Never watched a movie take such a turn in tone. What a ride. Ending felt good and bad at the same time imo. Liked all seasons, but I think I prefer the "lighter" first two seasons.
I dont like how Hank was a consistently loveing and funny character and they changed him in just a few episodes seemingly just to make his death easier to take.
i agree, i think it's that they needed some final confrontation for the side characters in the last episode to reach the climax, so they came up with this...
What I don't get is Gene mentioning his # changed when he was out of the country all those years. Yet Sally knew who to call when she got to LA.
Just saying
I had the same thought - they very obviously made a point of mentioning his changed number so surely it can’t just be a plot hole. I heard they did this to show that Gene actually never changed his number, but he wanted his son to think he did so he didn’t look like he’d been ignoring his calls all these years.
Finally got around to watching this season.
It didn't have the same tone as the previous 3. Tbh, I wish it ended with season 3. I think I liked that ending better.
The scene before Barry escapes prison was one of the few moments where I thought the season felt like Barry, and was the highlight of the season for me.
The last fake movie scene was hilarious. Loved the ending, this show is GOATED. Another must watch hbo classic. I just love how real the show feels, so many weird stuff and people happening in different scenes. That off-feeling. hard to see it in different shows.
I just don't agree with how Barry got killed and how fast and almost skipped over so quickly. I low-key loved the 8 year-time skip to where they were all different people I loved Fuches character. Loved the show regardless, Season 4 was darker and more serious.
I was surprised to come here and read the S4 hate, I don't see how the show could end any other way. If it had a happy ending people would have said the show pussied out. The show was part comedy but always based in realism, and there's just no way that his character could have kept avoiding all the heat (and shame) from the mountain of murders he had committed. If he wasn't killed he would have killed himself eventually.
People are not disappointed because the show doesn't have a happy ending, it's just that season 4 is all over the place and not funny at any point. I mean, surely you'd agree at the very least that this story could have been concluded much better than it was. I'm all for sad endings, as long as the writing is good
I thought the ending was great. The season itself was a bit all over the place, but to me the ending is almost perfect. Barry never gets to actually be the hero he wants to be, Gene’s constant need for the spotlight and attention dooms him, Noho Hank’s inability to ever do anything hard ends him, Sally finally figured out how to be a normal person.
It moved me honestly. What an amazing series.. so many layers. Never has a show made me feel so many different emotions.. One of my favorite of all time. GREAT characters.. amazing acting.
I’m just going to go with my initial thought(s) when the first post-time jump episode started and I kept thinking…is this real? Some sorta dream? Purgatory?
None of that really happened, it was all just a dream, Barry’s in jail, asleep…imagining life on a farm with a kid and Abraham Lincoln.
Oh damn this is one of those times when I like something and come on Reddit just to see everyone shitting on it. Happens from time to time. But for the record I loved season 4, loved the ending.
What a complete waste of a season 4. It's just like House of Cards where everyone says to skip the last season. I'd suggest the same to Barry to anyone new watching. I binged this show in little under a week. Had a FANTASTIC watching experience for season 1-2, and 3 I felt it was turning different, but still good. Season 4? I want my time back. Garbage writing and garbage fucking ending. It's like season 4 was written by a completely different group and thought this was a different show. All the humor, funny bits all went out the window and it turned into a dark grit of a cluster fuck. Dragged out nonsense and characters that had fantastic s1-2 just completely dragged through the mud and beaten with a stick in s4 by shit writing and direction.
Maybe S4 sucked so much due to Bill Hader directing it and writing it.
EDIT: oh and sally? whoever wrote her character should never hold a job of writing again. "You need to turn yourself in, Gene could go to jail"... Uhh, bitch you murdered a dude and Barry covered for you. Then went to a cop and pussy'd out. Pot calling the kettle black. So many dam plot holes in this season 4 you'd need 100 ashpalt trucks to fill it in.
"murdered a dude?" She was literally an attempted murder and she defended herself. What? yeah sally is a dog shit character but she never murdered anyone lol.
What is up with everyone saying that Sally murdered a dude, is this just parroting?
If you watched the full scene she is being brutally assaulted and almost murdered by a full psychopath way bigger and stronger than her. She barely makes a stab in time. Then she has to see him walk around, looking like an immortal monster trying to figure out what's going on. If it missed crucial brain matter as it appears, he could easily turn and come get her or at least she might think that. They specifically show Barry passed out over and over, to stress that it is up to her, and she has to fight for her life. She manages to defeat him with a bat, and he is still kicking for a while on the way down but she's brave and channels her emotion.
Just because she blames herself for channeling emotion into her self-defense and the concept that someone died, doesn't make her a murderer. The only tragedy with that outcome is the shame and self-blame. Barry was too messed up to help her contextualize and understand, and she lacked support she desperately needed. As Barry said, (if you want someone to blame), "He did this", because.. you know, all these psychos after him after he made tons of enemies as a hit man, didn't tell anyone, and now innocent people are having to witness traumatic events or fight for their fucking life.
Gene killed Barry because he liked the attention he got from the negative press. If Barry cleared his name then all of the attention would go back to Barry. The narcissist in him couldn't let that happen. He would rather be a famous villain than a nobody.
I was initially mad when I heard there was a season 4. The end of 3 seemed solid. I was not happy how 4 started, but DAMN that was a great series ending. The last few episodes of 4 were brilliant.
Freaking bleak but I loved it. I feel like Barry was going to have a hard ending no matter what. Thank you Bill Hader for making my anxiety go through the roof and keeping me glued to my screen till the very end.
Also Hausu is amazing.
The tone shift from last season to this season was horrific. They could have kept up the humor and the tone and ended it with Barry losing everything and having a flat humor end.
I guess I misinterpreted what happened with Hank and Christobal before. I thought the gang killed Christobal against Hank’s will, basically “the gang” did it because he couldn’t leave. That doesn’t mean Hank was guilty/caused it. So I was very confused for much of the confrontations with Fuches.
Overall I didn’t like the ending at all. Not for any character. The whole tone also has nothin to do with the Barry show as a whole.
Nah you hit it right on the head. Hank was basically forced to choose between his "rainbow gang" or the Chechens.
The Chenchens gave him an ultimatum, us or them. They allowed Christobal in as long as he played ball and was with Hank. Fuchs more or less wanted Hank to admit he got his lover killed or at least was apart of it, which he wasn't really
HUGE shift in tone for the last season especially with eps 4 and eps 5.
So so season, great finale epilogue.
Hank definitely didn’t want him to die but he still willingly made every decision that directly led to Cristobal’s death. He didn’t pull the trigger but he killed Cristobal’s dream and friends, knowing they would kill Cristobal if he wanted to leave.
Uhh I kinda thought it sucked...like really bad. Downvote all you want but like so many things were just so unrealistic and the movie at the end of the episode seemed like it was a joke but clearly it wasn't.
with the unrealistic part imma only say... that's what this show is about, it doesn't take itself too seriously, it literally had an episode with a kid that was climbing the trees and bit people
there were some integral parts too, from Barry's plot armor to Hank's plotline which consisted of some ridiculous moments, but were kinda in tone with the show
I didn't like a lot of it, but the epilogue and his son smiling at the memory of barry was excellent in my opinion. Turned the whole episode from "meh" to "great"
Ya but I didn’t like how the truth didn’t resolve. I also thought it was so unrealistic how the cops thought it was Gene and had no evidence against him
I think that was about the happiest ending most of the characters deserved.
Barry did what he could to redeem himself in his last moments. He got remembered as a hero that was taken advantage of which was never the case and is much better than he deserved.
Sally was able to get John and herself away from Barry. She still has no career in Hollywood but she’s back to being a self-absorbed actor.
Fuches somehow got redeemed despite being the most consistently antagonistic characters on the show. He got to make things right with Barry and walked away as the person most unscathed from the showdown with Hank.
The only person to get a truly bad ending was Cousineau and it was entirely consistent with his character and self-inflicted. One could also make an argument for Hank but I really couldn’t see any other way for things to end for him,nor did he deserve a better ending.
I think this was a brilliant, heartfelt, and complicated ending. It was aiming to be a realistic portrayal of how we feel about ourselves. And the lengths of denial we go to because of the shame we carry. But how that denial will ultimately be our demise.
I think the scene between Fuches and Hank was the synopsis. The synopsis was that the road to redemption or even recovery requires you to deal with the complexity of who you are. The good and the bad. All of it.
Look at each characters story.
**Fuches:** He survives that encounter. Why? Because in his speech he saw the great lengths to which he lied both to himself and others. And prison finally made him come to terms with his past. And in his self acceptance he could move on. He had to face the harshest truths about himself and survived.
**Hank:** No Ho Hank knew what Fuches said about him was true. But the feeling of shame was far more than he could handle. He couldn't come to terms with his past so he dug his heels and died. The out was right there for him, but he couldn't face his truth.
**Jim Moss:** Janice's father never got the justice he was looking for. He was willing to torture Barry. And I remember thinking in the scene where he's trying to determine the most painful weapon, I was sad. Sad that he couldn't get over the murder, sad that his anger got the best of him. And I kept wondering would Janice have wanted to see her father like that? He didn't face his shame head on and he never got his catharsis.
**Gene:** He was a bad father over and over and over again. In his quest to be loved and validated, he would have changed his story about Janice. He ends up killing Barry and his story ends in a bad place. Why? Cause he like Hank could never accept his own truth. He was a bad father and he was a narcissist. But you need to accept yourself, the good with the bad, so you can heal and be redeemed. He never did.
**Sally:** Sally gets partial redemption. Because when she and John where kidnapped, she realized she was the bad person. She had lied to herself earlier in the seasons about her relationship with her ex and how it ended. She had kept running away over and over again. And right before she and John get kidnapped at Gene's house. I think John asked her what are we going do now? And she's like "Just run away again." Then she disassociates for a second and realizes that the problem metaphorically and literally; she can't keep running away. It won't solve her problems. Unfortunately by the end, she doesn't fully address her problems, she doesn't say I love you to her son. And she was still more worried about her performance.
**Barry:** And Barry is the biggest perpetrator of it all. He never could accept the other side of himself. The things he did in the war, the things he did back from the war. He kept running and running and running by murdering and murdering. I think he finally realized at the last minute which was cathartic. But writers had to kill him.
Why? Because the ending scene with the fake movie shows how one dimensional good guys and villains are in storytelling. But not Barry the show and not Barry the person. In real life, villains aren't pure evil people. They are people like you and I who keep running away and justifying there actions more and more.
But if they face their truths maybe they won't become villains. Beautiful show, beautiful ending.
I agree 100%. I was surprised to come here and read the S4 hate, I don't see how the show could end any other way. If it had a happy ending people would have said the show pussied out. The show was part comedy but always based in realism, and there's just no way that his character could have kept avoiding all the heat (and shame) from the mountain of murders he had committed. If he wasn't killed he would have killed himself eventually.
Probably the best written analysis I’ve read on the finale so far.
This is after reading and watching multiple articles and videos from Bill Hader and the creative team.
Cheers
The fake movie at the end as well is just going to continue the cycle of denial. The smirk from John after watching it make me think this is going to be his new reality for his past despite actually being there for some of it and knowing what happened.
The whole show has always just been about actors acting tricking themselves into thinking they're okay and nothings their fault
>And I remember thinking in the scene where he's trying to determine the most painful weapon, I was sad.
I thought he was just making noises with different weapons as part of the psychological torture. I got the sense that despite being a big, mean dude with a deep voice, he actually doesn't do any physical violence (unless I'm forgetting something), and is simply a master of psychological manipulation.
It could be! I still think regardless of it being physical violence or not, he gave into his anger. That's why he followed a trail that didn't exist. And went after Gene. He never faced his grief and it consumed him.
I binged watched the entire show over the last week or so. Great finale and just show in general. I don't mind that some of the pieces of the ending were left vague.
There is one issue though that kind of bothers me. In the finale of season 3, Albert figured out the entire story after Fuches told him that Berry killed Jason. He knew that Berry was a contract killer and it wouldn't have been a leap for him to figure out that he killed Janice as well. Did he just fuck off when Cousineau was accused of murder? It felt a little strange that his character was never addressed. Regardless of what happened, Cousineau was going to go down for Berry's murder, but a good lawyer could have argued it down to manslaughter or self defense given how dangerous Berry was.
I suppose it works regardless but it felt like a plot hole for sure given how important Albert was in the finale of the 3rd season.
Yeah, I expected him to pop up again, but with how things turned up, what could he even do? "I caught Barry burrying a body but I let him go because he pinky-swore he wouldn't kill again" might not look best in court.
this is true. I would imagine he could just lead investigators to the body and attempt to shed light on Barry's true self via some other means. I would assume that Fuches either dropped off the map after the end of the finale or eventually got caught; especially if he continued to be "the raven". Maybe there is a world where Albert used him to illuminate Berry's crimes.
Every season just got more and more surreal, loved it! Stuck to its core themes and kept the satire the show has always had since the start. Gonna miss this so bad...
There was same absolutely incredible feats in directing, writing and acting this season. Even though it felt a lot more surreal and esoteric in nature, it still had that dark relentless storytelling that you can't help but watch in horror. They made me fall in love with a show that has absolutely no redeemable characters.
