Created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
3.04 “all the sauces”
Written by Jason Kim
Directed by Alec Berg
Starring Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan and Henry Winkler
New episodes airing Sundays on HBO

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Last week, I opened my Barry review by admitting the show had started to get harder to follow this season, because I am a small boy who can only carry so many plot threads in my brain - especially when they're being delivered to me in thirty-minute-long chunks, once per week. Almost every character in Barry's wide ensemble was moving in different directions. And that continues this time, enough that I'm going to break this thing down by characters. Everything ends in a potentially more streamlined place, though, which is promising.

Barry

The episode does an elegant job showing the effects of one of Barry's hits. A married couple talk on the phone, hang up, Barry kills the husband and we cut to the wife, who gets a little older and a lot more vacant. The murder is actually the first thing we saw in Barry's pilot, and the scene is a clever way to deal with the effects Barry has on the people around him. It isn't especially novel (there was an extended joke about a dead henchman's family in the first Austin Powers movie in 1997, and Quentin Tarantino's been talking about turning the effect the main character's killing of a mother has on a child in the first scene of Kill Bill into a full movie for years) but it's an interesting look at Barry himself.

He started as a cypher and the murder we see repeated here was coming from an empty, aimless dude who did whatever he was told. For a while in season two, he wouldn't have handled that murder in the same way. He probably would have at least resisted taking it on as a job. Now that we're in season three, he's picked up some of his old bad habits, though. It feels like he's turning back into a cypher.

Case in point, he takes on a job from NoHo Hank and spends the episode moving a bomb in place under the Bolivians' Los Angeles HQ. Hank wants the Bolivians killed while Cristobal is out. Barry's set to detonate the bomb with an app called Detonate (it's possible it's spelled Deton8 or something), but it doesn't work. Whether because of a Bluetooth error, a software glitch, or something else, Barry isn't able to blow the thing up in time. Cristobal returns and gets into a big fight with his stepfather. And then the bomb goes off. Barry hits Cristobal with his car.

Gene

But wait! Barry isn't actually falling back on his old habits and only took the Chechan job so he could show up at Gene's house with a duffel bag full of cash. Last week, I had guessed Barry took the job because killing is the only thing he knows he's good at, and that competence shields him from the real world. There may still be some truth there, but in this case killing is also the way Barry can provide for another person. The ethical issues with murder don't seem to faze Barry, so if he can go blow a half dozen people up to achieve a different goal, he'll blow a half dozen people up.

Gene is stunned by the money, but then he spends a lot of time stunned. Walking around with his manager Tom (Fred Melamed), Gene runs into Joe Mantenga, playing himself. Years ago, Joe had taken a restraining order out against Gene, but now he's read about his old enemy's work helping a veteran with his acting class and he couldn't be more impressed. Joe invites Gene over for dinner.

On top of that, Gene's outburst on set, when he hit Barry, yelled at him, and ran away, was mistaken for a passionate performance. His part in that show has been expanded. Tom's excited about the "collective amnesia we've been hoping for," now that Gene's getting noticed and the industry has forgotten he's terrible.

It's a messy point, but it's one the show has been building around Barry for a couple of years now - you can be a terrible person in this world and get praised for it as long as people don't have all the context. And you can only really make that point by bringing everybody down to Barry's level. So, now, basically everybody in Barry is unlikable.

Fuches

Having returned to America, Fuches is building an unincorporated civilian army to take his old employee down. He gives motives, and Barry's home address, to the wife and son of the man from the flashback killing and the father of the acting student Barry killed. The season one, episode one chickens are coming home to roost. Fuches is also competent, but he's weak. He can't do anything himself. His path will absolutely cross with Barry's soon, but first he's going to send some poor randos to their deaths.

Sally

This episode belongs to Sally, and Sarah Goldberg does an excellent job covering a wide emotional range. She's also still flanked by D'Arcy Carden's Natalie, the funniest part of the show and a rare bright spot in a series of stories that have gotten increasingly dark.

Sally's show Joplin is a critical smash (98% on Rotten Tomatoes to its competitor Pam's 27%). She takes the news in stride, barely letting it sink in at all and then, realizing her work is connecting, breaks down on stage. In her euphoria, Sally gives a speech where she thanks, among other people, her boyfriend. Her screen daughter Katie (Elsie Fisher) confronts Sally after the speech, drilling home that Barry's a violent guy, who shouldn't talk to her the way he did. Sally, perhaps actually hearing another person's concerns for the first time in years, is stunned. She breaks up with Barry. And he's confused. "I had a bad day. So, I'm not allowed to have a bad day?" he asks. But it's done. He has to clean his stuff out of their apartment. And I'm confused too, primarily because of how sharply the writers have turned away from whatever they were trying to say about Sally. This feels less like it developed because of something had happened, and more like it just developed after something else had happened. I don't know what to make of it. We'll see if next week provides any answers.