What Happened In The Barry Series Finale?

After four seasons of hitting marks, saying lines, and oh yeah… killing people, Barry’s harrowing final season proved that the series was always more than a dark comedy or a spot-on satire of the ultraviolent and often absurd-feeling entertainment industry. It was a bleak genre-defying story that was ultimately about how the stories we tell ourselves matter. Slick Hollywood formulaic fantasies may not be as harmless as we assume; the lies we feed ourselves to survive may lead us down darker paths than we thought possible; and when it seems like we’re trapped without hope, the truth really can set us free.

Spoilers from here on out: in the series finale, Cousineau kills Barry with a shocking yet humorously anticlimactic shot to the head. And the episode’s title is taken from Barry’s last words “Oh, wow.” before the screen cuts to black. Just like that, Barry’s gone – all the questions of his redeeming himself and his sudden decision to turn himself in never getting a chance to come to fruition. Meanwhile, Hank is gunned down by Fuches and his men, Fuches spares Barry and his son, and a future Sally finds peace alongside a teenage John, taking on Cousineau’s mantle to become the drama teacher.

In the end, Barry’s biopic does get made, but with the full Hollywood action-movie treatment, distorting all that we’ve seen into a glib fantasy while revealing an unsettling turn of real-life events: Gene has been cast as the uber-villain and is now serving a life sentence, while Barry is remembered as a hero. Now that’s the narrative his son is going to internalize, too–which is what Barry wanted, Here’s our take on how Barry’s shocking final moments add up to a profound moral code surrounding the simultaneous danger and importance of stories and legacies; the destructive desire for revenge, and the only path to redemption available to us.

The Importance Of A Good Legacy

Whether people are dead or alive, their legacies last. This is something Hollywood knows all too well – but often the focus in entertainment is on just making a name, without getting too deep into the purpose of fame.

In the end, for Barry and Hank, the concept, and fear, of what their legacies will be is ironically what drives both men to their respective fates. Hank’s attempt to emotionally distance himself from his role in Cristobal’s murder has left him unable to confront his true darkness. And by building Nohobal off of the business Cristobal wanted for the two of them, he attempts to rebuild a legacy that allows him to forget the evils of his past. But, Fuches’ reemergence digs up this dark past he fought so hard to bury. Hank’s entire life post-time-jump is built upon the foundations of a lie and his insecurities surrounding his capabilities as a crime boss. So when Fuches challenges Hank’s attempt to rewrite his legacy, the series places his fate in his own hands. When he refuses to acknowledge this evil, he is ultimately punished and forced to die in the wreckage of his false legacy holding Cristobal’s cold, metal hand. The key line Fuches delivers in this scene describes both himself and Hank, but also of course Barry and the whole reason he was driven to act in the first place.

Meanwhile, through ‘The Masked Collector’, we get to glimpse Barry’s highly warped legacy after his death. The decision to falsely valorize Barry and incriminate Gene comments on Hollywood’s tendency to look for simple heroes and villains, to fit complicated life into slick, ever-repeating plot formulas; and ultimately not to challenge the prevailing narratives of the status quo.

Here, the show completes its commentary on Hollywood and how this industry of fantasy and entertainment caters to, feeds and provides the self-serving narratives and often even the lies that we want to believe in…As Escapist Magazine writes, “In the end, Barry is not in control of his own story” because here it “shifts from the lies that people like Barry tell themselves to the lies that society itself tells about them.”

Barry’s four seasons have repeatedly grappled with this search for truth in drama versus the easy, feel-good, fake version that tends to be the commercially lucrative crowd-pleaser – like when Sally got a big break by telling the “strong woman fights back” version of her experiences with domestic abuse instead of owning the messier reality. And after Barry itself has sought to examine the difficult truths about its main characters, in its final moments it compares this with the “Hollywood version.”

While Barry may seem at first like a funny play on all Hollywood’s silliness, its interest in the stories we tell ourselves goes much deeper. All the characters – like all of us – are guided in their life paths and choices by the narratives in their minds, and more often than not these narratives are suspect, self-serving, self-centered, and full of fakeness and lies.

For years, Fuches controlled Barry through stories, which is why Barry seeks out a new mentor, Gene, to provide him with new stories or story-making tools.