And that final shot of Hank on Cristobal's statue was absolutely heartbreaking. I started this show as a "why not" three days ago, and now that it's over I'm left gutted. Bill Hader and team deserve every ounce of praise they're going to get. He's a master class at storytelling and I'll watch whatever he does.
9.2/10
I watched most of the first season a little while back and had no idea the finale just happened. I just finished it maybe 10 minutes ago and was a great watch.
I agree. I just started watching Barry for the first time 2 weeks ago. My whole family has been binge watching. It is like night and day from season 1 and 2 to season 4. Season 4 has no identify. It's just a complete mess that went away with everything that made it successful. I'm sorry I like Bill Hader but the writers really dropped the ball with this final season.
I'm really hoping they come out with a new show called Fuches or The Raven, and find a satisfying ending.
But to not have a satisfying ending is a choice, and I feel like they deliberately wanted people to feel unsatisfied watching Sally being this more broken person than she started off as, and John not knowing the truth of his dad.
There were a lot of contrivances in this season that I felt were silly and pulled me out of the story, but frankly, I feel like that's been going on this entire show?
Some examples off the top of my head: The investigator from S1 finding out Barry is the killer through his Facebook mutual friends, Fuches not killing Gene in the S2 finale after that cliffhanger with the gun to his head (I think Vince Gilligan would refer to that as "schmuck bait"), Gene weirdly only remembering that Fuches whispered Barry's name in his ear at the very end of the S2 finale.
So things like Janice's dad leaving Barry alone and poorly tied, or everyone turning on Gene over the course of an episode-- they were kind of annoying for me, but also par for the course as far as characters on this show acting selectively stupid (or selectively smart) in order to move the plot forward.
This season was definitely a departure from the previous seasons, but this show is full of big swings and experiments-- that's part of what has kept me coming back even when it didn't always feel like there was consistent internal logic.
I don't think it was par for the course, but Janice's dad should have and would have gotten Barry to give a confession about Gene. His character may see connections and come up with possible alternatives but he jumped to a conclusion without much evidence. Instead of going after Gene he should have stuck with Barry to get a better picture of what happened instead of filling in the blanks and baiting Gene.
All of this on top of tying Barry up better.
There's also the masked guy and truck that hit the house that never got explained, some people provide a pretty good explanation of it being in Sally's mind, but still if I hadn't read it I would have never seen the connection.
I know this post is old but I just finished the show and was looking online to see what other people thought so this part;
>There's also the masked guy and truck that hit the house that never got explained, some people provide a pretty good explanation of it being in Sally's mind, but still if I hadn't read it I would have never seen the connection.
Is still pretty fresh in my mind.
When the door slams behind Sally and the masked guy suddenly disappears you hear the masked guy say all the things that the person she stabbed in the face say.
"Wha'd ya do to my eye ya bitch!" Etc. It's a visual metaphor for the memory of what happened constantly haunting her. Always just behind her, always looming in the back of her mind.
The truck that hit her house was the redneck who she chokes in the bathroom and then pins him for stealing money from the till and gets him fired. He rams his truck into her house as revenge.
I agree with Gene only remembering Fugues telling him Barry did this. I was wondering why Gene didn't say anything or remember it sooner. I do recall Gene just staring down at the floor at the police station, looking at a piece of broken tile. Very convenient.
But I do believe Moss had a number of reasons to suspect Gene. One is how Barry actually was at Jim's house to step into Gene's place to kill Jim. This allows Jim to believe Gene's has control over Barry. Not to forget, Gene shot Barry and killed him. So even if Jim, Sally, or even Fugues were to step up on Gene's behalf, it would not change Gene's sentence. Any statement that they may provide is solely hearsay. The evidence Janice's partner had was enough to convict Barry, but it was destroyed or taken by Barry.
This season had some great directing and some good individual episodes but man that was not a compelling compelling or cohesive season overall.
The time jump was interesting but it really felt like it came from the writers writing themselves into a corner and having no idea how to get out.
The way Gene so quickly changed his tune when learning Daniel Day Lewis was interested felt out of character for him as he’s always been shown to actually care about Janice but maybe I’m wrong. The whole thing with the FBI turning on Gene and blaming him just didn’t feel real. Yea they Barry gave him money but that’s literally it? There’s no proof anywhere just speculation which isn’t how the law works.
It was completely in character. He's a massive narcissist who always resented that he didn't have the career he felt he deserved, due to how he treated people. Hearing that DDL is coming out of retirement to play him would be the biggest ego trip ever.
Then why wouldn’t he have been like that in the beginning when the movie was announced? He was given the opportunity to be involved, he could’ve even tried to play himself, but instead he just wanted to shut it down.
Obviously. But if fame, being in the industry, and meeting stars was what he wanted then he would’ve been excited about the movie. An actor he loves was all that made him change his mind? Just inconsistent and annoying
I don’t find that inconsistent at all. Before then it was just some faceless concept that could have just been some cheap garbage movie (which we see at the end is what it was). But having arguably the greatest actor of all time come out of retirement to play you was just too big of an ego trip. And that’s the whole point of Gene, he’s ego always overcomes his morals at the end of the day. It derailed his initial acting career, it’s why he takes money from the guy who murdered the love of his life, it’s why he wants to take Daniel day-Lewis call.
I thought we would assume Leo's input to Gene's ego may play a part in that offer. Meaning I don't believe it was any true agent representing Daniel Day Lewis. Contacting Gene the same day, Gene had just stated to Leo that he had a new cell number, or at least new to Leo seems like a clue. Gene has been out of the country for many years. You can argue that Gene had put his new cell phone number as a contact for such agents. But as you stated, there isn't any proof. We only see that Gene gives his number to Leo. So Leo may have known this offer would trigger Gene. Just like the Warner Brothers' offer wasn't appealing to Gene. Because he may have gone with it . And as far as consistency, Gene's middle name could have been inconsistent. I don't have time to go through it, but Gene's behavior flip-flops throughout the series.
Not to mention, Daniel Day Lewis is still such a big name and yet no evidence linking Mr. Lewis to any project. As we see, he isn't in The Mask Collector.
This is the dumbest writing the series, how prey tell did Allison get his number? Divination? Magic? Must be, because the show presents no other logical or reasonable explanation, and there are a dozen things like this.
100% fake.
1) Doors don’t work like that. She was locked from the inside?
2) The guy is yelling about his eye like the guy she stabbed.
3) The guy talks about the kid not breathing, which he clearly was fine.
By the end of this shit I grew to hate every single character left.
Hanks boyfriend died.
Hank became a snivelling bitch, he kind of always one, but all the good he was was gone by the end.
I haven't liked fuches since like season 2, and him consistently fucking Barry over, and then trying to help him out, and then fucking him over again, I'm just pissed off at this point.
I've never liked Sally, I always hated that she was just the love interest, and once joppelin hit she got entitled and bitchy and shit, then the time skip happened and she got bitchy about the whole "I killed a guy" thing, I don't know I fucking hate Sally.
We knew the kid, John for like what? 4 episodes max? I don't give a shit about him.
Cousineau sucks, I've hated him since he got bitchy with Barry I don't care if he had good reason, he was a slimy bitch who ended up killing him, fuck cousineau.
Barry himself has been on a decline since he got poisoned by the wife of the fucker he killed just before the Hamlet whatever the fuck. And since the time skip and him getting into Jesus lore and caring about his son and shit, I've hated him even more. Then he got all "I gotta kill cousineau", "I'm pussying out of killing cousineau cause a kid walked into the house he's in" "I gotta save my kid" he's an afterthought to the plot for the last episode, and he was killed 20 minutes in, leaving 10 of episode I frankly don't care about without him. He's what the show is fucking named after, I want to see him.
The fact they Sally was the only one to survive (except cousineau who was presumably in prison) pisses me off, fuck that bitch. I don't care about her fucking teaching career or whatever, I don't care about her son, I don't care about any of that shit. Barry is who I care about, Barry is who the show is named after, Barry is the one driving my interest in the show. If he is not there, I dont care about the show
And the movie at the end sucked ass I don't care if it was supposed to be bad, I fucking hated it
The Skyler hate was collectively pretty sexist, but they did make her character do things to get in the way of Walt, and whether good or bad, was always going to inspire, even non-sexist, hate.
The writers for Barry did a much better job at justifying the Sally hate, even though in the grand scheme of things, she wasn't even an evil person, just a more naive version of a delusional narcissist. She does get some growth in the last season, just enough for me not to entirely hate her anymore. And I applaud the writers for not completely redeeming her character completely - people only change in bits and pieces overtime and it would have been unrealistic for her to do a complete 180.
I liked the show, but in my opinion it just got worse as it went on. But I was bored, had no good alternative for entertainment, and felt like I should actually finish something for once as I failed to for the past few shows I've watched (succession, Castlevania, mob psycho 100, and a few others). And after the last season I got pissed off with the show entirely, vowed to never rewatch it, and bitched about it on reddit and YouTube comments. It's been a week, I've cooled down now, but I stand by my assessment of the show.
In short: I was bored, felt like I should finish it since I started it, and I seem like I hate everything about it because I overreacted.
I think that's kind of the whole point of the show is that these people are all delusional and believe they are "redeemed" by their acting careers but continue to spiral out of control in the real world. They all turn into the things that they hate. Barry says he's not a bad person and becomes one, Sally says she's never going to be in another abusive relationship, gets into one etc.
If you don't like it then that's totally understandable, but I hope looking at it through a different lens helps.
Honestly I think the entire fourth season was just garbage. I watched seasons 1 through 3 all at once, then stopped and waited until all of season 4 was out to watch it. So I had the season 3 ending sitting in my mind for a while before I started season 4.
And after the greatness of season 3, and the ending of season 3 being pretty damn good, I was just consistently disappointed with season 4.
It was ok I guess before he fled prison, and there was a time skip. But even then it felt like there was no direction, no drive. Like things were just happening and I had to be happy about it I guess.
But after the time skip, was just garbage. I don't care about Sally and Barry just being mediocre parents to this kid I don't care about because I've known him for like 3 episodes. I don't care about Barry researching Lincoln facts. Or Barry bringing bible stories all the time. I don't care about the fact that he goes to LA to try and kill cousineau for something he wasn't going to do (cause he was planning on stopping the movie from happening, at first anyway).
I don't care for the fact that Sally is grappling with the murder she committed or whatever. Or the fact she went back to LA because of a weird attack that happened (which I'm like half sure was imagined or something, cause shouldn't the kid have woken up? Or shouldn't the attackers have done anything of value? I'm honestly just kinda confused at that sequence. Which I shouldn't be as it's the crux of them getting kidnapped in the finale, so I should know why that's happening. But maybe I'm just dumb and everyone else understood it, I don't know)
By the end of this shit I grew to hate every single character left.
Hanks boyfriend died.
Hank became a snivelling bitch, he kind of always one, but all the good he was was gone by the end. And all of his character became what he did to his boyfriend. And I don't like when I character is functionally reduced down to "significant other of another person" and that's all he was at the end, with fuches fucking with him causing the death of his boyfriend and all that shit.
I haven't liked fuches since like season 2, and him consistently fucking Barry over, and then trying to help him out, and then fucking him over again, I'm just pissed off at this point. And the whole thing with his prison gang, I just found annoying. You just brought up this bullshit for the last few episodes of the entire show. How am I supposed to be invested in this, when it's based on this guy's gang hat I'm only hearing about now?
I've never liked Sally, I always hated that she was just the love interest, and once joppelin hit she got entitled and bitchy and shit, then the time skip happened and she got bitchy about the whole "I killed a guy" thing, I don't know I fucking hate Sally. I don't like how she was just a mediocre parent figure to the kid at the end either.
We knew the kid, John for like what? 4 episodes max? I don't give a shit about him. And the fact that everything had to do with him at the end, and it even followed him for the last like 10 minutes of the last episode. How am I supposed to care for the final moments of this show (and that's only made worse with the shitty fucking movie at the end, but whatever)?
Cousineau sucks, I've hated him since he got bitchy with Barry I don't care if he had good reason, he was a slimy bitch who ended up killing him, fuck cousineau.
Barry himself has been on a decline since he got poisoned by the wife of the fucker he killed just before the Hamlet whatever the fuck. And since the time skip and him getting into Jesus lore and caring about his son and shit, I've hated him even more. Then he got all "I gotta kill cousineau", "I'm pussying out of killing cousineau cause a kid walked into the house he's in" "I gotta save my kid" he's an afterthought to the plot for the last episode, and he was killed 20 minutes in, leaving 10 of episode I frankly don't care about without him. He's what the show is fucking named after, I want to see him.
The fact they Sally was the only one to survive (except cousineau who was presumably in prison) pisses me off, fuck that bitch. I don't care about her fucking teaching career or whatever, I don't care about her son, I don't care about any of that shit. Barry is who I care about, Barry is who the show is named after, Barry is the one driving my interest in the show. If he is not there, I dont care about the show
And the movie at the end sucked ass I don't care if it was supposed to be bad, I fucking hated it
I agree 100% with everything.
Seasons 1-3 were a dark comedy with a perfect ending: Barry is finally outwitted by Janice's father, SWAT surrounds the house, and he ends up spending life in prison. Gene is at peace that Barry is finally caught. Janice's father is left standing alone at the end, symbolizing the emptiness of having lost his daughter, while still being relieved that Barry is caught. Barry himself was a complicated character, neither good nor evil, just a lost soul. It was tragic but a fitting ending to his character arc. He finally paid for his sins with life in prison. The end. Beautiful ending to a beautifully written show.
