Barry Season 4 Episode 7 Review: Desperate Times And Desperate Measures
Hard though it may be to believe, there are just two episodes left in the HBO series "Barry," which used to lean more heavily on the comic side of things even amidst its dark setup. Now, though, it's pretty much all in on darkness. And with "a nice meal," the title belies a similar sense of grimness. Last week left off on quite the cliffhanger: Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) had come very close to his mission of returning to Los Angeles and killing his old acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) for potentially consulting on a biopic of his life, before being captured by Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom) and brought to his garage, where we know weaker men have barely withstood the terror of this grieving father/ex-cop. Oh, and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) is being beset upon by a mix of hallucinations and angry ex-co-workers as she fails to tend to their son John (Zachary Golinger).
Up to this point, we've only heard about Jim Moss and his terrifying capabilities. But "a nice meal" does not wait to show us what he's able to do in breaking the men he interrogates. Barry's eyes are covered by a blackout mask, and his arms and legs are tied to a chair, as he prays for salvation and Jim mocks him, saying he wants Barry to see his loved ones one last time. Barry shifts from imagining the sunset over his home in the middle of nowhere to the beach where he envisioned the people he'd killed were located, to a shot of his son John, all before we cut to the title card.
After that, Gene and his agent Tom (Fred Melamed) are looking over a post Gene has made to social media trying to curry favor for stopping the Barry Berkman biopic. Though the post looks a little sloppy, it's getting a lot of positive attention from commenters online. Tom compliments Gene on the approach, but there's something about the way Gene agrees that makes you think his heart's only so into said approach.
Why am I still opening these?
Hank (Anthony Carrigan) is back at his NoHoBal headquarters, looking at the copper statue of Cristobal (Michael Irby), and lost in thought before meeting some very tough-looking men that he's hired to kill Fuches (Stephen Root). (Fuches was briefly in Hank's employ last week but made the error of complimenting Hank on how Cristobal was dispatched, an act for which he clearly still feels immense guilt.) More accurately, Hank has nicknamed them the "four ultimate badass killers," and is incredibly impressed at their respectively violent resumes before telling them to kill Fuches by the end of the day. (Based on this show's track record, I think we know how that's going to go.)
In the garage, Barry continues to hallucinate – first, he sees a silent John before imagining a clean-cut Gene at a swanky dinner, and apologizing to him for his behavior. He also mentions the matter of $250,000 that he was going to give Gene, which raises Jim's interest for the first time, as he consults his old notebook and the notes he took. And something in Jim's face seems to unlock a big mystery...
Gene, meanwhile, is nowhere near clean-cut as he gets a call from Matt (Nate Corddry), an agent at United Talent Agency who has a client who wants to play him in the Barry biopic: Daniel Day-Lewis, who would want to come out of retirement to play the acting teacher. Gene, for the first time, seems even mildly intrigued, and the rest of us should only hear that as a big warning sign. "This is not Tony Danza trying to f**k with me, is it?" Gene asks, before agreeing to meet Matt later that day in a secret location to learn more. And then, if there's no clearer sign that Gene has given into his instincts, it comes a second later when he receives another call ... from Sally, who has taken John and flown to Los Angeles. Gene tells them to go to his house since he can't pick them up at the moment, and that they'll meet soon. Oh, Gene. (And oh, Sally, too, who desperately tries to appease an understandably confused John about what they're doing in California.)
Unsurprisingly, Hank's plan to have the "FUBAKs" take out Fuches and his men goes terribly. An hour after they landed at Fuches' house, they were removed in the darkest way possible, as Hank sees when he's greeted by four cardboard boxes on his desk. Yes, they're the FUBAKs' heads — and Hank has the episode's funniest line as he opens the third one and asks out loud "Why am I still opening these?" — and now Hank decides to do it himself. (Which ... well, that will also probably not go well, pal.)
Kind of a villain
Fuches, back at his house, has to deal with the emotional trauma his murders have wrought upon his barista girlfriend and her daughter (Carrie Gibson and Autumn Palen). Though he's waxed philosophic about the Raven being a "blood artist," hearing that and seeing it in action are very different. The subsequent workshopping among Fuches and his men of how to make it so the women don't hear future deaths is a close second in terms of the episode's humor — and giving the episode its title, as one proposal is to take the women out for a meal while murders go down at the house. But they're no closer to figuring things out.
Gene, meanwhile, is meeting in person with Matt in a secluded spot in a local garden. As much as Gene wants to act like he's against the movie, Matt reveals that Daniel Day-Lewis isn't enough to get a movie made — they'd have to get another of his clients to play Barry. That client is Mark Wahlberg, who's hesitant to play a cop killer, and it's here that Gene recalls his old self, saying that Barry is truly "a sympathetic soul" in spite of his actions. Oh, Gene. Come on. "Mark is concerned that he's kind of a villain," Matt says. Gene tries to paper it over by noting Barry's tendency to look for a father figure, which may be true ... but still, come on. Gene is further tempted when Matt says Mark wants to meet him at the Four Seasons. Again, friends: warning signs.
