Barry Is Out For 'Vengeance' As The Series Finale Approaches
The twisted titular protagonist of "Barry" has turned over a new leaf in his life as a fugitive. The hitman has taken on a new role as an Evangelical stay-at-home dad that wears horn-rimmed glasses and stiff button-ups. But when the sanctity of his new family is threatened, the old Barry returns. He will do anything to protect the life he built for himself with Sally and John, even if it means turning his back on his newfound faith. When Barry's son is taken hostage, the ex-assassin is out for blood — and in the series finale, it's blood he will get. The only question is, will he and his family all make it out alive?
Barry is drawn out of hiding when a press release teases that his former acting teacher, Cousineau, informed a major motion picture about his killings, capture, and escape. Barry almost breaks into Cousineau's L.A. home intent on murder before being kidnapped by Jim Moss, the father of one of Barry's notable victims.
"The interesting idea for me was that in Episode 7, Barry's caught and he kind of retreats and like Jim says, 'You're a man of God now, which is bulls***.' He's kind of calling him on it," series creator and star Bill Hader recently told TV Insider. "Barry apologizes to Cousineau in this kind of delirium. He thinks he's going to die, and so he's trying to repent for these things. Jim Moss says, 'You're going to see the people you love for the last time,' and that's what Barry's afraid of. And he has that vision of his son and everything."
The anti-hero breaks free from Moss' garage, but he isn't out of the woods just yet.
His family is being threatened — for real this time
After Barry escapes from Jim Moss' capture, he gets a call from Noho Hank, who tells him he's holding his wife and son captive. Cousineau only threatened Barry's new life in a theoretical sense, and Barry was prepared to kill the acting teacher and his family. Hank is now directly threatening Barry's family — as well as Barry himself — so there's no telling what he'll do.
It's clear that the fugitive's deepest fear is losing his family, specifically his son. Barry has shaped himself into a god in his son's eyes by isolating him from the world and establishing himself as an absolute authority.
"He can't really find redemption with anybody else, so he's turned to God for redemption ... but again, I don't think he really understands religion," Hader explained to TVLine in an early May interview. "He's very much trying to paint the version of himself that he wants to be to his son ... How his son sees him is how he's always wanted to be seen by everybody."
The person he is in this new life — reflected back in his son's eyes — is what Barry is fighting to keep, and he will fight harder and bloodier than ever before to preserve his "heaven," his "safe place," as the series creator described it. Sally and especially John are symbols of his new life of redemption, and he is terrified of losing them, which is why he hallucinates seeing them again in Jim Moss' garage. This fear in Barry sets up the way the series will end.
Barry is going out with a vengeance in the finale
Hank made Barry's paranoia over his family's safety into a reality. Barry was afraid of never seeing them again, and now an eccentric villain is dangling them over a shark pit. "It's basically Hank saying, 'Yeah, you're going to see them,'" Hader said, per TV Insider. "Now it's for real."
Barry might have changed a lot over the eight years that elapsed in the bold mid-season time jump, but the series creator always pictured the protagonist going out with a bang and returning to his serial killing roots. "I always felt like that last moment of Barry is him angry out for vengeance," he revealed. "We know what he gets [like] when he gets mad, but it's also a sense of maybe some guilt of, 'This is what I brought upon everybody.'"
Hader also revealed that, for one reason or another, the family will not be happily reunited in the finale. "What Jim Moss wants is going to happen," the "SNL" alum confirmed. "He's never going to see his family again." Maybe this means Barry will die in the show's final episode, or maybe it just means that Sally will take John and leave him for good. Even if Barry does manage to kill his son's captors, could the violent extraction change John's impression of his father forever — or worse, put the child in harm's way?
Has Barry really changed at all?
At first, it seems like Barry's values have shifted since he had a son, but he quickly reveals his true colors. The thing about John that's most important to Barry is his opinion as an audience member in the performance of a lifetime.
"The thing that was nice about him having a kid is Barry had a chance to be the person he always wanted to be in the eyes of his son, which is a hero and a guy who does the right thing and a guy who's not violent," Hader explained to The Wrap in early May. "This kind of upstanding American guy, which is a character he's playing. So they're still acting. It's this idea of him being this upstanding person, but now he has this kid, and this kid can see him and reflect back the person he wants to be, and that's really important to him."
This is the integrity he seems to be protecting — not the safety of his family, but his moral righteousness in his son's eyes. He abandons Sally and John to hunt down Cousineau when he poses a merely existential threat to them, and Barry even admits that his only reason for trying to kill the old man is that he doesn't want John to know the truth. Barry is desperate to stay in character as his own ideal man, and now that his son is in Hank and Fuches' grasp, his image will definitely be compromised.
It's clear that there won't be a happy ending for Barry, but there will probably be a bloody one. The only thing that's certain is that he's out for vengeance, and when that guy's on the warpath, his enemies should probably get out of the way.