Barry Season 1-3 were some of the best writing in television history. Absolutely amazing show. It was super funny, yet realistic, and most characters and actions followed logic and reason.
Then they threw this fucking trainwreck abomination of Season 4 at us?
1. Suddenly, Barry is basically braindead and has no ability to figure things out anymore. It's like he's had a lobotomy and wanders around like a zombie.
2. Sally's neuroticism is tuned up to 1000x and she's a miserable fucking cunt who can't even show one shred of love for her own son, and spent all her time drinking, not even able to cook him a fucking meal for ONE fucking day when she had to watch her son.
3. Barry has a weird religious nutjob tone all of a sudden.
4. They spend almost two full episodes wallowing in Sally's misery to paint Barry dirty, and they wasted a bunch of time on a weird "dirty loser love triangle at the diner she worked at".
5. They kill Cristobal and turn funny Hank into a fucking water hose of constant tears.
6. Fuches is no longer a dunce and is now some kind of hardened "man with no heart" crime boss, with a bunch of "immortal" losers he picked up in prison, and everyone goes along with it, playing it completely straight. Hank's crime empire and Chechens lose to a guy who just got out of prison! His gang is basically immortal.
7. They sucked all the humor out of the show and wallowed in misery. "We're so brave and artistic, you thought you were watching a dark comedy but turns out you were watching an artsy Ingmar Bergman misery-drama porn movie instead", amirite?
8. And yes, some of these ideas sound cool on paper, but they were so poorly executed in the show.
It also pissed me off how poorly they executed the time jump aka "how the fuck do we move this plot forward after he's in prison?".
1. Barry escapes from prison, somehow getting past all guards and all gated checkpoints and huge walls, but we are never shown any of it, making it totally unbelievable. They clearly had no idea how he did it, so they just handwaved it away.
2. Next, Janice's father is staking out Sally's home, expecting to see Barry there (he's correct), but somehow Barry AND Sally got past him, and they just handwaved that away too.
3. They also handwave the fact that Sally has to wear wigs, while Barry still looks exactly like himself, the national news fugitive cop killer who escaped from prison.
4. And as a sidenote, it was ridiculous that Barry kept buying guns and walking out with them immediately, which is such a delusional view of the world. In reality, you need to complete an FBI background check named "NICS" and then wait several days/weeks for them to clear your identity and eligibility. A random fake ID wouldn't work. It would have to be A VALID PHOTO ID that exists in the FBI's registry. But nah, "forget all of that, because in Barry you can buy guns with instant checkout". Instead of all of this stupidity, it would have been a lot more believable if Barry had simply stashed some "untraceable" guns from his criminal lifestyle, without adding yet another distraction of unbelievability to the plotline.
5. The only believable part of "the timewarp" was that Sally was clearly tired of being in the background all her life (acting career in the dumps) and accepted that she liked the thrill of being on the run with her loving, protective, assassin boyfriend. "You make me feel safe", she said.
6. It really pissed me off how they executed the time jump: We see Barry facing Sally, and he asks her to run away with him. We then immediately see a cut to the same fucking "dream landscape" that Barry always fantasizes in when he dreams about his bromance with Fuches, coming back from the war, etc. You know, the fucking place where we know that Barry is hallucinating and nothing is real? They use that place, and put a completely random house in the middle of that desert, without any roads, without any plants, without any trees (the kid even asks "Wow, is it true that large trees exist, daddy?" at one point). It all looks exactly like a dream sequence. It made me extremely annoyed as I constantly sat there waiting for "the dream sequence" to end and expected a cut back to Sally's face where she realizes "no, running away with you would be a miserable life, I can't do it...". But nope... that wasn't it... instead, the "dream sequence" landscape and its humorless misery droned on and on for two episodes... After the first one, I thought "okay, they devoted one episode to the dream, but now it's surely time to go back to reality?", but nope... after two episodes, I realized it's not a fucking dream, it's actually happening, they actually did this stupid and incredibly unbelievable time jump and simultaneously chose to film it like the dream sequences... It was so out of place.
7. And the son? They LITERALLY say in the show that they ran away 8 years ago (they mention in the show that Gene "disappeared 8 years ago" on the night that he shot his own son by accident, just a day or two after Barry escaped from prison). A kid takes at least 1 year to be born. So he was at most 7 years old. And even if we trust the show's external synopsis of episode 5 which says "roughly ten years after barry's escape", the kid could still be no more than 9 years old then, if they had sex immediately when they ran away together. And "roughly ten years" can of course refer to 8 years as they said in the show, so it's most likely been just 8 years. So the kid is at most 7 years old if we trust the show's own internal words on-screen, and 9 years old if the external synopsis puts things closer to 10 years. But... they got a kid to play him who looks 13 years old (he seems to be 11 years old in real life, but the thing is, that's still too old, because kids physically age extremely fast between "7-9 year old" and "11-12 year old", and the boy they cast looks way too old). That was a very stupid decision and made the show look completely disheveled and disorganized. Like nobody in casting bothered to make the kid look age-appropriate. It took me out of every scene with him and was super distracting, and just added to all the annoyances with the poorly shot "dream sequence time jump".
But the most annoying thing of all... was how poorly written the story was...
From episode 4 onwards it was very clear that the entire season was following the cheap, shitty, classic Hollywood trope of tearing down a character (Barry) until he's despised by everyone and all the viewers, to make him easy to kill off.
They basically stripped away all his redeeming qualities, made him a violent cop killer in prison who loathes people and is proud to be a cop killer and threatens the other cops until he's beaten to near death (which makes him look even more disheleved and easy to hate), and they removed all his love for Sally and made it into some kinda psychosis instead, and made him "torture" his son by forbidding video games, forbidding his son from even playing baseball, etc.
It was painfully clear they were doing Barry dirty and turning him into a disgusting shitbag, stripping away all his humanity that had originally made him such a complex character. From episode 4 (the time warp) onwards, I knew it already: They were setting up Barry's death.
It was telegraphed a mile away. And extremely shittily written, with a total "character swap" of Barry. Nothing about his change was believable.
And then the show ends with more misery: Gene goes to prison for life, wrongly accused of killing Janice. Barry dies, leaving John without a father. Hank and Cristobal are dead. Fuches gets to live on. Sally is still a neurotic, narcissistic cunt who somehow cared about telling Barry to "turn yourself in, since Gene is about to go to prison for murder", but then conveniently forgets everything five minutes later when she lets Gene go to prison for murder rather than testifying on his behalf in court. And they ended the whole show with more of Sally's narcissism, seeing her become a narcissistic drama teacher who can't even reply with "I love you" back to HER own son after her show ended. Four seasons led up to that shitty ending...
The whole season was just constant misery, illogical jumps and bad writing. Characters constantly went against their own internal logic and personalities just to suit the story, and every character kept flip-flopping between high and low IQ to suit each scene. It was so badly written.
Jesus what a shit show (literally). The only good parts of Season 4 were the 3 or so episodes until Cristobal died for no reason, and the final "Hollywood movie" version of events (pretty funny parody of Hollywood's "based on a true story"). But overall, it was an extremely badly written and completely pointless season.
Barry ended on Season 3. That's it. The rest was just some wannabe writer hippie hallucinating that they were some artsy Ingmar Bergman.
Barry Seasons 1-3 were pretty much 10/10 masterpieces of clever writing, and already had a perfect ending. It's pretty ironic that Season 4 makes fun of Hollywood, when it was Hollywood's typical greed that led to the making of the totally unnecessary and painfully bad Season 4. Like so many ruined shows before it, Hollywood doesn't know when to stop and let a good thing rest.
Exactly. I saw interviews and shit for the fourth season, and all I heard was how they were so proud of it, and how they took a brave dark turn for the show. About how bill hader did an amazing job directing it. And shit. What a fucking joke.
He did that because he was deflecting his guilt onto Fuches. Even after he admitted to having Cristobal killed, he wanted to continue to hide from that reality. I would assume not all of his guys were in that room and that he wanted to continue to idolize Cristobal as though he had been murdered by some rival gang.
The reality was, Hank had to get Cristobal killed because he knew too much and wanted to leave him. Fuches knew this to be true, and mentioned it at the dinner. Hank, who did not want to admit that he had Cristobal killed, decided to call off their initial deal because he was mad that he got called out.
The new deal made up by Fuches to make peace with Hank was that he wanted Hank to admit that he had Cristobal killed and that it was not rivals. Hank, still refusing to admit this, called off the deal to make peace, causing that huge gunfight scene, and finally the death of Hank.
Yes, the almost cut to black in the Sopranos.
And in Breaking Bad, the final last look between Walt and Jesse. And when Walter dove onto Jesse. Protecting him from the spray of bullets. Fuches and John.
>fused at that sequence. Which I shouldn't be as it's the crux of them getting kidnap
I caught that too and laughed to myself. I heard that boston/massachusetts accent. (Second one in the show, after Albert's accent)
Yeah, dunno why they even made it a point to mention that he had a different phone number. Had they just left out that little detail it would have made more sense.
I can’t remember my address from 5 years ago, I can’t remember my friends address from 2 years ago and I damn sure can’t remember anyone else’s address from 8 years ago.
It wasn't because he was directing. I would assume he did it this way because he wanted to get to that ending and to do that, he needed to wrap up the other characters. The other thing to point out is that Barry's arc kind of finished around the season 3 finale/mid season 4. The character didn't grow much between the season 3 finale where Albert confronted him and the end of the show and he really didn't have to given that he had a pretty satisfying arc.
He directed a lot of other episodes, most famously the "ronny/lily" episode where its almost nothing else but Barry and Fuches for the entire episode.
This season is 8 episodes long and they run about 30 minutes... has probably the least dialogue of all the seasons, Bill Hader was the guy they brought on to south park to help them write episodes, roughly the same length, and produce them weekly, those were actually funny too, and I am sorry but makes no sense.
I hated it. Hated it. It was joyless, unjust and uncomfortable. It doesn't matter to me how well written a show is, if it twists itself backwards to make you hate characters you were rooting for it doesn't make me think the shows deep... it makes me stop caring.
What happened with Gene was just tragic and forced. Why forced? Gene going out of his way to make himself a hero to such cartoonish levels felt really odd, like a part of his personality got amplified to ludicrous degrees. When the final episode comes around you see it as the dumb payoff that felt so pointless and bleak.
And don't get me started on Jim. His ability to just kidnap and brainwash people at will was the closest the show got to remembering it was a comedy. This jerk ruined a guys life, the journalist, and he never faced any consequences or justice for his actions... him having the police in his back pocket and being the one to pin it on Gene was just the final spit in the face for me.
Every single thing you said, yes. Joyless and uncomfortable is how it felt from start to finish. I have no doubt that the cast and crew put effort into it (as a writer myself, i get that). But unfortunately I’d just stopped caring. The show just ground me down. Joyless is the word.
I disagree, Gene's character is totally in line for this.
Ironically, he didn't have to go that route. As Barry's final words before Wow was, "He was willing to turn himself in." Whether or not Gene heard it was left unknown.
In season 3, I forget which episode no one forces Gene to kill Barry, but that's what was going to happen exactly, but the same Rip Torn gun fell apart and rolled under a table. So this isn't out of no where, or rushed. Also, think of the other time the same gun shows up prior to killing Barry. It was when Barry was set up by Gene to go to jail. I guess you're missing the irony of so many of the plots/ stories. Gene takes the money, and it makes him look suspicious. Gene flip-flops instead of being steadfast consistently on Janice's side. Jim noticed it.
Barry intended on the money for another reason. Barry takes the same gun from Gene and gets arrested. On and on. Not to mention the other Rip Torn gun references made via Gene telling Barry he was going to get it to kill himself because he lost Janice.
It is sad for Gene the way it turns out. But it's fitting in the conclusion. I have read others mentioning why Sally chose not to intervene on Gene's behalf. I take it she doesn't feel responsible to as Gene never took Sally's safety as a priority. I am not saying it's right. I am just noting it makes sense storywise.
What I'm saying is out of character is Gene's need to spin the events surrounding Barry and his beloved GF to such a cartoonish degree. He was just given his second chance, he had popularity again and he was being rewarded for being graceful and humble with people he wronged in the past. He's also terrified of Jim. It was a huge shift for him and very clumsy for him to forget all this for more fame putting his life and reputation on the line.
Let's see, Gene professed to love Janice and wanted integrity kept towards the investigation. This was never accomplished. Gene was the source of 99% of the leaks. Gene inconsistently flip-flops so when he's not honoring Janice's memory or defending or setting up Barry. Gene is taking money, playing a one man show for a reporter Gene sought out himself. Entertaining offers for movie deals. Fleeing the country after shooting his son accidentally.
Yea not suspicious behavior.
I thought you were arguing in favor of my points until I realized you're arguing Gene's motives are fine earlier. But yea, that's my point, you write down everything he does and it looks really sloppy and inconsistent in Season 4.
It looks sloppy and inconsistent because Gene is a sloppy and inconsistent character, by design. He's an established narcissist who cannot get out of his own way and is self-defeating. Like Fuches, like Hank, like Sally.
The difference is that Fuches and Sally take responsibility for their past actions (to varying degrees). And as a result, are somewhat redeemed. Gene says he's a reformed man, but immediately crumbles the first time his dignitity and morality is tested via the agent.
