Created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
3.06 “710N”
Written by Duffy Boudreau
Directed by Bill Hader
Starring Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan and Henry Winkler
New episodes airing Sundays on HBO

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I think the show Barry has, by now, established that it isn't chastising us for liking the character Barry. It's just making him an irredeemable monster after two seasons spent slowly moving in the opposite direction. Bill Hader, Alec Berg, and their crew have two more episodes to introduce a thematic reason for the tonal shift, and, if the rest of this season is any indication of their intent, I'm worried it won't happen and we'll enter another two year hiatus without much of an anchor. If we're just looking at this episode, though, we have confirmation they can still put together one hell of an action sequence.

Before we spent the final ten minutes of "710N" in a highway motorcycle chase, before anything happened, the "Previously On" lead-in from HBO included Barry's old army buddy Chris Lucado (Chris Marquette), from the first season. You remember what happened with Chris: way back in the seventh episode, Barry killed his frightened, pleading friend to ensure the police wouldn't find out about their botched raid on a Bolivian airstrip. Barry then took all his anger, self-hatred and frustration and channeled it into one perfect line reading at Sally's big performance in front of Gene's class and a semi-interested agent. You remember because it was a perfect plotline that ended in what might still be the most chilling scene this show's pulled off. But that's the thing - it ended. Barry was changed by it and, through him, Sally and Fuches were changed by it. Lessons were learned and the story moved forward.

For the third week in a row, I have to write that Barry is moving backward. Chris's widow (Karen David) and son are back in the mix. We don't find out until this episode's final minutes, but she's the nth character Fuches has come to with evidence that Barry killed her loved one, and we're left with an exciting cliffhanger, but it also means relitigating the morality of events everybody - from Barry to you and me - was pretty clear about.

Fuches's other big recruitment this time around are a group of motocross dudes led by Traci, sister to Taylor, one of the other marines killed off in the back half of Barry's first season. They're pissed! One of them shoots Fuches in the chest and walks away, leaving him for dead in the desert.

Despite what Barry might have wanted, Fuches is rescued and nursed back to health by a family. In a hilarious moment, he asks the family's daughter, "What do you and your people call water?" "Water," she says, before letting him know he's 20 miles outside LA. That same woman apparently falls in love with Fuches and he's once again faced with the situation he had in Chechnya - a beautiful woman wants to spend her life with this horrible asshole, but the horrible asshole has to go off and try to kill his former employee. Fuches steals the family's truck after seeing the news article about Gene helping Barry through acting classes.

Sally meets with a new TV exec, played by Vanessa Bayer, which can only be a good thing. I keep expressing reservations about new characters, but Vanesa Bayer is the perfect anchor for everything. She describes the TV business using noises and facial expressions I couldn't hope to transliterate here. She offers Sally a writing job on the show that killed Joplin. That's Sally's scene.

The bikers return for an amazing chase that plays like a direct rebuttal to Michael Bay's recent widescreen headache AmbuLAnce. The bikers slowly, clumsily surround Barry's car and he speeds off in a sequence reminiscent of last season's nearly episode-length fight with a karate instructor and his near-supernatural daughter. You need good action to sell this stuff, and Barry's action is always ridiculously fun. You can't do the Monty Python shoestring budget epic thing anymore. They perfected it. You have to make incredible action if you want me to believe I'm watching incredible action. What We Do In The Shadows is another brilliant show that understands this - the special effects in that thing (and its movie) are good and it never uses the comedy crutch of, "Oh, we just half-assed this thing, that's fun, right?" Even as I worry it's falling apart thematically, Barry brings a perfect chase when it needs to.

As all of this is happening, Gene gets an opportunity to teach a MasterClass and brings his ex, Laura (Laura San Giacomo) in. It's his own version of Barry's attempt to help the people he's fucked over so that they'll forgive him. It lasts about two minutes, because you can't keep introducing or reintroducing major characters to a half-hour show and give everybody a full story. There's a funny framing device in this episode where Sally, Barry, and NoHo Hank all get separate life advice from Mitch (Tom Allen), who runs Beignets by Mitch. I can't take it as just a recurring joke, though. Mitch gets more screen time than NoHo Hank and Gene combined, and Barry's stung me enough this season that I have to worry this new joke character is going to be the center of some other storyline next season. And it'll be funny, but I'm going to be left wondering why we can't just get more development on the things we already care about and are anxious to see play out.