The Profound Meditation on Forgiveness and Redemption
HBO's Barry: 15 Things You Missed
The Barry season 4 ending was just as ambiguous and thought-provoking as audiences have come to expect from the show, with deeper meanings to unpack and uncertain fates to ponder for some characters. Barry’s highly anticipated series finale, titled “wow,” follows on from the shocking cliffhanger ending of the previous episode with Barry arming himself to the teeth and preparing to save Sally and John from their captor, NoHo Hank. But, while that penultimate episode seemed to set up an explosive showdown in the finale, in true Barry fashion, “wow” completely subverted those expectations and offered an ending to the series that was totally unexpected.
Dying NoHo Hank holds Cristobal's statue in Barry
The genius of Barry has always come from Bill Hader’s ability to steer the story in directions that feel both wholly unexpected and also ominously inevitable. That extended to the finale episode, which concluded the show’s profound meditation on forgiveness and redemption without losing sight of the Hollywood satire it started as. Every character ended up where they needed to be by the time the story came to a close. Yet, there are still a lot of unanswered questions to explore and characters whose fates are left open to interpretation in the Barry season 4 ending.
Bill Hader as Barry and Stephen Root as Fuches in HBO Barry
NoHo Hank's Tragic Demise and Unfulfilled Love
NoHo Hank’s character arc took a dark turn at the midpoint of Barry season 4 when he had the love of his life, Cristobal, executed by his own men. After the time jump, Hank was shown to still be haunted by Cristobal’s death. He named his company Nohobal after their ship name, and he put a big bronze statue of Cristobal in the lobby of the office building. Whenever Fuches mentioned Cristobal’s death, it touched a nerve with Hank, who was never able to forgive himself for being responsible for the death of the man he loved.
Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root) in a white tank in Barry
Hank was ultimately killed in the crossfire of a shootout that only happened because he couldn’t bear to confess his role in Cristobal’s death. In his dying moments, Hank reached out to take the extended hand of Cristobal’s statue, making for one of the Barry finale’s most memorable shots. Hank could never move on from the guilt, so dying was the only way for him to achieve peace. His reaching out to Cristobal’s statue symbolized that perfectly.
The Unexpected Redemption of Fuches and Barry's Tragic End
Even though Fuches has wanted Barry dead for the past two seasons, in the end, he dove heroically through gunfire to protect John from being shot and then gave John back to Barry without using him as a bargaining chip or leverage. Fuches seemed to want nothing more than to kill Barry. But in the end, even though he had the opportunity, he didn’t do it. When Hank told him that Barry had a son, Fuches had a complete change of heart because he saw the opportunity for a second chance. He failed in his role as Barry's father figure. That made him want to give Barry the opportunity to be the father that he could never be. When Fuches returned John to his father, he and Barry shared a silent moment of mutual understanding, similar to Walt and Jesse’s final encounter in the Breaking Bad finale.
Fuches (Stephen Root) confronting NoHo Hank in the Barry season 4 finale
After all the terrible things Barry did and all his failed attempts to earn forgiveness, it seemed that the only suitable way to end Barry’s story was with the title character’s death. The series finale killed off Barry as expected, but in an entirely unpredictable way. Just as Barry was preparing to turn himself in, he was shot in the chest, then again in the head. The title of the episode comes from Barry’s final line before his death. After being shot the first time, Barry fell into a chair and looked up just long enough to see which of his many enemies had killed him. When he saw it was Gene, he said, “Oh, wow.” Considering all the formidable criminal underworld figures who had tried and failed to kill Barry over the years – Hank, Fuches, Esther, the biker gang – he was surprised that the one who finally managed to kill him was his bumbling, mild-mannered acting teacher.
Gene sitting by Barry's corpse in Barry
The Ironic Fate of Gene Cousineau and the Epilogue
When he learned that Gene had accepted $250,000 in blood money from Barry, Jim Moss began to question Gene’s account of Janice Moss's heartbreaking death in Barry season 1. After making the mistake of speaking to journalist Lon O’Neil, Gene promised Jim that he would stop exploiting Janice’s murder to boost his profile. But when a supposed agent called saying Daniel Day-Lewis wanted to come out of retirement to play him, Gene couldn’t resist. When Gene described Barry as a sympathetic soul in an attempt to convince Mark Wahlberg to play him, he unwittingly confirmed Jim’s suspicions that Gene was allied with Barry and involved in Janice’s murder.
Gene's fate revealed by a title card in Barry
Following Barry’s death, the finale had another time jump. Years after Barry was killed, Sally took a job as a high school theater director. After a student performance of Our Town, while Sally and a teenage John were walking to her car, she was stopped by the school’s new AP history teacher. When he asked her out on a date, she bluntly rejected him. John asked if he could stay at a friend’s house, and she gave him permission. At his friend’s house, John watched The Mask Collector, a wildly falsified biopic of Barry Berkman that revealed the fate of the remaining characters.
John (Barry's son) smiling in Barry
