Reaction Review: Barry Season 4 Episode 5: tricky legacies
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
EPISODE SUMMARY
Warning: major spoilers for Barry season 4 episode 5, “tricky legacies”, are throughout the entire review. The following summary also briefly discusses triggering depictions of physical and sexual abuse. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
So, let’s get some answers after that twist at the end of the previous episode. Barry Berkman walks with one of the strange kid who happens to be his son: he addresses the father of the other kid that was a part of the fight. They’re in the middle of nowhere: some farm area where no one can find them. Barry brings his son, John, home and seems to be a good parent that tries to teach responsibility within anger. He mentions that he used to have anger issues but now has control over his feelings. We’re still not sure quite how much time has passed. Wife — I think — Sally is inside the house and tossing on a wig while her “husband” and son play outside. She leaves for work as a waitress at a diner (she also puts on a southern accent, so clearly Sally and Barry are incognito wherever they are). She goes by the name “Emily” now. During her break, she gets invited to an event but she makes up a morbid excuse to get out of it.
While filling up their car for gas, Sally talks with Barry about what their son is learning: American presidents. It’s clear that John is being homeschooled by Barry. Sally downs a significant amount of vodka while not paying attention to Barry’s conversation on the phone. At home, they eat microwaved dinners. Sally is smashed. She brings up how president Abraham Lincoln is now on the penny. On one hand, he is recognized and everywhere. On the other, she implies that pennies are kind of useless with today’s economy: they just aren’t enough to buy anything with. She’s projecting her own insecurities surrounding her failure as an actress. Later on, John can’t sleep because his parents are bickering: Barry knows that Sally is constantly drunk. They watch their own content separately with headphones on.
We cut to a minister discussing the need to find God during times of tribulation, and we zoom out to find John watching this sermon with his parents. They are holding their own Sunday service at home; it is slowly becoming more and more apparent that they do nearly everything at home, and that John is almost held captive from the rest of the world there. John and Barry are outside walking when the former freezes: he finds a group of kids playing baseball. He begins playing catch with the other boy he was fighting with earlier. The new friend offers to have the boy over sometime when his dad, Barry, is napping. John proceeds to ask the boy if his mom also wears “hair on top of her hair”. Back home, Barry and his son are opening up a ton of packages from Amazon, except for the comforter that John asked for; Barry uses the opportunity to talk about how God provides us only with what we need. Barry is helping tidy up when he spots the baseball glove in John’s room. He shows him scary videos of baseball playing kids that get into serious accidents while playing to scare him from playing. In the middle of the night, John comes crying to the bedroom about his new fear of baseballs; it’s the first time “Emily” addresses Barry by his new name (Clark). John sleeps with his mom, but Sally is unable to wind down again.
The next day, Sally finds that she is being pursued by this same tattooed coworker, Bevel, that was giving her a hard time at work. She caves and has a drink with him. His brother was caught during a robbery gone wrong. She asks if Bevel has also shot people, and he admits to doing so. He asks for Sally’s bare foot and he does something to it (we can only imagine what). He confesses to fantasizing about her and gets into the graphic details. She shrugs it off and goes to the bathroom (it’s only code). He follows, and he starts embracing him. They sexually connect. She starts strangling him in the same way that she has been strangled by Barry before: he begs her to stop but she won’t. He tries ripping her hair and the wig comes off. She continues to abuse him. Bevel promises not to tell anyone about the revelation, apologizes, and then leaves timidly.
Barry has his Iraq war paraphernalia arrive on his doorstep, and he uses this opportunity to discuss his years serving as a marine with John. That evening during dinner, Barry goes into some gritty details about Lincoln that don’t get discussed enough: clearly he’s gone down this rabbit hole. He continues to slag on other “morally just” figures and discussing their dark secrets. After dinner, Barry and Sally are enjoying their own forms of content — again — when they get a mysterious knock on the door. The knocking persists while they prepare for the worst with a stashed away gun. Barry instructs Sally to take John and hide in the bathtub. Barry paces to the door and finds that no one is outside. He takes a few steps out into the dark unknown. He can hear running footsteps: it’s possible that some kids were playing ding dong ditch, so to speak. Barry waited outside the house the entire night.
Back in civilization, we follow an executive who gets addressed by a studio officer. The officer states that Gene Cousineau — who has been missing and presumed dead for eight years (!) — is in their facility and wants to talk to whoever is running Warner Brothers. After some hesitation, she asks him to wait. We return to Barry and Sally’s new life, and it appears that she has ratted on Bevel for harassing her. Bevel has been fired. That evening, Sally continues to drink. Barry is going over war stories with John. He promises to protect his son in the same way he served his country. Sally gets an alert on her computer and starts calling for his name (his actual name: Barry; his son questions who that is). There is news that Gene has struck a deal with Warner Brothers to tell the story of Barry Berkman. He concludes that he will have to now kill Gene. Stay tuned.
FIRST REACTION
What an eerie episode of television. If we didn’t know anything about Barry Berkman and Sally, this would feel like it came right out of The Twilight Zone. We don’t see NoHo Hank or Monroe Fuches whatsoever, and we barely see Gene Cousineau (but it’s enough to get us excited for what is to come). This is straight up Barry and Sally playing the performances of their lives: you can interpret that however you wish. It really felt like we were watching a scene reenactment straight from Gene’s class, but this time it’s within reality. This is all that child John knows about life, and there’s something truly disheartening about this. Barry and Sally want to live a lie rather than be caught or live on the lam? Sure. To create a child and drag him into this predicament? It’s actually quite upsetting, in my opinion.
I’m not sure how distanced Sally and Barry are romantically, but she may have been telling the truth when she said she feels the most safe with him. There may no longer be any love there at all, but they are both incredibly committed to making sure this new life works out. This is clearly a one-off episode and a daring one at that: I knew Barry leapt ahead in time, but not eight fucking years! What has set Barry apart from so many similar shows is how daring it is willing to be. We’re in the dark with two major characters, have jumped ahead nearly a decade in a series that usually follows events on a daily basis (save for the occasional leap in time, like the end of season 1), and all that we have is a surprise appearance from one Gene Cousineau (after years of hiding) and a brand new — albeit shoddy — life for two characters that once held such promise: a killer that was originally on the path to redemption, and an actor that was on her way to the top before her weighted collapse.
Barry’s fixation on finding the darkest secrets in good people feels like foreshadowing: he will likely have to tell John about his hitman past some day soon. There’s no way his medals of valour just showed up; either he wanted it delivered to their hidden home, or he has held onto his badges for years and only shown them to John now (disguised as a delivery). Maybe Barry is also trying to tell himself that he is a good person despite what he has done. Sally, on the other hand, has a different trajectory. She drinks herself to sleep every night. She exhibited signs of being abusive with power in ways that she learned from Barry. She is not well. She may feel “safe” with Barry, but this is the worst we have ever seen Sally throughout the series. It breaks my heart. Barry has never not been a satire, even in these critically serious episodes. A mannequin father that has become a bible thumper, an alcoholic mother that hates her life but insists that she doesn’t, and a sheltered son that is constantly lied to so he can’t ever leave (à la The Truman Show). Sure, those future film franchises we spot towards the end of the episodes are more blatant parodies of the film industry, but Barry and Sally’s life is a farce: it’s a statement on the pseudo happiness of the American dream housing two of the most existentially gutted people in the entire nation. The world’s a stage, et cetera.
Final Grade: 4.5/5
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.