turn himself in.
"I don't think that's what God wants for me," Barry asserts, because Barry will use anything as an excuse to do what he wants.
He's been given the opportunity to save the man he's wanted to impress for the majority of the series, and he would rather save himself, so of course he wakes up to find Sally and John gone. He storms over to Gene's house (for reasons I still don't fully understand) and gets himself killed. Gene barely speaks in this episode, but this, too, feels like a satisfying resolution to his arc. Gene always wanted attention and fulfillment, and now, because he was too eager to make up for all the times Barry got the better of him, he kills his last chance of remaining free.
But it doesn't end there.
Some years later, John (Jaeden Martell) is a teenager and Sally teaches theater at his high school. They're not adversarial, but they're distant, and it almost feels a little inconclusive. I get the feeling that Sally, so disturbed by everything Barry put her through, can't be close to this extension of him; seeing more than one scene of their life now would have been nice.
Against Sally's wishes, John's friend finally lets him see The Mask Collector, the movie made about his father—but it's not about Barry's misdeeds, it's about how he was misunderstood and manipulated, and how he died a hero standing up to the monstrous Gene. (Seeing him played by Jim Cummings was an absolute delight, a great moment of levity in a very dark finale.) It's one more gut punch by the show, as if it's saying to those who rooted for Barry back in season one, "this is what would've happened, are you happy now?"
Barry ends the series winning, but he loses his life and the love of almost everyone around him in the process. John gets to believe the false narrative that his father was a hero, but now he lives without that father.
"wow" is not a perfect finale. Sally's story doesn't feel fully concluded, Fuches's arc of not actually wanting to hurt Barry feels completely out of left field, and the twist has some logical issues. If it were perhaps forty-five minutes long, the majority of the issues could've been solved. But Barry is not a show that's concerned with doing everything its audience wants—it was one of the few shows on TV that did its own thing and produced amazing television as a result.
The story of Barry Berkman is not a fair one. Good people die or are corrupted, and bad people are immortalized as respectable. It's a series where almost no one learned the right lesson, and in one way or another, they paid for it. But it's also a series that works because of this injustice, and because there are at least some characters that get it right. I'm not trying to say it's a series about bettering yourself, but it is one about accepting and accounting, and it tells a fantastic story about those things while still being creative and wholly original. In the end, I'm grateful for it.
All episodes of Barry are now available on Max.