At Fuches' house, Fuches watches as his girlfriend and her daughter are driven away by some of his men, because ... well, maybe they should just not be present. As the car leaves, we see that Fuches' instinct was right: Hank and his men are ready with a rocket launcher aimed at the house. Though it seems like they have a real clear shot, Hank is hapless as ever, missing with the rocket and finding out that his men only brought ... one rocket. "You thought we were going to get this on the first f***ing try?" Hank says right before Fuches' men start firing back. Hank's driver is quickly killed, but it seems like Hank (after taking a taunting call from Fuches) survives once more. All of these guys are like the Energizer Bunny.
Keep doing what we're doing
And none more so than Barry, still in Jim Moss' garage, now with the blackout mask off. He wakes up to find that he's on his own, though we hear a TV blaring in the house. It is with unsurprising speed and ease that Barry, upon spying one of Jim's many knives, moves over to said knife, frees himself and then jimmies his way into Jim's house. He ends up being slightly felled based on a wound to his hand from using the knife to break in, but he's otherwise still on his own. (It is here I have to point out something that rankles me: Jim Moss has finally — FINALLY — gotten himself face to face with the man who killed his daughter, and then he leaves that man, a known killer and ex-military man, to his own devices? That seems pretty stupid.)
Hank, meanwhile, has been found at a local woman's house, and tells his man that it's time for a new phase, in which they do whatever Fuches wants. And right now, of course, that means finding Barry. So the next phase is capturing Gene at his house and bringing the acting teacher to Hank to hopefully locate our title character.
But as you may recall, someone else is at Gene's house: Sally and John, who arrive to find the house otherwise empty. John begins that old saw of being a kid with endless questions that aren't easy to answer, as he wonders where Gene is, where his dad is, etc., before asking the key question: "What are we going to do?" Sally's response is both offhand — "We're just going to keep doing what we're doing" — and seems to unlock something in her head. They can keep going on in their miserable way, or they can break the pattern. Then, Sally sees a cop nearby and decides to do that. She walks over, saying she wants to turn herself in, and then she imagines that the cop is the man she killed last season, Shane (Anthony Molinari), with his eye bleeding from her wound. And she backs down (presumably since the cop is ... y'know, not a dead man). And as the cop leaves, Sally turns and sees that Hank's men have grabbed John ... and they're about to get her too. Oh boy.
One last twist
At the Four Seasons, Matt is playing up how excited Mark Wahlberg is about the Barry Berkman project to Gene, warning him about being nervous: "He doesn't like nervous." Matt leads Gene in, and ... well, Bill Hader has gotten some famous people on this show this year, but Mark Wahlberg is not one of them. No, Gene is met by his son Leo (Andrew Leeds), the DA (Charles Parnell), and Jim Moss. "You want to tell us why Barry Berkman gave you $250,000, Gene?" Leo is there, of course, because the house he has was paid for via that Chechen drug money, and Jim and the DA think Gene shot his son for that reason. Moreover, the DA thinks that Gene had Barry kill Janice so that Janice wouldn't know about his potential connections to the Chechen mob. (This is, along with the stuff with Jim leaving Barry on his own, kind of ridiculous and not in a good way. We know that Gene's shooting of Leo was a true accident, and that Gene had nothing to do with Janice's death, and this all just feels a little too tidy. Not to say that Gene is faultless in this series, but ... c'mon. We know he's innocent of this specific crime.)
Sally and John, meanwhile, are being held captive when NoHo Hank enters the supply closet where they're kept, taking off her wig and realizing who his men captured. "Sally Reed. Great," he says with almost no affect before leaving John to wonder who his mom really is.
His dad, meanwhile, is still at Jim Moss' house, waking up that evening from his unintended nap. (Again — I really cannot swallow that Jim left Barry on his own for the whole day. Come on.) He gets up and stumbles into Jim's living room, where he hears his phone ringing. Though he thinks Sally's on the other end, it is of course a faux-cheery Hank. He wants to give Fuches what he wants, and while he doesn't have Barry yet, Hank is right to presume that by holding his phone up to Sally and John — the former of whom has no emotion as she tells Barry they need help, while John all but screams for it — that will rouse Barry into action. Well, we can assume it will rouse Barry into action — the last thing we see after hearing Sally and John ask for help and Hank hanging up his phone is a close-up of the back of Barry's head. He's probably mad, huh?
And we've got just one episode left, huh? "A nice meal" does a lot of what this season of "Barry" has done very well — balances a sense of unavoidable bleakness with some solid inside-baseball humor as well as some visually effective gags (such as Hank's desperation to escape Fuches' counterattack outside his house, all captured via a wide shot courtesy of Hader as director) — while also making me wonder about this being the endgame. In some ways, it makes sense that Fuches vs. Barry, with Hank having to maneuver things on the sidelines, is the final part of this series, or at least appears to be the final part of this series. On the other hand, there's a slightly deflating sense to the idea that Jim Moss having Barry in his clutches led to not much of anything. That is, unless we find out in the final moments of the series that some amount of these final four episodes are a deathbed fantasy on Barry's part. Did we really make a true time jump? Did Barry really escape from Jim's garage? Only one more week to wonder.