After four seasons, HBO’s Barry has taken its final bow. The Bill Hader-led comedy went through a number of enormous changes in the final season, leading to what seemed like an epic confrontation between hit-man Barry (Hader) and semi-legit crime boss Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), with a few other characters stuck in the middle. So was it a bloodbath? Did everyone die? Or did the show head in another direction entirely? How did Barry end?
If you’ve been watching for the past four seasons, you probably know the answer to this one: Barry ended very much on its own terms, with a finale that was both inevitable, frustrating, and often both funny and bleak. That all said, let’s get into it. Here’s the Barry series finale ending, explained.
Barry Series Finale Ending, Explained:
We began the episode pretty much where we left off the penultimate one, with Noho Hank holding Barry’s wife (girlfriend?) Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg) and his son John hostage as leverage to get his rival — and Barry’s former handler — Fuches (Stephen Root) to the offices of NohoBal for a showdown.
Meanwhile, Barry is on a rampage and marches into a big box store to buy as many guns as possible. He knows where Sally and John are, and he’s about to bring holy hell down on both Noho Hank and Fuches.
Back at NohoBal, Hank and Fuches face off; but things change as soon as Fuches finds out about Barry’s son. Fuches says he’ll drop everything and stop terrorizing Hank if the latter lets John and Sally go, and just admits he killed his lover, Cristobal (Michael Irby). Hank can’t do that, so Fuches shoots him. What follows is a volley of gunfire, ending in both gangs dead, including Hank, who crawls up to the statue of Cristobal in the NoHoBal lobby and holds the statue’s hand as he dies.
Fuches, though, is fine. And so is John, who he jumped on to save his life. Fuches brings John out to Barry, and gives the son to the father, finally doing something nice and selfless for Barry after all these years. Barry takes John — and Sally, who also survived the massacre — and they flee.
That night, Sally tells Barry he needs to give himself up to the authorities, but Barry thinks god has other plans for him… So she takes John and leaves. Distraught, Barry heads to his former acting teacher Gene Cousineau’s (Henry Winkler) house to see if Gene knows where Sally and John have gone. Only issue, Gene is dealing with some problems of his own. Specifically, he’s being blamed for murders committed by Barry. And just as Barry decides to turn himself in, Gene shoots him in the heart.
“Oh wow,” says Barry, and Gene shoots him one more time, with the screen cutting to black.
Before you think Barry went the Sopranos route, we then cut back to Gene sitting on his couch with the smoking gun (Rip Torn’s prop gun, in fact) and Barry with a bullet wound in his head. RIP Barry.
It’s not over yet, though… Cutting to an unspecified time in the future, Sally and a high school-aged John are now living in some sort of non-California place (you know because it’s snowing). She’s a high school drama teacher who isn’t interested in dating, but otherwise seems settled — or at least, okay.
John, meanwhile, is not. He heads back to a friend’s house and after refusing a drink watches The Mask Collector, a movie that’s about everything we’ve just watched in the past four seasons of Barry, but Hollywood style. Barry is a good actor, Gene is a good teacher, and it ends in the pitched gun battle we were denied in this very episode. The series ends with Older John, enraptured with this satisfying story of his father’s heroism.
And that’s the gist of it, right? Barry was always about how the allure of acting and Hollywood doesn’t connect with reality. We’re all making movies out of our own lives, but rarely does the narrative we live follow the dramatic arcs and pleasing resolutions we see on screen. There are certainly arguments to be made about how well (or not) the finale worked, but unlike the character of Barry, the show definitely went out on its own terms.
