[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Barry Season 4 Episodes 1 “yikes” and 2 “bestest place on the earth.”]
With the first two episodes of its final season, Barry shows it’s not slowing down and still must-see TV. The titular character (Bill Hader) is in prison, but he’s still in contact with those who have surrounded him for the past three seasons, including a phone call to Gene (Henry Winkler), who was the one to put him behind bars.
It’s Barry’s ex-girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) who visits him in prison in the second episode, after a disappointing trip home. Among the complaints from her mother: Sally used her abusive ex’s name in her show. What Sally wants to know from Barry is if she has to worry about “Muffin”; one of the last things that happened prior to his arrest was she killed a guy in self-defense. Barry assures her she doesn’t have anything to worry about before telling her she made him feel human. But once she’s cleared up the “Muffin” concern, why is she still there? She feels safe with him, she admits. She always will be, he promises as she does eventually walk away, and he loves her.
So how conflicted is Sally at that point? “Incredibly conflicted,” Goldberg confirms to TV Insider. “I think she left LA partly to get away from him, and when she went to home to Joplin, there was some misguided hope there that maybe she was going to find a place of solace. Maybe she was going to find some security, some comfort, some understanding, somebody to listen, and some protection. And she was met with all the opposite. We got a window into Sally’s kind of slightly brutal upbringing and maybe a better understanding of why she is the way that she is.”
Merrick Morton/HBO
Going to see Barry upon her return to LA is partly in hopes that getting assurances about “Muffin” will “stop the nightmare,” Goldberg continues. “She’s so panicked about what’s happened and when she says, ‘I feel safe with you,’ I think the truth is that Barry’s the only person who saw the worst, most base animal part of herself and saw all of her animal rage come out and he’s chosen to love her anyway. I think that there’s a security in that in being witnessed.”
There is also the “complicity” in the crime they committed together, she adds. “She’s on a sinking ship and he’s the only one with an oar really, I think is what it’s like. So I think feeling witnessed in that way is what’s making her feel safe.”
Betrayal is a major part of these first two episodes, especially with regards to Barry when it comes to Fuches (Stephen Root) and Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan). Though Fuches originally makes a deal with the feds to try to get Barry to confess to what he’s done on tape, he ditches the wire upon finding Barry beaten by a guard at the end of the premiere. Then, in Episode 2, Barry is the one to make a deal with the feds, and Fuches realizes that when he finds his cell empty and learns the other man’s been moved to special housing. Fuches’ first move after that: alerting Hank, who earlier had been ready to stage a prison break for Barry. Now, with Barry working with the FBI, Hank’s new goal is to kill him.
“One of the things about Hank is he’s very emotional,” Carrigan points out. “He’s quite dramatic. And so I think, yeah, he fluctuates very easily, especially when his feelings get hurt.”
As for where Fuches’ head is after Barry’s betrayal, “it’s in a bad place because this has happened to him several times before this, and it doesn’t matter how much he loves Barry, if Barry does something he doesn’t like, he’s immediately into revenge mode,” Root says. “So at that point that you’re talking about, he is deeply into revenge mode. And what finally happens to him is — I’m not going to say that he gets his revenge, but he does have a conclusion to his relationship with Barry.”
Something tells us most, if not all, of the conclusions for all the relationships on Barry are going to hurt.
Barry, Sundays, 10/9c, HBO