And it’s even a fake story that triggers Gene to lose it and murder Barry, according to actor Henry Winkler. He told USA Today, “All these people making up this story, and there’s no way to turn it back around to the truth. He’s close to insanity, instantly.”

The finale also raises the question of whether any “heroic” legacy can ever really be deserved because the motivation of being seen and appreciated (even by God) inherently corrupts the good things we attempt to do.

After Fuches’ action, Barry believes he’s been redeemed, but Sally knows better. Barry turns down this idea until he learns of Cousineau’s dilemma, and Barry does feel moved to take responsibility for his sins to exonerate his innocent teacher. While Hank refuses to confront his inner evil, in the end, Barry makes the surprising choice to own up to his mistakes. At least it seems like that’s what he’s about to do – but as he’s only alive for a few seconds after that, there’s no follow-through or catharsis to his last-minute change of heart. It would be a stretch to say he got any sort of redemption. Moreover, from what we’ve heard of Barry grappling with this question earlier, it’s clear Barry views turning himself in as a chance to service his own narrative by being redeemed in God’s eyes.

While Sally and Fuches are both right that the only true redemption attainable to us is taking accountability for our sins, importantly in this process, there’s a need to de-center oneself in the narrative and think about how we’re affecting others. Indiewire’s Steve Greene writes that the finale carries out “the ‘Barry’ idea that everyone in this sordid web got tangled up by putting themselves at the center of their own story” – and even that Gene’s final fate might be interpreted as a retribution for his excessive need for fame.

While Barry’s life ends before he gets to become that real-life hero (if he ever would have), ironically his post-mortem legacy reflects how he wanted to be remembered by John. Despite Barry’s attempts to completely shield John from his true identity as a child, John does have the traumatic, full knowledge of who his father is, thanks to his mother’s honesty with him

But in this final scene, it’s as if we see all this truth potentially being reshaped into a new story. And as John breaks into a moved, bittersweet smile while the biopic’s postscript details Barry’s burial honors, it’s implied that John does see his father as a hero now.

This kind of narrative, Barry believes, will model for his son how to live a “pious” life untouched by the violence of his own.

Yet, isn’t that pretty suspect? After all, wasn’t it the same kind of easy, over-simplistic narrative that led Barry to become a soldier in the first place without thinking much about it, and kill a lot of people before understanding why or what that would do to his psyche? It makes sense that Barry – who’s hooked on telling himself nice-sounding fiction about himself – was drawn to Hollywood. And if John takes this silly biopic as guidance for how to live his life, that will ultimately lead him straight back to the violence and lies that have dogged Barry’s life.

Redemption Or Revenge

One of the final season’s themes is that revenge is futile - and near pointless – while the way forward is scrutinizing personal reflection. This is reflected in the dichotomy between Gene’s decision to kill Barry, and Fuches’ choice to let both Barry and John walk free. In the beginning, Gene was Barry’s light mentor – sure, he was driven by vanity and chasing the spotlight, but he did want to help his acting student-slash-son-figure find truth on the stage. Fuches, of course, was Barry’s dark mentor, having exploited and manipulated Barry into becoming a terrible killing machine. Over the course of the season, though, we see Gene transform into a hollow shell of himself, while Fuches metamorphosizes into a toughened, but self-aware, crime leader.

Fuches has switched his allegiance to Barry countless times throughout the series, but their final encounter carries significant weight. Fuches’ confrontation with Hank reveals that he no longer views himself as a life-saving mentor, instead seeing himself for the true evil he possesses. Fuches shields John from the violence around him, choosing to end the cycle he began with Barry when Barry was a child, and passes the boy off to Barry without a word. Fuches is still very far from a hero, but his willingness to accept his true, heartless self lets him walk away. And he gets at least a moment of redemption when he attempts in a small way to make up for all he did to his former soldier.

Surprisingly, then, it’s Barry’s other mentor who gets violent. For Gene, revenge has become everything, and it comes with a high cost. He has lost everything, his love, his son, and his career, and feels that he has nothing to lose by killing Barry. So he finally gets what he wanted - Barry dead - but the sad irony is that his actions make Barry a martyr in the eyes of the world. It’s Gene who takes the fall for Janice’s murder while Barry is remembered as a hero – even though he’s the only person who could have cleared Gene. Afterward, he sits expressionless on the couch next to Barry’s dead body, void of emotion in a shot that mirrors Barry’s detached killings throughout the series. Clearly, Barry’s death brings him no satisfaction.