I just finished it. And you......-YOU- are preaching my SOUL right now. It was so forced and the drastic personality flops and toxicity amplifications they gave characters was so obviously forced to push the show in an absolutely unnecessary direction that it was painful. I loved this show and this ending just puts it right up there with "The Strain" for me.
I didnt like the ending because I wanted Barry to pay for what he did.
But it makes complete sense inside the world of the show, for the viewers is depressing as fuck.
You don't think getting shot twice and the final shot blows out the back of his head out is any punishment? We clearly see Barry preferred to be with his family. He was willing to give it up and suffer death, prison, and separation from his family. So Barry died, and the silver lining was a story told differently, which is clearly for a positive purpose. We are supposed to gather that John isn't going to go dark or be manipulated by someone with bad intentions. John was even protected from Sally, not developing any alcohol addiction. We are shown this as a positive conclusion. No matter what opinion you have of Barry, there is no denying Barry's son did not have to follow. Yes, it's sad Sally didn't say she loved John too but that's how John will immortalize Barry and maybe Sally knows this. The ending had meaning.
What is the reading on the kid watching the movie about Barry?
Seems like some people in here are thinking that he believes that false narrative but it seems to me that he’s really upset about watching it because he knows that his father was not hero of the story.
This time skip gave me the feeling of watching the ending of "The Graduate", where they realize their mistakes.
It was hard to let go the fun dynamic of juggling act, and turn into this depression. But it felt very fitting. There cannot be a happy ending for a guy like Barry. This is at times a very unique and original show, amidst the seas of regurgitated formulaic tv trash. I loved every minute of it, even the hard parts.
The show will not be remembered for its ending and possibly not even for this last season. The first two seasons were so goddamn good that they carried the weight of the last two seasons
Idk wtf happened bro. Like this season was alright *I guess*, but that third season…I was like, am I watching a different show??
I actually felt relief when they said 4 was going to be the last one, that’s how much I disliked 3.
I think it's interesting how the time jump makes everything so similar to Dexter, or really a lot of shows now where they're bringing them back after an actual time jump to 'end it properly.'
And that really highlights the problem for me. I don't feel like we got an ending for the characters from the first 3.5 seasons, we just got an ending for who they were after the time jump. And I never even liked any of those characters...
That's a great point. There's so much we don't know about post timeskip Barry. We don't know about his relationship with Sally, his son, how he lives, how he acts day to day. We had so much time to get to know Barry in the first 3 seasons, yet barely an episode to see how he adjusted after all those years.
I know that different people will feel different ways, but I'm surprised at how many takes there are from people that obviously don't see the show through the lens of absurdity.
That was the show for 3 seasons and it worked great. Season 4, however, and especially the later half were so overly serious it killed a lot of the comedic potential of some scenes. It turned from an absurdist dark comedy to a drama with the occasional conedic moment.
I’m torn on this finale as an episode, but I really liked it as an ending to the story. It seemed fitting. My instinct right after was I didn’t like it as an episode, but I’ll have to rewatch the series/season to see how I feel
The ending was disappointing because the plot leading up to it was contrived and not believable.
1. Barry on the run does not even grow a beard in 8 years. He doesn't even wear a disguise taking a plane to ca.
2. He loves his son. He even tells him he loves him unlike sally. Yet he leavesvhis son with an alcoholic to protect him with a dis- assembled gun to boot.
3. Barry wants to stop a single movie to be made...even though a mass muderer at large with a TV star would have been a media feeding frenzy with books and TV shows and dozens of people getting their 15 min of fame. With Barry's current mugshot for all to see. Which brings us back to why no disguise.
4.moss poorly tying Barry before leaving for hours
5. Barry passing out and conveniently waking for a personal phone call.
6. The reason gene came out of hiding....totally contrived. There had to be TV movies and murder mystery reenactments multiple times. Over 8 years. And police who interviewed gene have already given his side of the story. So both gene and Barry come out of hiding for a very thin reason.. one risking being killed along with son and grandson...and the other risking getting caught...
WHY
7. There are still people out there to help cousineau not be convicted. Like the fbi guy that knew Barry Killied their common friend and spared Barry's life in a field. Sally is so cold hearted that she would let gene rot in prison? She urged him to turn himself in to save gene.Wasn't there a woman who poisoned Barry. Or the mom with the kid who got shot by mistake.
You are looking at this show far too seriously. Do you watch sci movies and expect realism as well? This show was very obviously from the beginning not a super serious and realistic series.
1. He wears glasses and dresses like a dad, basically full Clark Kent disguise
2 Barry and everyone on the show are basically shitty people, Sally, Barry, Jean are awful narcissists the entire time and blind themselves to negative situations or comments like when Sally was trying to get Barry to turn himself in, which was only because it would have benefitted her.
3. Kind of just a repeat of 1 and 2, but Jean went dark for 8 years and he's the only one with testimony that matters towards a movie.
4. It's a not so serious tv show with obvious plot holes and b.s. scenarios
5. See 4
6. See 3 and 4
7. " "
>You are looking at this show far too seriously. Do you watch sci movies and expect realism as well? This show was very obviously from the beginning not a super serious and realistic series.
The most trash part of online discourse about fiction is when someone pulls this card for legitimate criticism.
Barry didn’t have holes like that. And then it did. That’s a drop in quality, not “it’s a wacky tv show man, what do you expect???”
Bad writing can always be explained away with.." no one takes this seriously..especially the writers"
Meanwhile Hader made this show take a turn toward realism as he said to show the reality of a killer".
You can't turn to dark reality and then say it's a bs so the writing does not have to ring true.
And yes everyone gets the Clark reference and the use of glasses. Very cute
Still doesn't explain why he wouldn't want his son to play baseball as that can lead to him being out in the public more...yet he dosent lift a finger to disguise hjmself....or even buy a temp disguise for emergencies like going to LA to kill someone.
It all can be explained away as the writers didn't take anything seriously so nothing needs to make sense or be grounded in reality.
I guess that can be said for any TV show.
There is no such thing as bad writing...just unrealistic expectations that the writing makes sense.
There is such a thing as hyper criticism. How many successful shows have you written, directed or acted in?
It's a decent plot for a funny and dark tv show and it has provided much entertainment. Picking it apart with hyper criticism at every corner over minor issues serves to do what exactly?
Suspension of disbelief in moderate doses isn't a bad thing
Yes that's the ticket. Whenever poor writing occurs..it's "hyper critisjsm" to point it out.
For 3 seasons they spent building characters.
And in t h e 4th season its as if halfway through they came up with an ending and then had to shoehorn all the characters into arriving at the final episode. Even if the shoes hardly fit.
But for those "look the other way in life" folks....."hyper criticism" is a great denial. A great deflector. A great excuse...for lazy writing
Nothing wrong with that.
What? You have comments on a politician I like....how many elections have you won.
I agree...attacking the debater personally rather than using cogent debate points shows you are out of gas
I'm sure they would be happy to rewrite and shoot it to your standards if you feel like providing the funding for a new season four, five, six however many you want to pay for.
They decided to end it with 4 seasons and tied up the story pretty well I think with the time and constraints they had in the real world.
They were writing season 4 during the covid break of season 3 shooting. They had plenty of time to craft a final season that made sense.
There was no rushed deadline. No one said only 8 episodes were allowed or that all episodes had to be around 30 - 35 min.
Excuses excuses excuses.
Maybe a writers dog ate the scripts
I think 1), 3) and 5) can be answer by the fact despite the series being about them *within* the universe they exist, they aren't really considered important. The may appear on random podcasts, but really most of what Barry has done is random acts of gang violence and domestic assassinations. The only people who care are the police, the cast and the victims. Otherwise it just appears on the news for 5 minutes and then gets forgotten about.
A Hollywood blockbuster is different and certainly to the cast, who have no sense of proportion.
For 2) Barry has sociopathic and narcissistic, he loves his son as a form of supply. He supplies this perfect ideal while his son believes and that validates Barry. If you look at the damage he does to his son, keeping him away from other children, scarring him about baseball, buying books instead of blankets, you'll see it's not love, it's the actors desire for the perfect audience, which he gets, even after death.
As for 7) the FBI guy and Sally still love Barry. Barry saved both their lives, and the memory of him matters more than Gene. Sally also realises when she gets to Gene's position as a coach teaching his methods, he was also abusive in his own way.
People are more complex than you are making out.
If Sally tries to get Gene out of death after Barry's death, who else takes the blame?
She also loved/loves Barry despite his abuse and Gene killed him. That's why she's not dating anyone.
His escape involved the death of a half dozen fed agents and he has to be a person of interest. That is sensationalist stuff add a TV personality and you have a media feeding frenzy. Add to it a missing cousineau.and it's one ho u r talk show material. 20/20. Docudramas. Continual news stories of "Barry sightings".
A dead detective massive fed death TV actress missing acting coach prison breakout... no..the movie will not be the first in 8 years to cover this extensively.
And Barry is first irked now? More people have seen all the TV specials and murder mystery shows and nade for TV movies than will see the Hollywood movie.
Genes side is already out there through detectives that interviewed him
I have two takes on the finale and series. the first take is intellectual and heady, and a critique on the nature of acting and the business of Hollywood, the craft of storytelling and moviemaking using techniques such as foreshadowing, Chekov's guns, and other things that distance the final product from the reality.
The 2nd take is that this show started moving away from it's original lighter, funnier, zanier tone of it's characters and into a pseudo-BetterCall Saul type tone. Which didn't really work. And the finale went in that direction instead of the funnier one.
Every character in the show was a bad person. A selfish narcissist who was telling a tale about Hollywood from their selfish actions.
It wasn't a great finale as you can see by the comments here alone. I didn't think it was great. It wasn't even the best episode of the season (Wizard). So alas, another show is tossed onto the heap of entertainment content now. oh well, moving on.
Yeah, I personally did not like the tone shift. I said in another post that the finale tried way too hard to be like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos (which I loved those shows, but I also loved Barry for not being those shows if that makes sense). I really missed the absurd, zany, and ridiculous tone of Seasons 1&2.
The penultimate episode definitely felt like it was trying to carry the comedic load before the finale went serious. Between the mercenaries and their deaths, the F&F movie discussion, and Hank's attempt to blow up the compound, it was like the writers were trying to get out all the humor before they went dark and serious for the finale.
Seems like the theme was denial. Fuchs survived in the end because he realized who he really was, while Barry, Hank and Gene all paid the price.
It's also really humorous to see people say Barry was redeemed. The show was obviously making fun of religious aggrandizement and how naive many people are who are nonsecular.
Never watched a movie take such a turn in tone. What a ride. Ending felt good and bad at the same time imo. Liked all seasons, but I think I prefer the "lighter" first two seasons.
I dont like how Hank was a consistently loveing and funny character and they changed him in just a few episodes seemingly just to make his death easier to take.
i agree, i think it's that they needed some final confrontation for the side characters in the last episode to reach the climax, so they came up with this...
What I don't get is Gene mentioning his # changed when he was out of the country all those years. Yet Sally knew who to call when she got to LA. Just saying
I had the same thought - they very obviously made a point of mentioning his changed number so surely it can’t just be a plot hole. I heard they did this to show that Gene actually never changed his number, but he wanted his son to think he did so he didn’t look like he’d been ignoring his calls all these years.
i think you're right
That definitely stood out to me as well.
Finally got around to watching this season. It didn't have the same tone as the previous 3. Tbh, I wish it ended with season 3. I think I liked that ending better. The scene before Barry escapes prison was one of the few moments where I thought the season felt like Barry, and was the highlight of the season for me.
The last fake movie scene was hilarious. Loved the ending, this show is GOATED. Another must watch hbo classic. I just love how real the show feels, so many weird stuff and people happening in different scenes. That off-feeling. hard to see it in different shows.
I really enjoyed it. By dying to Gene, Barry got what he really wanted: to be seen as a hero and a good person.
I just don't agree with how Barry got killed and how fast and almost skipped over so quickly. I low-key loved the 8 year-time skip to where they were all different people I loved Fuches character. Loved the show regardless, Season 4 was darker and more serious.
Show went downhill fast
Anyone else getting Better call Saul Vibes from this season The calmness yet violent scenes The symbolic imagery The time skip
I was surprised to come here and read the S4 hate, I don't see how the show could end any other way. If it had a happy ending people would have said the show pussied out. The show was part comedy but always based in realism, and there's just no way that his character could have kept avoiding all the heat (and shame) from the mountain of murders he had committed. If he wasn't killed he would have killed himself eventually.
[удалено]
Check out a thread of self selected zealots fawning over lackluster television? No thanks.
Damn bro barry really got you worked up lol.
People are not disappointed because the show doesn't have a happy ending, it's just that season 4 is all over the place and not funny at any point. I mean, surely you'd agree at the very least that this story could have been concluded much better than it was. I'm all for sad endings, as long as the writing is good
I thought the ending was great. The season itself was a bit all over the place, but to me the ending is almost perfect. Barry never gets to actually be the hero he wants to be, Gene’s constant need for the spotlight and attention dooms him, Noho Hank’s inability to ever do anything hard ends him, Sally finally figured out how to be a normal person.
