Barry's Reality-Shattering Cutaways Make Season 4 An Intriguing Puzzle To Piece Together
With the arrival of Season 4 of "Barry," the acclaimed comedy-drama is giving its final bow. However, far from resting on its laurels, the series is going big with its central characters for their closing act, putting Barry (Bill Hader) and the others into radically different scenarios than they're used to and changing up their goals and character motivations substantially along the way.
While Barry languishes in prison, though, the HBO series has broken free from the constraints of space and time. Interspersed seemingly at random in the latest episodes of the show are eerie cutaways that seamlessly blend in with what is happening in a scene until they clearly show that they're not taking place in the same reality.
Or are they?
By the end of Season 4, Episode 4 ("It Takes a Psycho"), fans finally have a window into understanding these odd "Barry" scenes, and it appears to be that they take place in the future after Barry and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) have escaped into witness protection and been relocated. Still, with things in this future appearing a little bit too ideal for a show like this, it could turn out that there's more to these scenes than meets the eye.
Barry's final season is more experimental than expected
In the idealistic scenes from the future in "Barry," the titular hitman turned actor has escaped the consequences of his many murderous actions and now has a son with Sally. Meanwhile, the duo is regularly visited by Barry's former handler, Fuches (Stephen Root), who seems to once again be on good terms with the main character.
While it's possible that "Barry" will conclude with a happy ending for the assassin, it's also plausible to imagine that this conclusion could be a fake-out. Considering that this is a series about fantasy and reality through the lens of acting, these scenes could be akin to how Richard Harrow's (Jack Huston) final moments played out on another HBO series, "Boardwalk Empire."
Fans of that series will recall that Harrow is seen reuniting with his family for dinner before a sudden cut reveals that this was what he was seeing as he died beneath the docks from gunshot wounds he'd sustained. Now, even if we assume that these flash-forwards are not real life, "Barry" could go two different ways: one approach would be for it to be a dying fantasy, like Harrow's, while the other would be for it to be an escape from the boredom of his prison sentence. This would be especially relevant if we find out that Barry has been sent to solitary confinement, a place where the imagination is one's only path to escape. Either way, we'll definitely be getting more hints as Season 4 heads toward its perfectly timed ending.