Barry Series Finale Ending Explained

This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Barry.

Throughout the entire four-season run of HBO’s Barry, Bill Hader’s Barry Berkman continuously tried to convince himself and those around him that he was actually a good guy. In spite of the wake of bodies he’d left from his time in the Marines at Korengal; as a small-time hitman-for-hire in Cleveland; and in LA where he caught the acting bug; he was constantly trying to outrun his past and turn over a new leaf, starting now. By the end of the show’s series finale, “wow” — directed by Hader, as many of the best Barry episodes were — Barry’s complicated delusion as the guy he told himself he always was, a man upholding justice who somehow found himself in impossible situations that he had to shoot his way out of, becomes upsettingly realized. In reality, he was an irredeemable killer who destroyed the lives of the people close to him. 

It was a remarkably bleak conclusion, a real one-two punch of marathon TV-watching immediately following Succession’s mega-sized rollercoaster of a finale. The episode begins with the standoff between Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan) and Monroe Fuches (Steven Root) in the foyer of Nohobal. A tense hostage negotiation, with masterful performances from Carrigan and Root, fails, ending in a mutually assured bloodbath between the Chechyens and the Raven’s crews. Their whole exchange — about denial, safety, and the acceptance of true selves — speaks directly to the themes of the entire series, full of people running away from or trying (often futilely) to reinvent themselves by wearing different masks. Killer Barry to actor Barry; Fuches to criminal mastermind The Raven; narcissistic pain-in-the ass actor Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) to teacher and mentor; from struggling actor Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg) to disgraced showrunner to anything that doesn’t make her feel deep shame. 

At the end of that faceoff, Fuches, as it’s revealed when the shooting is over, leaps on top of John to protect him from the hail of bullets, and Noho Hank dies at the foot of Cristobal’s bronze statue, ending the torment of his guilt over but  never able to admit the role he played in sending the love of his life to his death by choosing safety over love. Hank built the whole Nohobal enterprise to hide his culpability; by honoring Cristobal’s dream of a sand empire, he tricked himself into thinking he could exonerate his actions to a dead man and himself so his own well-being wouldn’t crumble. That the building was full of huge glass windows was likely no mistake. The company was a thin ruse that started forming giant cracks the second Fuches got out of prison. 

On his way to the corporate HQ to save Sally and John, Barry makes a pit stop at a Wal-Mart coded store (for the second time this season) to buy guns, a dark take on how easy it is to acquire firearms in the United States. When he walks up to the young clerk, bored at their job at the department store gun counter, they barely react to this deranged man demanding guns with a single word — they just ask which kind — and when Barry walks out of the store with semi-automatics strapped to his back, no one bats an eye. The whole scene is a dismal and, frankly, scarily realistic jab at the normalized presence of military weapons in society. 

By the time he arrives the action is over. Fuches walks John out, covering the boy’s eyes to prevent him from seeing the amputated legs and guts spilled on the floor, wordlessly returns him to Barry and runs away instead of tolerating their troubled relationship any further. At that moment, he’s just a scared man, without a crew, facing down a guy carrying heat who has no hesitation about killing people. Fuches, who wanted nothing else but to kill Barry after his years in prison, ultimately couldn’t help himself feeling protective of the man for whom he was a demented father figure from the time Barry was just a kid. Seeing John (Zachary Golinger) over FaceTime with Hank at the top of the episode, you can see the glimmer in Fuches’ eyes, which could have been read as him mulling over a new plot to hurt Barry by doing something awful to his son, but it’s not. Knowing their history, it’s a “holy shit” moment for the guy that softened his hatred. His grown boy has a boy, too. It only made sense that his instinct was to become a sort of parent (or grandparent, really) for John.

Barry, Sally, and John slip away to a motel, where Barry’s delusions manifest further, telling Sally that it wasn’t in God’s plan for him to die, that he was redeemed — this all coming from the guy who combed through pastor podcasts until he found the one that effectively gave him the green light to kill his former acting teacher and another knotty patriarch in Barry’s life, Gene Cousineau. Sally is unconvinced; the only way for him to truly redeem himself, she says, is to turn himself in for the murder of Gene’s cop girlfriend, Janice Moss. By the morning, Sally and John have absconded, but that decision was made the second that Barry ignored Sally’s plea, instead suggesting that they could start the next chapter of their lives the next day. For Sally, there was no “next chapter” with Barry. She was already checked out when we met her working at that diner in Texas, trudging through an unfulfilled life as a fugitive and clearly resentful that she ever chose this path. Facing a pile of bodies alone, calling out to John with no response, and laying in bed with Barry like nothing serious had happened was the last straw.