Wow am I the only one who thought this season was beautiful
It moved me honestly. What an amazing series.. so many layers. Never has a show made me feel so many different emotions.. One of my favorite of all time. GREAT characters.. amazing acting.
I’m just going to go with my initial thought(s) when the first post-time jump episode started and I kept thinking…is this real? Some sorta dream? Purgatory? None of that really happened, it was all just a dream, Barry’s in jail, asleep…imagining life on a farm with a kid and Abraham Lincoln.
Oh damn this is one of those times when I like something and come on Reddit just to see everyone shitting on it. Happens from time to time. But for the record I loved season 4, loved the ending.
What a complete waste of a season 4. It's just like House of Cards where everyone says to skip the last season. I'd suggest the same to Barry to anyone new watching. I binged this show in little under a week. Had a FANTASTIC watching experience for season 1-2, and 3 I felt it was turning different, but still good. Season 4? I want my time back. Garbage writing and garbage fucking ending. It's like season 4 was written by a completely different group and thought this was a different show. All the humor, funny bits all went out the window and it turned into a dark grit of a cluster fuck. Dragged out nonsense and characters that had fantastic s1-2 just completely dragged through the mud and beaten with a stick in s4 by shit writing and direction. Maybe S4 sucked so much due to Bill Hader directing it and writing it. EDIT: oh and sally? whoever wrote her character should never hold a job of writing again. "You need to turn yourself in, Gene could go to jail"... Uhh, bitch you murdered a dude and Barry covered for you. Then went to a cop and pussy'd out. Pot calling the kettle black. So many dam plot holes in this season 4 you'd need 100 ashpalt trucks to fill it in.
"murdered a dude?" She was literally an attempted murder and she defended herself. What? yeah sally is a dog shit character but she never murdered anyone lol.
Found the sexist!
yeah i feel like they tried way too hard to make it subversive and deep, to the detriment of the show
What is up with everyone saying that Sally murdered a dude, is this just parroting? If you watched the full scene she is being brutally assaulted and almost murdered by a full psychopath way bigger and stronger than her. She barely makes a stab in time. Then she has to see him walk around, looking like an immortal monster trying to figure out what's going on. If it missed crucial brain matter as it appears, he could easily turn and come get her or at least she might think that. They specifically show Barry passed out over and over, to stress that it is up to her, and she has to fight for her life. She manages to defeat him with a bat, and he is still kicking for a while on the way down but she's brave and channels her emotion. Just because she blames herself for channeling emotion into her self-defense and the concept that someone died, doesn't make her a murderer. The only tragedy with that outcome is the shame and self-blame. Barry was too messed up to help her contextualize and understand, and she lacked support she desperately needed. As Barry said, (if you want someone to blame), "He did this", because.. you know, all these psychos after him after he made tons of enemies as a hit man, didn't tell anyone, and now innocent people are having to witness traumatic events or fight for their fucking life.
Gene killed Barry because he liked the attention he got from the negative press. If Barry cleared his name then all of the attention would go back to Barry. The narcissist in him couldn't let that happen. He would rather be a famous villain than a nobody.
Huh, I like this explanation
S3 sucked for the most part, & S4 sucked entirely. S1 S2 were so damn good. Such a shame.
If Barry had ended at season 3 it would have been a perfect show. This entire season felt unnecessary and unsatisfying.
I was initially mad when I heard there was a season 4. The end of 3 seemed solid. I was not happy how 4 started, but DAMN that was a great series ending. The last few episodes of 4 were brilliant.
Strongly disagree, season 4 was very good imo. Wrapped up stuff pretty well, and not in a cheesy "everything ended well" kinda way.
Strongly disagree
tell me that you don't understand good satirical writing without telling me you don't understand good satirical writing
I feel sorry for anybody who doesn’t like S4
Freaking bleak but I loved it. I feel like Barry was going to have a hard ending no matter what. Thank you Bill Hader for making my anxiety go through the roof and keeping me glued to my screen till the very end. Also Hausu is amazing.
The tone shift from last season to this season was horrific. They could have kept up the humor and the tone and ended it with Barry losing everything and having a flat humor end.
I guess I misinterpreted what happened with Hank and Christobal before. I thought the gang killed Christobal against Hank’s will, basically “the gang” did it because he couldn’t leave. That doesn’t mean Hank was guilty/caused it. So I was very confused for much of the confrontations with Fuches. Overall I didn’t like the ending at all. Not for any character. The whole tone also has nothin to do with the Barry show as a whole.
Nah you hit it right on the head. Hank was basically forced to choose between his "rainbow gang" or the Chechens. The Chenchens gave him an ultimatum, us or them. They allowed Christobal in as long as he played ball and was with Hank. Fuchs more or less wanted Hank to admit he got his lover killed or at least was apart of it, which he wasn't really HUGE shift in tone for the last season especially with eps 4 and eps 5. So so season, great finale epilogue.
Oh, I didn't know that it wasn't against Hank's will! Where'd you get that?
Hank definitely didn’t want him to die but he still willingly made every decision that directly led to Cristobal’s death. He didn’t pull the trigger but he killed Cristobal’s dream and friends, knowing they would kill Cristobal if he wanted to leave.
This season makes me feel like the writers' strike has been going on much longer than we're being told. xD
Uhh I kinda thought it sucked...like really bad. Downvote all you want but like so many things were just so unrealistic and the movie at the end of the episode seemed like it was a joke but clearly it wasn't.
with the unrealistic part imma only say... that's what this show is about, it doesn't take itself too seriously, it literally had an episode with a kid that was climbing the trees and bit people
Ya but that wasn't integral to the story
there were some integral parts too, from Barry's plot armor to Hank's plotline which consisted of some ridiculous moments, but were kinda in tone with the show
I didn't like a lot of it, but the epilogue and his son smiling at the memory of barry was excellent in my opinion. Turned the whole episode from "meh" to "great"
Ya but I didn’t like how the truth didn’t resolve. I also thought it was so unrealistic how the cops thought it was Gene and had no evidence against him
The whole point is that Hollywood loves to lie as long as it makes a good story.
It’s not Hollywood that did that though, it was the police
Oh yes, the immediate switch to gene as a suspect felt very unnatural
I wish at least one person had a happy ending, but it was still a great ending to a great show.
I think that was about the happiest ending most of the characters deserved. Barry did what he could to redeem himself in his last moments. He got remembered as a hero that was taken advantage of which was never the case and is much better than he deserved. Sally was able to get John and herself away from Barry. She still has no career in Hollywood but she’s back to being a self-absorbed actor. Fuches somehow got redeemed despite being the most consistently antagonistic characters on the show. He got to make things right with Barry and walked away as the person most unscathed from the showdown with Hank. The only person to get a truly bad ending was Cousineau and it was entirely consistent with his character and self-inflicted. One could also make an argument for Hank but I really couldn’t see any other way for things to end for him,nor did he deserve a better ending.
As much as I had hoped that all these characters I love get a good ending I think you are spot on
Sally and their son seemed like they were good. I mean, there will be obvious trauma for both of them, but they seemed to be in a good enough place.
I think this was a brilliant, heartfelt, and complicated ending. It was aiming to be a realistic portrayal of how we feel about ourselves. And the lengths of denial we go to because of the shame we carry. But how that denial will ultimately be our demise. I think the scene between Fuches and Hank was the synopsis. The synopsis was that the road to redemption or even recovery requires you to deal with the complexity of who you are. The good and the bad. All of it. Look at each characters story. **Fuches:** He survives that encounter. Why? Because in his speech he saw the great lengths to which he lied both to himself and others. And prison finally made him come to terms with his past. And in his self acceptance he could move on. He had to face the harshest truths about himself and survived. **Hank:** No Ho Hank knew what Fuches said about him was true. But the feeling of shame was far more than he could handle. He couldn't come to terms with his past so he dug his heels and died. The out was right there for him, but he couldn't face his truth. **Jim Moss:** Janice's father never got the justice he was looking for. He was willing to torture Barry. And I remember thinking in the scene where he's trying to determine the most painful weapon, I was sad. Sad that he couldn't get over the murder, sad that his anger got the best of him. And I kept wondering would Janice have wanted to see her father like that? He didn't face his shame head on and he never got his catharsis. **Gene:** He was a bad father over and over and over again. In his quest to be loved and validated, he would have changed his story about Janice. He ends up killing Barry and his story ends in a bad place. Why? Cause he like Hank could never accept his own truth. He was a bad father and he was a narcissist. But you need to accept yourself, the good with the bad, so you can heal and be redeemed. He never did. **Sally:** Sally gets partial redemption. Because when she and John where kidnapped, she realized she was the bad person. She had lied to herself earlier in the seasons about her relationship with her ex and how it ended. She had kept running away over and over again. And right before she and John get kidnapped at Gene's house. I think John asked her what are we going do now? And she's like "Just run away again." Then she disassociates for a second and realizes that the problem metaphorically and literally; she can't keep running away. It won't solve her problems. Unfortunately by the end, she doesn't fully address her problems, she doesn't say I love you to her son. And she was still more worried about her performance. **Barry:** And Barry is the biggest perpetrator of it all. He never could accept the other side of himself. The things he did in the war, the things he did back from the war. He kept running and running and running by murdering and murdering. I think he finally realized at the last minute which was cathartic. But writers had to kill him. Why? Because the ending scene with the fake movie shows how one dimensional good guys and villains are in storytelling. But not Barry the show and not Barry the person. In real life, villains aren't pure evil people. They are people like you and I who keep running away and justifying there actions more and more. But if they face their truths maybe they won't become villains. Beautiful show, beautiful ending.
I agree 100%. I was surprised to come here and read the S4 hate, I don't see how the show could end any other way. If it had a happy ending people would have said the show pussied out. The show was part comedy but always based in realism, and there's just no way that his character could have kept avoiding all the heat (and shame) from the mountain of murders he had committed. If he wasn't killed he would have killed himself eventually.
Probably the best written analysis I’ve read on the finale so far. This is after reading and watching multiple articles and videos from Bill Hader and the creative team. Cheers
Thank you for the kind words!
The fake movie at the end as well is just going to continue the cycle of denial. The smirk from John after watching it make me think this is going to be his new reality for his past despite actually being there for some of it and knowing what happened. The whole show has always just been about actors acting tricking themselves into thinking they're okay and nothings their fault
One of the few people who fundamentally understood what the show was about. Cheers.
>And I remember thinking in the scene where he's trying to determine the most painful weapon, I was sad. I thought he was just making noises with different weapons as part of the psychological torture. I got the sense that despite being a big, mean dude with a deep voice, he actually doesn't do any physical violence (unless I'm forgetting something), and is simply a master of psychological manipulation.
It could be! I still think regardless of it being physical violence or not, he gave into his anger. That's why he followed a trail that didn't exist. And went after Gene. He never faced his grief and it consumed him.
For sure. Your post was great and helped me interpret some things in the finale. I think you're spot on with your interpretations.
Great analysis 👍 I do also think Bill Hader loves trolling us as well lol.
I binged watched the entire show over the last week or so. Great finale and just show in general. I don't mind that some of the pieces of the ending were left vague. There is one issue though that kind of bothers me. In the finale of season 3, Albert figured out the entire story after Fuches told him that Berry killed Jason. He knew that Berry was a contract killer and it wouldn't have been a leap for him to figure out that he killed Janice as well. Did he just fuck off when Cousineau was accused of murder? It felt a little strange that his character was never addressed. Regardless of what happened, Cousineau was going to go down for Berry's murder, but a good lawyer could have argued it down to manslaughter or self defense given how dangerous Berry was. I suppose it works regardless but it felt like a plot hole for sure given how important Albert was in the finale of the 3rd season.
Valid points but your post made me want to eat berries
yeah good o' speech to text. Apparently doesn't like the name Barry....
Yeah, why did Albert just disappear?
Yeah, I expected him to pop up again, but with how things turned up, what could he even do? "I caught Barry burrying a body but I let him go because he pinky-swore he wouldn't kill again" might not look best in court.
this is true. I would imagine he could just lead investigators to the body and attempt to shed light on Barry's true self via some other means. I would assume that Fuches either dropped off the map after the end of the finale or eventually got caught; especially if he continued to be "the raven". Maybe there is a world where Albert used him to illuminate Berry's crimes.
Every season just got more and more surreal, loved it! Stuck to its core themes and kept the satire the show has always had since the start. Gonna miss this so bad...
I thought it was funny, too. His voice is easily recognizable.
There was same absolutely incredible feats in directing, writing and acting this season. Even though it felt a lot more surreal and esoteric in nature, it still had that dark relentless storytelling that you can't help but watch in horror. They made me fall in love with a show that has absolutely no redeemable characters. And that final shot of Hank on Cristobal's statue was absolutely heartbreaking. I started this show as a "why not" three days ago, and now that it's over I'm left gutted. Bill Hader and team deserve every ounce of praise they're going to get. He's a master class at storytelling and I'll watch whatever he does. 9.2/10
I watched most of the first season a little while back and had no idea the finale just happened. I just finished it maybe 10 minutes ago and was a great watch.
1st-3rd season were a feast but this one? Like biting into a pastry filled with toothpaste.
I agree. I just started watching Barry for the first time 2 weeks ago. My whole family has been binge watching. It is like night and day from season 1 and 2 to season 4. Season 4 has no identify. It's just a complete mess that went away with everything that made it successful. I'm sorry I like Bill Hader but the writers really dropped the ball with this final season.
