‘Barry’ Recap: Now Even Religious Podcasters Encourage Him to Murder

Barry zoomed eight years into the future and isolated its two leads—Barry aka Clark (Bill Hader) and Sally aka Emily (Sarah Goldberg)—from their past life, just to ultimately bring them back to Los Angeles. There was no way Barry could stay away for long. It only took one horrifying Google Alert to send him running back to the hills, Christian podcast downloaded to his phone, gun attached at the hip.

Barry just heard word that his former acting teacher/nemesis Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) is potentially developing a film based on their story together. While Cousineau has preliminary meetings with Warner Bros. (how meta, considering Barry is an HBO production), Barry flies into the Burbank airport with a plan to kill his old pal. Even if the film isn’t made, the fact that Cousineau is still running his mouth about Barry is concerning enough to draw the hitman out of retirement.

Before he departs, Barry teaches Sally a quick lesson on gun safety so she can protect herself and John (Zachary Golinger) in his absence. Sally asks to keep the safety on, fearful that the gun will go off. Barry won’t let her. He claims that the safety doesn’t matter because John will figure out how to use the gun anyway: “Boys instinctively know how guns and cars work,” Barry argues, a line that sent shivers down my spine. John doesn’t even know how to play baseball, a game that should come more instinctively to the youngster than his father’s Glock.

Sally has bigger fish to fry than the whole gun sitch. John—who has spent every moment of his life learning lessons with his father, watching YouTube with his father, eating with his father, doing everything in the world with his father—shockingly, cannot live without his father. He refuses to eat. He can’t stop crying. Out of her mind, Sally pours about three shots of vodka into his drink. John passes out for hours.

The gun safety pep-talk is no help to Sally anyway, who needed more security than that to keep her safe from a home invader wearing a black bodysuit who creeps around like her shadow. As Hader has shown in episodes past—and especially in this fourth season—he has quite the eye for directing these kinds of scenes in a way that is especially haunting. Sally wanders around her home like she normally might, and we only see the figure appear here and there. At first, it feels like the dark outline of a human might be an accident, or perhaps just a figment of our imagination. But then, slowly, he becomes more and more present, an increasing threat to Sally.

After Sally locks herself in her room (not on purpose, but to get away from John, who is still dead to the world on the couch), the figure yelps (Sally slams the door on his toes, oops) and the house is ransacked. Sally has no where to go. She has nothing to defend herself with. A gun won’t help. Her son sleeps through the earthquake-level destruction, but he wouldn’t have been of any use anyway—he’s too busy learning to be a kind pacifist from his deranged father to know any kind of self defense. The Christian YouTube clips Barry has shown John have taught him that “thou shalt not kill”—but what about to protect himself and his family?

A few deserts over, Barry struggles with that same verse. On his way to murder Cousineau, he listens to a couple of different podcasts that help unpack that commandment. Once one of the podcasters (a fantastically screamy cameo from Bill Burr) says something that he takes as permission to kill—you know, because podcasters speak in lieu of God now—he heads into Cousineau’s home. The reasoning, for the record, is that it’s only OK to kill in certain circumstances (i.e. self defense or an accident, not to get your former acting teacher to shut his trap).

But before he can strike, Barry is captured by Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom), which is the end of the episode. We’ve glazed over a few other notable aspects, though, so let’s crack back into the bits and bobbles of Barry that don’t connect to the main Sally-Barry-Cousineau tango.

Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) has turned his Cristobal (Michael Irby) trauma into money with his new sand business in Southern California, aptly called “NohoBal.” If I had all the time in the world, I would pause each frame of Barry to allow myself time to read the museum-style plaques in the lobby of NohoBal headquarters, which we get to see in very brief shots. But just seeing the golden statue of Cristobal, which looks ever so slightly like Han Solo after he was frozen in carbonite, I was satisfied.

Hank strikes a deal with Fuches (Stephen Root), who has just been freed from prison. Hank will put Fuches and his team up in a brand new house if they promise to do business with him. All is well in the world of Hank and Fuches. They celebrate. Fuches finds a wife—a random woman who makes him a latte at the first coffee shop he finds. Life is easy. Keep Barry Berkman out of it–lord knows that won’t be the case—and tranquility is possible.

Cousineau also takes the high road, rejecting Warner Bros.’ offer to make his life into a movie. Barry would be the villain in this story, but he’d also be the lead, which unsettles Gene. But is he unsettled because of the moral implications, or because the film won’t be worth it if he isn’t the leading role? Cousineau goes to see his (once again) estranged son near the end of the episode to update him on the ongoing movie situation. He’s not going to take Warner Bros.’ offer.

But his son is too wise for that—any chance at fame is worth it for his father. This feels like a parallel to the beginning of the season (in which Cousineau was directed to stay away from press, but opted to perform a one-man show giving Vanity Fair the scoop). Or perhaps the beginning of the show was only forecasting what would come of Cousineau’s storyline. Either way, the movie feels like a thing that will happen. But can Warner cast Henry Winkler and Bill Hader to star?

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