The turning point in Barry’s legacy came right as Barry was prepared to turn himself in. Convinced Sally took John to Cousineau’s house, he barges in just as Gene’s agent Tom (Fred Melamed) is trying to sneak out, leaving a depleted Gene locked in his room reading article after article about how he was an accomplice in Janice’s death because he took drug money from Barry. Desperately yelling for Sally and John, Tom assures Barry that they’re not there. He’s lost the very thing he was trying to protect, the disappointment and sense of betrayal plain on his face. 

With nothing left for him, Barry is prepared to accept his fate and asks Tom to call the police. But Gene — stuck in a corner, accused of something he did not do with no real avenue out — emerges from his room holding the gifted prop gun from Rip Torn, the same one he accidentally shot his son Leo with. He shoots and kills Barry (his last words, an unceremonious “Oh, wow,” dying in the same way that most of his victims did). In a chilling shot, Barry is slumped on the living room chair with a bullet in his head and chest with Gene stony-faced on the couch just next to him, the sound of sirens swarming the house. If only he hadn’t pulled the trigger, Barry would have likely confessed and gone down once and for all for Janice’s death, maybe clearing Gene of any wrongdoing. Instead, in his wounded and rageful decision after all the harm Barry has caused for him and his family, he makes Barry a martyr.

In the episode’s final act, after another eight-or-so-year time jump, Sally has found a new life as a high school theater director with a teenage John (Jaeden Martell) watching the performance from the front row. After the show, she turns down the advances of the new AP History teacher — no more men for her, dealing with Barry was too heavy — and drives off alone as John goes to stay over at his friend Eric’s house. In her solitude, an intense mix of trauma and contentment consumes her. The man who she made terrible decisions for is long dead, but her feelings, guilt, the things she’s witnessed and done remain unprocessed and never will be. (Like she can ever talk to a therapist about all of that without seriously incriminating herself.) Barry, the live-action human typhoon, ruined her life, . At the same time, she’s been able to patch together an existence for her and John, something the accomplished on her own, summed up by staring at her simple bouquet of flowers.  

The final shot is on John, smiling with tears in his eyes.

At Eric’s house, John has decided to watch the long-in-development movie about Barry’s time with Gene, called The Masked Collector, against Sally’s wishes. Obviously — she doesn’t want that man to take up any more space for John or fill his brain with ideas about who his dad wasn’t. The real narrative has been absolutely bastardized — the movie, goofily acted, aggrandizes Barry as a war hero who stumbled into Gene’s conspiracy to kill Janice with the help of the Chechyan mob. The meta-movie’s final cards announce that Barry has been buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full honors, and Gene is rotting in jail for the murders of Janice and Barry. The final shot is on John, smiling with tears in his eyes. He can find peace in this version of his dad, remembering him as a patriotic father who taught him about the Bible and Abraham Lincoln. It’s an inaccurate memorial of the guy Barry always wished himself to be. He can ignore the truth about his parents that Sally told him when they were kidnapped to move forward with his life, in spite of his messed-up childhood.

This undeserved valorization of a terrible guy, as many people have pointed out on Twitter, smacks of movies like American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed movie starring Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sharpshooter who held problematically extremist views about Islam. Though it’s only more apparent with the entirety of the series now in perspective, versus watching the twisty inner workings of the plot unfold week after week, Barry was building toward this kind of conclusion all along. The shiny retelling of Barry’s life, where movie execs have reshaped a messy story into a bankable picture about a True Patriot, is a brilliant culmination and indictment of the Hollywood satire that the series was from the very beginning. Where the entirety of life is complicated, the machine of the movie biz will tend toward smoothing reality’s spikiness to fit into an easily digestible shape over a two-hour runtime that bolsters and feeds the worst parts of the American psyche.