I'm really hoping they come out with a new show called Fuches or The Raven, and find a satisfying ending. But to not have a satisfying ending is a choice, and I feel like they deliberately wanted people to feel unsatisfied watching Sally being this more broken person than she started off as, and John not knowing the truth of his dad.
There were a lot of contrivances in this season that I felt were silly and pulled me out of the story, but frankly, I feel like that's been going on this entire show? Some examples off the top of my head: The investigator from S1 finding out Barry is the killer through his Facebook mutual friends, Fuches not killing Gene in the S2 finale after that cliffhanger with the gun to his head (I think Vince Gilligan would refer to that as "schmuck bait"), Gene weirdly only remembering that Fuches whispered Barry's name in his ear at the very end of the S2 finale. So things like Janice's dad leaving Barry alone and poorly tied, or everyone turning on Gene over the course of an episode-- they were kind of annoying for me, but also par for the course as far as characters on this show acting selectively stupid (or selectively smart) in order to move the plot forward. This season was definitely a departure from the previous seasons, but this show is full of big swings and experiments-- that's part of what has kept me coming back even when it didn't always feel like there was consistent internal logic.
I don't think it was par for the course, but Janice's dad should have and would have gotten Barry to give a confession about Gene. His character may see connections and come up with possible alternatives but he jumped to a conclusion without much evidence. Instead of going after Gene he should have stuck with Barry to get a better picture of what happened instead of filling in the blanks and baiting Gene. All of this on top of tying Barry up better. There's also the masked guy and truck that hit the house that never got explained, some people provide a pretty good explanation of it being in Sally's mind, but still if I hadn't read it I would have never seen the connection.
I know this post is old but I just finished the show and was looking online to see what other people thought so this part; >There's also the masked guy and truck that hit the house that never got explained, some people provide a pretty good explanation of it being in Sally's mind, but still if I hadn't read it I would have never seen the connection. Is still pretty fresh in my mind. When the door slams behind Sally and the masked guy suddenly disappears you hear the masked guy say all the things that the person she stabbed in the face say. "Wha'd ya do to my eye ya bitch!" Etc. It's a visual metaphor for the memory of what happened constantly haunting her. Always just behind her, always looming in the back of her mind. The truck that hit her house was the redneck who she chokes in the bathroom and then pins him for stealing money from the till and gets him fired. He rams his truck into her house as revenge.
I agree with Gene only remembering Fugues telling him Barry did this. I was wondering why Gene didn't say anything or remember it sooner. I do recall Gene just staring down at the floor at the police station, looking at a piece of broken tile. Very convenient. But I do believe Moss had a number of reasons to suspect Gene. One is how Barry actually was at Jim's house to step into Gene's place to kill Jim. This allows Jim to believe Gene's has control over Barry. Not to forget, Gene shot Barry and killed him. So even if Jim, Sally, or even Fugues were to step up on Gene's behalf, it would not change Gene's sentence. Any statement that they may provide is solely hearsay. The evidence Janice's partner had was enough to convict Barry, but it was destroyed or taken by Barry.
This season had some great directing and some good individual episodes but man that was not a compelling compelling or cohesive season overall. The time jump was interesting but it really felt like it came from the writers writing themselves into a corner and having no idea how to get out. The way Gene so quickly changed his tune when learning Daniel Day Lewis was interested felt out of character for him as he’s always been shown to actually care about Janice but maybe I’m wrong. The whole thing with the FBI turning on Gene and blaming him just didn’t feel real. Yea they Barry gave him money but that’s literally it? There’s no proof anywhere just speculation which isn’t how the law works.
It was completely in character. He's a massive narcissist who always resented that he didn't have the career he felt he deserved, due to how he treated people. Hearing that DDL is coming out of retirement to play him would be the biggest ego trip ever.
Then why wouldn’t he have been like that in the beginning when the movie was announced? He was given the opportunity to be involved, he could’ve even tried to play himself, but instead he just wanted to shut it down.
It was fake…DDL was never playing him. It was a sting from the FBI (the guy was an actor, mentioned he was in Gene’s class in 2004).
Obviously. But if fame, being in the industry, and meeting stars was what he wanted then he would’ve been excited about the movie. An actor he loves was all that made him change his mind? Just inconsistent and annoying
I don’t find that inconsistent at all. Before then it was just some faceless concept that could have just been some cheap garbage movie (which we see at the end is what it was). But having arguably the greatest actor of all time come out of retirement to play you was just too big of an ego trip. And that’s the whole point of Gene, he’s ego always overcomes his morals at the end of the day. It derailed his initial acting career, it’s why he takes money from the guy who murdered the love of his life, it’s why he wants to take Daniel day-Lewis call.
I thought we would assume Leo's input to Gene's ego may play a part in that offer. Meaning I don't believe it was any true agent representing Daniel Day Lewis. Contacting Gene the same day, Gene had just stated to Leo that he had a new cell number, or at least new to Leo seems like a clue. Gene has been out of the country for many years. You can argue that Gene had put his new cell phone number as a contact for such agents. But as you stated, there isn't any proof. We only see that Gene gives his number to Leo. So Leo may have known this offer would trigger Gene. Just like the Warner Brothers' offer wasn't appealing to Gene. Because he may have gone with it . And as far as consistency, Gene's middle name could have been inconsistent. I don't have time to go through it, but Gene's behavior flip-flops throughout the series. Not to mention, Daniel Day Lewis is still such a big name and yet no evidence linking Mr. Lewis to any project. As we see, he isn't in The Mask Collector.
DDL was never playing him, it was an FBI sting.
This is the dumbest writing the series, how prey tell did Allison get his number? Divination? Magic? Must be, because the show presents no other logical or reasonable explanation, and there are a dozen things like this.
You are watching another series in another universe. So enjoy.
Who were the people who attacked Sally and John at their home?
100% fake. 1) Doors don’t work like that. She was locked from the inside? 2) The guy is yelling about his eye like the guy she stabbed. 3) The guy talks about the kid not breathing, which he clearly was fine.
I'm pretty sure it's up to interpretation whether or not it's the cook that she had a "moment" with or if she's actually just manic and hallucinating.
Yeah they never answered that, was it all a dream? Was she too drunk and destroyed the house then didn't remember?
This ending sucked ass, I'll elaborate if anyone cares to listen
Share it!!!
By the end of this shit I grew to hate every single character left. Hanks boyfriend died. Hank became a snivelling bitch, he kind of always one, but all the good he was was gone by the end. I haven't liked fuches since like season 2, and him consistently fucking Barry over, and then trying to help him out, and then fucking him over again, I'm just pissed off at this point. I've never liked Sally, I always hated that she was just the love interest, and once joppelin hit she got entitled and bitchy and shit, then the time skip happened and she got bitchy about the whole "I killed a guy" thing, I don't know I fucking hate Sally. We knew the kid, John for like what? 4 episodes max? I don't give a shit about him. Cousineau sucks, I've hated him since he got bitchy with Barry I don't care if he had good reason, he was a slimy bitch who ended up killing him, fuck cousineau. Barry himself has been on a decline since he got poisoned by the wife of the fucker he killed just before the Hamlet whatever the fuck. And since the time skip and him getting into Jesus lore and caring about his son and shit, I've hated him even more. Then he got all "I gotta kill cousineau", "I'm pussying out of killing cousineau cause a kid walked into the house he's in" "I gotta save my kid" he's an afterthought to the plot for the last episode, and he was killed 20 minutes in, leaving 10 of episode I frankly don't care about without him. He's what the show is fucking named after, I want to see him. The fact they Sally was the only one to survive (except cousineau who was presumably in prison) pisses me off, fuck that bitch. I don't care about her fucking teaching career or whatever, I don't care about her son, I don't care about any of that shit. Barry is who I care about, Barry is who the show is named after, Barry is the one driving my interest in the show. If he is not there, I dont care about the show And the movie at the end sucked ass I don't care if it was supposed to be bad, I fucking hated it
The sally hate is hilarious to me. It's like the Skyler hate after breaking bad. It really just shows who the sexists are.
The Skyler hate was collectively pretty sexist, but they did make her character do things to get in the way of Walt, and whether good or bad, was always going to inspire, even non-sexist, hate. The writers for Barry did a much better job at justifying the Sally hate, even though in the grand scheme of things, she wasn't even an evil person, just a more naive version of a delusional narcissist. She does get some growth in the last season, just enough for me not to entirely hate her anymore. And I applaud the writers for not completely redeeming her character completely - people only change in bits and pieces overtime and it would have been unrealistic for her to do a complete 180.
why did you watch 4 seasons? Lol you seem to hate everything about the show
I liked the show, but in my opinion it just got worse as it went on. But I was bored, had no good alternative for entertainment, and felt like I should actually finish something for once as I failed to for the past few shows I've watched (succession, Castlevania, mob psycho 100, and a few others). And after the last season I got pissed off with the show entirely, vowed to never rewatch it, and bitched about it on reddit and YouTube comments. It's been a week, I've cooled down now, but I stand by my assessment of the show. In short: I was bored, felt like I should finish it since I started it, and I seem like I hate everything about it because I overreacted.
really bad take, "skylar bad walt should have lived" lvl take
I think that's kind of the whole point of the show is that these people are all delusional and believe they are "redeemed" by their acting careers but continue to spiral out of control in the real world. They all turn into the things that they hate. Barry says he's not a bad person and becomes one, Sally says she's never going to be in another abusive relationship, gets into one etc. If you don't like it then that's totally understandable, but I hope looking at it through a different lens helps.