While the season 3 finale portrayed Gene’s revenge as a satisfying win, the events of season 4 indicated that his ego would never be satisfied unless his heroism was at the center of the narrative. And it’s hard to think of a punishment greater for this reputation-obsessed character than having his name so viciously smeared. As actor Henry Winkler told USA Today, “Gene called himself a mask collector because he carried all these characters inside and thought he was God’s gift to acting. Gene would have been crushed to see that portrayal.”

Meanwhile, even Jim’s attempts towards revenge fail. By wrongly accusing Gene, he inadvertently creates a domino effect that results in her story being sensationalized for a popcorn flick. So for those who do seek revenge, Barry paints a bleak portrait of what it really means to get what you want.

Why Sally Got A Happy Ending

While Barry gets his fake redemption and fame after death, Sally ends up living a life with a more limited level of recognition. Years later when we catch up with Sally, she’s built a life for her and John as a high-school drama teacher. Like Cousineau at the start of the show, she’s a big fish in a small pond, who’s nonetheless fiercely loved in her community. Sally may not be creating her own hyped TV show, but she takes her work as seriously as ever – and she takes pride in being great at what she does. The key shot we see of her in the finale is of her taking a long look at the bouquet of flowers she’s received for her students’ production of Our Town. The flowers – the archetypal symbol of theatrical kudos and praise – still mean a lot to her. She retains that craving for applause and validation, probably way beyond what she gets as a teacher. Still, even if there’s a part of her that wants more, getting that bouquet, and knowing how good of a job she did, can be enough for her. When a new guy asks her out, she doesn’t have to consider it or make up an excuse – she knows what she doesn’t want; she’s already got what she needs, and she’s content with her life of teaching and living with her son.

The fact that Sally is the only character to receive a pseudo-‘happy’, or at least a satisfying ending, models a path for hope in all the bleakness we’ve seen. Over the course of the series, we’ve watched Sally yearn for success and fame at any cost – lose it due to her own ego, and be forced into a motherly role she never wanted. Whether thanks to her own doing or the brutal Hollywood machine, time after time Sally has seen her dreams ripped out of her hands. But Sally’s happier ever after is no accident: Barry’s characters often have their fates in their own hands, but fumble it due to their inability to reckon with their truest selves. What distinguishes Sally, however, is her choice to be fully honest with John, and most importantly, with herself. This revelation lifts a weight off of Sally - after years of being a fame-obsessed performer and absent mother unhappy with her life, here she actually shows real love towards John. Her moment of reckoning is what prompts her to not only tell Barry to turn himself in but gives her the courage to leave him in the motel. After years of being trapped in Barry’s terrifying narrative, Sally’s confession to John provides her with the agency she needed to get out, even if it takes being broken to her core to do it (a story that’s even sadder, given her pre-existing past with abuse).

It’s this ability to tell the truth that makes Sally – when she follows that urge – a sometimes great actress and dramatist. From what we see of Sally in the later plot, she’s taken pains to maintain that devotion to truth in her life – to keep centering what’s real, and the work, instead of what other people think about her and her creations.

So while she’s not famous or doing the grandiose job she dreamed of, the reason she’s contented is because she knows she’s doing her craft right. It’s a useful lesson to us all because we can’t control the external world, their stories, and how they perceive us, but sticking with the truth will undoubtedly direct our own lives in a healthy direction. In the end, even if John is seeing this warped narrative of Barry, he’s living with Sally as his mother every day – so that’s giving him his best possible shot of taking a different road from his father.

Barry’s Biggest Takeaways

Throughout its four-season run, Barry has shown us how stories, whether the ones we tell ourselves or perform to others, can either propel us to good or lead us down a bleak path of ego-driven despair. While some viewers may have wanted Barry to die in a torturous way that equaled his horrendous crimes, in the end, he dies like nearly all of his victims - quickly, and with little time to have a big dramatic moment or process what was happening. In a sense, that’s what the show does; chip away at the masks these characters put on to hide from themselves. But for those that can face their inhumanity head-on, like Sally, life can exist. Just not one that you see in the movies.