go ahead, spill it all out, I'm interested
Honestly I think the entire fourth season was just garbage. I watched seasons 1 through 3 all at once, then stopped and waited until all of season 4 was out to watch it. So I had the season 3 ending sitting in my mind for a while before I started season 4. And after the greatness of season 3, and the ending of season 3 being pretty damn good, I was just consistently disappointed with season 4. It was ok I guess before he fled prison, and there was a time skip. But even then it felt like there was no direction, no drive. Like things were just happening and I had to be happy about it I guess. But after the time skip, was just garbage. I don't care about Sally and Barry just being mediocre parents to this kid I don't care about because I've known him for like 3 episodes. I don't care about Barry researching Lincoln facts. Or Barry bringing bible stories all the time. I don't care about the fact that he goes to LA to try and kill cousineau for something he wasn't going to do (cause he was planning on stopping the movie from happening, at first anyway). I don't care for the fact that Sally is grappling with the murder she committed or whatever. Or the fact she went back to LA because of a weird attack that happened (which I'm like half sure was imagined or something, cause shouldn't the kid have woken up? Or shouldn't the attackers have done anything of value? I'm honestly just kinda confused at that sequence. Which I shouldn't be as it's the crux of them getting kidnapped in the finale, so I should know why that's happening. But maybe I'm just dumb and everyone else understood it, I don't know) By the end of this shit I grew to hate every single character left. Hanks boyfriend died. Hank became a snivelling bitch, he kind of always one, but all the good he was was gone by the end. And all of his character became what he did to his boyfriend. And I don't like when I character is functionally reduced down to "significant other of another person" and that's all he was at the end, with fuches fucking with him causing the death of his boyfriend and all that shit. I haven't liked fuches since like season 2, and him consistently fucking Barry over, and then trying to help him out, and then fucking him over again, I'm just pissed off at this point. And the whole thing with his prison gang, I just found annoying. You just brought up this bullshit for the last few episodes of the entire show. How am I supposed to be invested in this, when it's based on this guy's gang hat I'm only hearing about now? I've never liked Sally, I always hated that she was just the love interest, and once joppelin hit she got entitled and bitchy and shit, then the time skip happened and she got bitchy about the whole "I killed a guy" thing, I don't know I fucking hate Sally. I don't like how she was just a mediocre parent figure to the kid at the end either. We knew the kid, John for like what? 4 episodes max? I don't give a shit about him. And the fact that everything had to do with him at the end, and it even followed him for the last like 10 minutes of the last episode. How am I supposed to care for the final moments of this show (and that's only made worse with the shitty fucking movie at the end, but whatever)? Cousineau sucks, I've hated him since he got bitchy with Barry I don't care if he had good reason, he was a slimy bitch who ended up killing him, fuck cousineau. Barry himself has been on a decline since he got poisoned by the wife of the fucker he killed just before the Hamlet whatever the fuck. And since the time skip and him getting into Jesus lore and caring about his son and shit, I've hated him even more. Then he got all "I gotta kill cousineau", "I'm pussying out of killing cousineau cause a kid walked into the house he's in" "I gotta save my kid" he's an afterthought to the plot for the last episode, and he was killed 20 minutes in, leaving 10 of episode I frankly don't care about without him. He's what the show is fucking named after, I want to see him. The fact they Sally was the only one to survive (except cousineau who was presumably in prison) pisses me off, fuck that bitch. I don't care about her fucking teaching career or whatever, I don't care about her son, I don't care about any of that shit. Barry is who I care about, Barry is who the show is named after, Barry is the one driving my interest in the show. If he is not there, I dont care about the show And the movie at the end sucked ass I don't care if it was supposed to be bad, I fucking hated it
I agree 100% with everything. Seasons 1-3 were a dark comedy with a perfect ending: Barry is finally outwitted by Janice's father, SWAT surrounds the house, and he ends up spending life in prison. Gene is at peace that Barry is finally caught. Janice's father is left standing alone at the end, symbolizing the emptiness of having lost his daughter, while still being relieved that Barry is caught. Barry himself was a complicated character, neither good nor evil, just a lost soul. It was tragic but a fitting ending to his character arc. He finally paid for his sins with life in prison. The end. Beautiful ending to a beautifully written show. Barry Season 1-3 were some of the best writing in television history. Absolutely amazing show. It was super funny, yet realistic, and most characters and actions followed logic and reason. Then they threw this fucking trainwreck abomination of Season 4 at us? 1. Suddenly, Barry is basically braindead and has no ability to figure things out anymore. It's like he's had a lobotomy and wanders around like a zombie. 2. Sally's neuroticism is tuned up to 1000x and she's a miserable fucking cunt who can't even show one shred of love for her own son, and spent all her time drinking, not even able to cook him a fucking meal for ONE fucking day when she had to watch her son. 3. Barry has a weird religious nutjob tone all of a sudden. 4. They spend almost two full episodes wallowing in Sally's misery to paint Barry dirty, and they wasted a bunch of time on a weird "dirty loser love triangle at the diner she worked at". 5. They kill Cristobal and turn funny Hank into a fucking water hose of constant tears. 6. Fuches is no longer a dunce and is now some kind of hardened "man with no heart" crime boss, with a bunch of "immortal" losers he picked up in prison, and everyone goes along with it, playing it completely straight. Hank's crime empire and Chechens lose to a guy who just got out of prison! His gang is basically immortal. 7. They sucked all the humor out of the show and wallowed in misery. "We're so brave and artistic, you thought you were watching a dark comedy but turns out you were watching an artsy Ingmar Bergman misery-drama porn movie instead", amirite? 8. And yes, some of these ideas sound cool on paper, but they were so poorly executed in the show. It also pissed me off how poorly they executed the time jump aka "how the fuck do we move this plot forward after he's in prison?". 1. Barry escapes from prison, somehow getting past all guards and all gated checkpoints and huge walls, but we are never shown any of it, making it totally unbelievable. They clearly had no idea how he did it, so they just handwaved it away. 2. Next, Janice's father is staking out Sally's home, expecting to see Barry there (he's correct), but somehow Barry AND Sally got past him, and they just handwaved that away too. 3. They also handwave the fact that Sally has to wear wigs, while Barry still looks exactly like himself, the national news fugitive cop killer who escaped from prison. 4. And as a sidenote, it was ridiculous that Barry kept buying guns and walking out with them immediately, which is such a delusional view of the world. In reality, you need to complete an FBI background check named "NICS" and then wait several days/weeks for them to clear your identity and eligibility. A random fake ID wouldn't work. It would have to be A VALID PHOTO ID that exists in the FBI's registry. But nah, "forget all of that, because in Barry you can buy guns with instant checkout". Instead of all of this stupidity, it would have been a lot more believable if Barry had simply stashed some "untraceable" guns from his criminal lifestyle, without adding yet another distraction of unbelievability to the plotline. 5. The only believable part of "the timewarp" was that Sally was clearly tired of being in the background all her life (acting career in the dumps) and accepted that she liked the thrill of being on the run with her loving, protective, assassin boyfriend. "You make me feel safe", she said. 6. It really pissed me off how they executed the time jump: We see Barry facing Sally, and he asks her to run away with him. We then immediately see a cut to the same fucking "dream landscape" that Barry always fantasizes in when he dreams about his bromance with Fuches, coming back from the war, etc. You know, the fucking place where we know that Barry is hallucinating and nothing is real? They use that place, and put a completely random house in the middle of that desert, without any roads, without any plants, without any trees (the kid even asks "Wow, is it true that large trees exist, daddy?" at one point). It all looks exactly like a dream sequence. It made me extremely annoyed as I constantly sat there waiting for "the dream sequence" to end and expected a cut back to Sally's face where she realizes "no, running away with you would be a miserable life, I can't do it...". But nope... that wasn't it... instead, the "dream sequence" landscape and its humorless misery droned on and on for two episodes... After the first one, I thought "okay, they devoted one episode to the dream, but now it's surely time to go back to reality?", but nope... after two episodes, I realized it's not a fucking dream, it's actually happening, they actually did this stupid and incredibly unbelievable time jump and simultaneously chose to film it like the dream sequences... It was so out of place. 7. And the son? They LITERALLY say in the show that they ran away 8 years ago (they mention in the show that Gene "disappeared 8 years ago" on the night that he shot his own son by accident, just a day or two after Barry escaped from prison). A kid takes at least 1 year to be born. So he was at most 7 years old. And even if we trust the show's external synopsis of episode 5 which says "roughly ten years after barry's escape", the kid could still be no more than 9 years old then, if they had sex immediately when they ran away together. And "roughly ten years" can of course refer to 8 years as they said in the show, so it's most likely been just 8 years. So the kid is at most 7 years old if we trust the show's own internal words on-screen, and 9 years old if the external synopsis puts things closer to 10 years. But... they got a kid to play him who looks 13 years old (he seems to be 11 years old in real life, but the thing is, that's still too old, because kids physically age extremely fast between "7-9 year old" and "11-12 year old", and the boy they cast looks way too old). That was a very stupid decision and made the show look completely disheveled and disorganized. Like nobody in casting bothered to make the kid look age-appropriate. It took me out of every scene with him and was super distracting, and just added to all the annoyances with the poorly shot "dream sequence time jump". But the most annoying thing of all... was how poorly written the story was... From episode 4 onwards it was very clear that the entire season was following the cheap, shitty, classic Hollywood trope of tearing down a character (Barry) until he's despised by everyone and all the viewers, to make him easy to kill off. They basically stripped away all his redeeming qualities, made him a violent cop killer in prison who loathes people and is proud to be a cop killer and threatens the other cops until he's beaten to near death (which makes him look even more disheleved and easy to hate), and they removed all his love for Sally and made it into some kinda psychosis instead, and made him "torture" his son by forbidding video games, forbidding his son from even playing baseball, etc. It was painfully clear they were doing Barry dirty and turning him into a disgusting shitbag, stripping away all his humanity that had originally made him such a complex character. From episode 4 (the time warp) onwards, I knew it already: They were setting up Barry's death. It was telegraphed a mile away. And extremely shittily written, with a total "character swap" of Barry. Nothing about his change was believable. And then the show ends with more misery: Gene goes to prison for life, wrongly accused of killing Janice. Barry dies, leaving John without a father. Hank and Cristobal are dead. Fuches gets to live on. Sally is still a neurotic, narcissistic cunt who somehow cared about telling Barry to "turn yourself in, since Gene is about to go to prison for murder", but then conveniently forgets everything five minutes later when she lets Gene go to prison for murder rather than testifying on his behalf in court. And they ended the whole show with more of Sally's narcissism, seeing her become a narcissistic drama teacher who can't even reply with "I love you" back to HER own son after her show ended. Four seasons led up to that shitty ending... The whole season was just constant misery, illogical jumps and bad writing. Characters constantly went against their own internal logic and personalities just to suit the story, and every character kept flip-flopping between high and low IQ to suit each scene. It was so badly written. Jesus what a shit show (literally). The only good parts of Season 4 were the 3 or so episodes until Cristobal died for no reason, and the final "Hollywood movie" version of events (pretty funny parody of Hollywood's "based on a true story"). But overall, it was an extremely badly written and completely pointless season. Barry ended on Season 3. That's it. The rest was just some wannabe writer hippie hallucinating that they were some artsy Ingmar Bergman. Barry Seasons 1-3 were pretty much 10/10 masterpieces of clever writing, and already had a perfect ending. It's pretty ironic that Season 4 makes fun of Hollywood, when it was Hollywood's typical greed that led to the making of the totally unnecessary and painfully bad Season 4. Like so many ruined shows before it, Hollywood doesn't know when to stop and let a good thing rest.
Exactly. I saw interviews and shit for the fourth season, and all I heard was how they were so proud of it, and how they took a brave dark turn for the show. About how bill hader did an amazing job directing it. And shit. What a fucking joke.
If you didn't care about basically anything, why did you even bother finishing the show? You put out a lot of words for "I don't care".
Fuches survived
Maybe I’m dumb— why did Hank call Fuches a liar and tell him the deal was off? The new deal was for him to admit what he was- which he had just done.
He did that because he was deflecting his guilt onto Fuches. Even after he admitted to having Cristobal killed, he wanted to continue to hide from that reality. I would assume not all of his guys were in that room and that he wanted to continue to idolize Cristobal as though he had been murdered by some rival gang.
The reality was, Hank had to get Cristobal killed because he knew too much and wanted to leave him. Fuches knew this to be true, and mentioned it at the dinner. Hank, who did not want to admit that he had Cristobal killed, decided to call off their initial deal because he was mad that he got called out. The new deal made up by Fuches to make peace with Hank was that he wanted Hank to admit that he had Cristobal killed and that it was not rivals. Hank, still refusing to admit this, called off the deal to make peace, causing that huge gunfight scene, and finally the death of Hank.
Yes, the almost cut to black in the Sopranos. And in Breaking Bad, the final last look between Walt and Jesse. And when Walter dove onto Jesse. Protecting him from the spray of bullets. Fuches and John.
Now, we just have to wait for the Fuches spinoff show.
Bill Burr from Breaking Bad was the voice of the pastor on Barry's finale.
>fused at that sequence. Which I shouldn't be as it's the crux of them getting kidnap I caught that too and laughed to myself. I heard that boston/massachusetts accent. (Second one in the show, after Albert's accent)
Cousineau told his son that he changed his phone number, so how the hell did Sally able to call him on the phone?
Yeah, dunno why they even made it a point to mention that he had a different phone number. Had they just left out that little detail it would have made more sense.
She isn't, as in absolutely no way, so call it a plot hole, or just bad writing.
Also wondering how the hell she remembered his address from 8 years ago.
How did she know his number when Gene clearly said earlier that his number changed when he was out of the country...?
Gene asked her if she remembered. Can you remember an address from years ago. It's not unusual.
I can’t remember my address from 5 years ago, I can’t remember my friends address from 2 years ago and I damn sure can’t remember anyone else’s address from 8 years ago.
Hmm good point
is it just me, or does Barry barely get any screen time anymore?
You're right. I assumed it was to allow Hader more time/energy to focus on directing.
It wasn't because he was directing. I would assume he did it this way because he wanted to get to that ending and to do that, he needed to wrap up the other characters. The other thing to point out is that Barry's arc kind of finished around the season 3 finale/mid season 4. The character didn't grow much between the season 3 finale where Albert confronted him and the end of the show and he really didn't have to given that he had a pretty satisfying arc. He directed a lot of other episodes, most famously the "ronny/lily" episode where its almost nothing else but Barry and Fuches for the entire episode.
This season is 8 episodes long and they run about 30 minutes... has probably the least dialogue of all the seasons, Bill Hader was the guy they brought on to south park to help them write episodes, roughly the same length, and produce them weekly, those were actually funny too, and I am sorry but makes no sense.
I have to assume the original writers of the show did not work on season 3 or 4? or am I an ass? holy shit
They didn't. For the most part it was Bergband Hader...the "genius".....
They literally created the show and wrote it from the beginning
I thought Hader said he wrote seasons 3 and 4 during the pandemic
I hated it. Hated it. It was joyless, unjust and uncomfortable. It doesn't matter to me how well written a show is, if it twists itself backwards to make you hate characters you were rooting for it doesn't make me think the shows deep... it makes me stop caring. What happened with Gene was just tragic and forced. Why forced? Gene going out of his way to make himself a hero to such cartoonish levels felt really odd, like a part of his personality got amplified to ludicrous degrees. When the final episode comes around you see it as the dumb payoff that felt so pointless and bleak. And don't get me started on Jim. His ability to just kidnap and brainwash people at will was the closest the show got to remembering it was a comedy. This jerk ruined a guys life, the journalist, and he never faced any consequences or justice for his actions... him having the police in his back pocket and being the one to pin it on Gene was just the final spit in the face for me.
Every single thing you said, yes. Joyless and uncomfortable is how it felt from start to finish. I have no doubt that the cast and crew put effort into it (as a writer myself, i get that). But unfortunately I’d just stopped caring. The show just ground me down. Joyless is the word.
I disagree, Gene's character is totally in line for this. Ironically, he didn't have to go that route. As Barry's final words before Wow was, "He was willing to turn himself in." Whether or not Gene heard it was left unknown. In season 3, I forget which episode no one forces Gene to kill Barry, but that's what was going to happen exactly, but the same Rip Torn gun fell apart and rolled under a table. So this isn't out of no where, or rushed. Also, think of the other time the same gun shows up prior to killing Barry. It was when Barry was set up by Gene to go to jail. I guess you're missing the irony of so many of the plots/ stories. Gene takes the money, and it makes him look suspicious. Gene flip-flops instead of being steadfast consistently on Janice's side. Jim noticed it. Barry intended on the money for another reason. Barry takes the same gun from Gene and gets arrested. On and on. Not to mention the other Rip Torn gun references made via Gene telling Barry he was going to get it to kill himself because he lost Janice. It is sad for Gene the way it turns out. But it's fitting in the conclusion. I have read others mentioning why Sally chose not to intervene on Gene's behalf. I take it she doesn't feel responsible to as Gene never took Sally's safety as a priority. I am not saying it's right. I am just noting it makes sense storywise.
What I'm saying is out of character is Gene's need to spin the events surrounding Barry and his beloved GF to such a cartoonish degree. He was just given his second chance, he had popularity again and he was being rewarded for being graceful and humble with people he wronged in the past. He's also terrified of Jim. It was a huge shift for him and very clumsy for him to forget all this for more fame putting his life and reputation on the line.
Oh I forgot Gene and Tom are crashing their car breaking into Lon's house.
Let's see, Gene professed to love Janice and wanted integrity kept towards the investigation. This was never accomplished. Gene was the source of 99% of the leaks. Gene inconsistently flip-flops so when he's not honoring Janice's memory or defending or setting up Barry. Gene is taking money, playing a one man show for a reporter Gene sought out himself. Entertaining offers for movie deals. Fleeing the country after shooting his son accidentally. Yea not suspicious behavior.
I thought you were arguing in favor of my points until I realized you're arguing Gene's motives are fine earlier. But yea, that's my point, you write down everything he does and it looks really sloppy and inconsistent in Season 4.
It looks sloppy and inconsistent because Gene is a sloppy and inconsistent character, by design. He's an established narcissist who cannot get out of his own way and is self-defeating. Like Fuches, like Hank, like Sally. The difference is that Fuches and Sally take responsibility for their past actions (to varying degrees). And as a result, are somewhat redeemed. Gene says he's a reformed man, but immediately crumbles the first time his dignitity and morality is tested via the agent.
I just finished it. And you......-YOU- are preaching my SOUL right now. It was so forced and the drastic personality flops and toxicity amplifications they gave characters was so obviously forced to push the show in an absolutely unnecessary direction that it was painful. I loved this show and this ending just puts it right up there with "The Strain" for me.
I didnt like the ending because I wanted Barry to pay for what he did. But it makes complete sense inside the world of the show, for the viewers is depressing as fuck.
You don't think getting shot twice and the final shot blows out the back of his head out is any punishment? We clearly see Barry preferred to be with his family. He was willing to give it up and suffer death, prison, and separation from his family. So Barry died, and the silver lining was a story told differently, which is clearly for a positive purpose. We are supposed to gather that John isn't going to go dark or be manipulated by someone with bad intentions. John was even protected from Sally, not developing any alcohol addiction. We are shown this as a positive conclusion. No matter what opinion you have of Barry, there is no denying Barry's son did not have to follow. Yes, it's sad Sally didn't say she loved John too but that's how John will immortalize Barry and maybe Sally knows this. The ending had meaning.
What is the reading on the kid watching the movie about Barry? Seems like some people in here are thinking that he believes that false narrative but it seems to me that he’s really upset about watching it because he knows that his father was not hero of the story.
I think his little smile at the end makes it possible he buys into it. I don't even know if he knows the whole truth. I doubt it.
I just need the people who made the first 2 seasons back please
Season 3 was a masterpiece and a perfect ending. Season 4 shouldn’t have happened.
You are speaking to my soul right now.
Haha. Exactly. Me too
Well I assume Fuches is happily raising goats somewhere.
This was such low hanging fruit for some comic relief... I was wishing they had done this to finish up Fuches story
I mean, seriously, I assume that’s where he wound up after running away at the end. That’s the only place where he could be himself and be happy.
This time skip gave me the feeling of watching the ending of "The Graduate", where they realize their mistakes. It was hard to let go the fun dynamic of juggling act, and turn into this depression. But it felt very fitting. There cannot be a happy ending for a guy like Barry. This is at times a very unique and original show, amidst the seas of regurgitated formulaic tv trash. I loved every minute of it, even the hard parts.
The show will not be remembered for its ending and possibly not even for this last season. The first two seasons were so goddamn good that they carried the weight of the last two seasons
!RemindMe 5 years
Idk wtf happened bro. Like this season was alright *I guess*, but that third season…I was like, am I watching a different show?? I actually felt relief when they said 4 was going to be the last one, that’s how much I disliked 3.
Me too. Season 3 was just awful
Season 3 was the best season.
What did you like about it. It seemed like there was very little humor. It got kind of artsy and they abandoned the actor/hitman thing.
True Hollywood ending
I think it's interesting how the time jump makes everything so similar to Dexter, or really a lot of shows now where they're bringing them back after an actual time jump to 'end it properly.' And that really highlights the problem for me. I don't feel like we got an ending for the characters from the first 3.5 seasons, we just got an ending for who they were after the time jump. And I never even liked any of those characters...
That's a great point. There's so much we don't know about post timeskip Barry. We don't know about his relationship with Sally, his son, how he lives, how he acts day to day. We had so much time to get to know Barry in the first 3 seasons, yet barely an episode to see how he adjusted after all those years.
Yeah, I felt completely disconnected from all of them after the time jump. It was, imo, not the right way to go, but I still love the show overall.
I know that different people will feel different ways, but I'm surprised at how many takes there are from people that obviously don't see the show through the lens of absurdity.
That was the show for 3 seasons and it worked great. Season 4, however, and especially the later half were so overly serious it killed a lot of the comedic potential of some scenes. It turned from an absurdist dark comedy to a drama with the occasional conedic moment.
No script that has based his history on absurdity can later on try to make emotional turns and expect to still connect with the audience.
I’m torn on this finale as an episode, but I really liked it as an ending to the story. It seemed fitting. My instinct right after was I didn’t like it as an episode, but I’ll have to rewatch the series/season to see how I feel
The ending was disappointing because the plot leading up to it was contrived and not believable. 1. Barry on the run does not even grow a beard in 8 years. He doesn't even wear a disguise taking a plane to ca. 2. He loves his son. He even tells him he loves him unlike sally. Yet he leavesvhis son with an alcoholic to protect him with a dis- assembled gun to boot. 3. Barry wants to stop a single movie to be made...even though a mass muderer at large with a TV star would have been a media feeding frenzy with books and TV shows and dozens of people getting their 15 min of fame. With Barry's current mugshot for all to see. Which brings us back to why no disguise. 4.moss poorly tying Barry before leaving for hours 5. Barry passing out and conveniently waking for a personal phone call. 6. The reason gene came out of hiding....totally contrived. There had to be TV movies and murder mystery reenactments multiple times. Over 8 years. And police who interviewed gene have already given his side of the story. So both gene and Barry come out of hiding for a very thin reason.. one risking being killed along with son and grandson...and the other risking getting caught... WHY 7. There are still people out there to help cousineau not be convicted. Like the fbi guy that knew Barry Killied their common friend and spared Barry's life in a field. Sally is so cold hearted that she would let gene rot in prison? She urged him to turn himself in to save gene.Wasn't there a woman who poisoned Barry. Or the mom with the kid who got shot by mistake.
You are looking at this show far too seriously. Do you watch sci movies and expect realism as well? This show was very obviously from the beginning not a super serious and realistic series. 1. He wears glasses and dresses like a dad, basically full Clark Kent disguise 2 Barry and everyone on the show are basically shitty people, Sally, Barry, Jean are awful narcissists the entire time and blind themselves to negative situations or comments like when Sally was trying to get Barry to turn himself in, which was only because it would have benefitted her. 3. Kind of just a repeat of 1 and 2, but Jean went dark for 8 years and he's the only one with testimony that matters towards a movie. 4. It's a not so serious tv show with obvious plot holes and b.s. scenarios 5. See 4 6. See 3 and 4 7. " "
>You are looking at this show far too seriously. Do you watch sci movies and expect realism as well? This show was very obviously from the beginning not a super serious and realistic series. The most trash part of online discourse about fiction is when someone pulls this card for legitimate criticism. Barry didn’t have holes like that. And then it did. That’s a drop in quality, not “it’s a wacky tv show man, what do you expect???”
Ah what a well thought out response sir/ma'am, kudos to you
Bad writing can always be explained away with.." no one takes this seriously..especially the writers" Meanwhile Hader made this show take a turn toward realism as he said to show the reality of a killer". You can't turn to dark reality and then say it's a bs so the writing does not have to ring true. And yes everyone gets the Clark reference and the use of glasses. Very cute Still doesn't explain why he wouldn't want his son to play baseball as that can lead to him being out in the public more...yet he dosent lift a finger to disguise hjmself....or even buy a temp disguise for emergencies like going to LA to kill someone. It all can be explained away as the writers didn't take anything seriously so nothing needs to make sense or be grounded in reality. I guess that can be said for any TV show. There is no such thing as bad writing...just unrealistic expectations that the writing makes sense.
There is such a thing as hyper criticism. How many successful shows have you written, directed or acted in? It's a decent plot for a funny and dark tv show and it has provided much entertainment. Picking it apart with hyper criticism at every corner over minor issues serves to do what exactly? Suspension of disbelief in moderate doses isn't a bad thing
Yes that's the ticket. Whenever poor writing occurs..it's "hyper critisjsm" to point it out. For 3 seasons they spent building characters. And in t h e 4th season its as if halfway through they came up with an ending and then had to shoehorn all the characters into arriving at the final episode. Even if the shoes hardly fit. But for those "look the other way in life" folks....."hyper criticism" is a great denial. A great deflector. A great excuse...for lazy writing Nothing wrong with that.
When you offend a fanboy, you know his argument is weak when he asks "how many successful tv shows have you written "
What? You have comments on a politician I like....how many elections have you won. I agree...attacking the debater personally rather than using cogent debate points shows you are out of gas
I'm sure they would be happy to rewrite and shoot it to your standards if you feel like providing the funding for a new season four, five, six however many you want to pay for. They decided to end it with 4 seasons and tied up the story pretty well I think with the time and constraints they had in the real world.
They were writing season 4 during the covid break of season 3 shooting. They had plenty of time to craft a final season that made sense. There was no rushed deadline. No one said only 8 episodes were allowed or that all episodes had to be around 30 - 35 min. Excuses excuses excuses. Maybe a writers dog ate the scripts
I think 1), 3) and 5) can be answer by the fact despite the series being about them *within* the universe they exist, they aren't really considered important. The may appear on random podcasts, but really most of what Barry has done is random acts of gang violence and domestic assassinations. The only people who care are the police, the cast and the victims. Otherwise it just appears on the news for 5 minutes and then gets forgotten about. A Hollywood blockbuster is different and certainly to the cast, who have no sense of proportion. For 2) Barry has sociopathic and narcissistic, he loves his son as a form of supply. He supplies this perfect ideal while his son believes and that validates Barry. If you look at the damage he does to his son, keeping him away from other children, scarring him about baseball, buying books instead of blankets, you'll see it's not love, it's the actors desire for the perfect audience, which he gets, even after death. As for 7) the FBI guy and Sally still love Barry. Barry saved both their lives, and the memory of him matters more than Gene. Sally also realises when she gets to Gene's position as a coach teaching his methods, he was also abusive in his own way.
Sally told Barry to give himself up to save gene. Now all of a sudden she felt he was abusive and said fk you.
People are more complex than you are making out. If Sally tries to get Gene out of death after Barry's death, who else takes the blame? She also loved/loves Barry despite his abuse and Gene killed him. That's why she's not dating anyone.
His escape involved the death of a half dozen fed agents and he has to be a person of interest. That is sensationalist stuff add a TV personality and you have a media feeding frenzy. Add to it a missing cousineau.and it's one ho u r talk show material. 20/20. Docudramas. Continual news stories of "Barry sightings". A dead detective massive fed death TV actress missing acting coach prison breakout... no..the movie will not be the first in 8 years to cover this extensively. And Barry is first irked now? More people have seen all the TV specials and murder mystery shows and nade for TV movies than will see the Hollywood movie. Genes side is already out there through detectives that interviewed him
I have two takes on the finale and series. the first take is intellectual and heady, and a critique on the nature of acting and the business of Hollywood, the craft of storytelling and moviemaking using techniques such as foreshadowing, Chekov's guns, and other things that distance the final product from the reality. The 2nd take is that this show started moving away from it's original lighter, funnier, zanier tone of it's characters and into a pseudo-BetterCall Saul type tone. Which didn't really work. And the finale went in that direction instead of the funnier one. Every character in the show was a bad person. A selfish narcissist who was telling a tale about Hollywood from their selfish actions. It wasn't a great finale as you can see by the comments here alone. I didn't think it was great. It wasn't even the best episode of the season (Wizard). So alas, another show is tossed onto the heap of entertainment content now. oh well, moving on.
Yeah, I personally did not like the tone shift. I said in another post that the finale tried way too hard to be like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos (which I loved those shows, but I also loved Barry for not being those shows if that makes sense). I really missed the absurd, zany, and ridiculous tone of Seasons 1&2.
I thought the finale had some darkly funny moments. Like Barry’s last line was really funny, it was just at a dark time
The penultimate episode definitely felt like it was trying to carry the comedic load before the finale went serious. Between the mercenaries and their deaths, the F&F movie discussion, and Hank's attempt to blow up the compound, it was like the writers were trying to get out all the humor before they went dark and serious for the finale.
of course. but it lost it's tone maybe. maybe not. whatever it's just TV
Lost its tone/style season 2 episode 8
Seems like the theme was denial. Fuchs survived in the end because he realized who he really was, while Barry, Hank and Gene all paid the price. It's also really humorous to see people say Barry was redeemed. The show was obviously making fun of religious aggrandizement and how naive many people are who are nonsecular.