Created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
3.07 “candy asses”
Written by Liz Sarnoff
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'm writing this first chunk of the review on Monday, June 6. My plan was to watch Barry and write it up. My wife is pregnant and we were given a July 1 due date, but she's had high blood pressure, and we've been to the hospital a few times in the past week. Today her OB made the call to induce on Friday. This Friday, in four days. I'm going to have a baby son by the time the next Barry episode airs.

I had a very earnest, sincere experience a few years ago and I'm going to detail it here, fully knowing it'll come across as cheesy and maybe even fake. It was the kind of revelation a character in a young adult novel would have. I've dealt with depression almost all of my life and have written before about the feeling of not wanting to be alive. There is a distinction there between that feeling and wanting not to be alive—though I have also felt that, in smaller quantities. It isn't an active thing, it isn't saying, "I want to die." It's saying, "I have been depressed so long that it would be okay if I was not alive." And I love my partner and my family and my friends and I love you a little for reading this, truly, but there is something different, lesser maybe, but different, about loving a piece of art that you had nothing to do with, and that doesn't know you exist.

And the cheesy, middle school-level, Coldplay-song-depth thing here is that I had rewatched part of The Tree of Life when the extended cut was released in 2018 and then, an hour later, I was laying on the floor, eyes closed, breathing slowly after doing yoga with my wife, the person who means most to me, and I thought, "It is worth being alive because today I got to watch part of The Tree of Life in an apartment I live in with the person next to me. If I can have forty afternoons like this one, that's worth all the terrible things I've had to deal with." Walking out of the CinéArts theater at Palo Alto Square (RIP) in 2011, I remember feeling that The Tree of Life had helped me understand my father and grandfather better—and I liked the film quite a bit. And then, seven years later, in a long depression, it hit me again and it was art I was thankful for.

It's a big, important movie, The Tree of Life. But The Naked Gun is also something that makes me happy to be alive. Roger Rabbit, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Final Flesh, various episodes of The Simpsons and Joe Pera Talks With You and the "Not Jackie Chan" sketch on Tim and Eric, Awesome Show Great Job. In the right light, with the right things going on, with the wrong things in need of a counteraction, I can watch these and think, "If I was dead, I wouldn't be able to watch this right now." There are David Berman poems that make me feel that way. The horns in "I Second That Emotion" make me feel that way. There's a Twitter account that repurposes PornHub comments as captions for the current, bafflingly terrible version of the comic strip Heathcliff and last week one of them made me laugh so hard I cried. It was one of the great moments of my year.

On this week's episode of Barry, we're almost at the season finale and Barry, like Fuches at the beginning of the last installment, is dying on the ground. In his mind, he's on a foggy beach with everybody he's murdered. He's happy to see them, but they recognize him as the reason they're dead. In reality, he's in the back of Ryan Madison's father's car.

Ryan Madison is the guy Barry killed at the beginning of the series. I've struggled this season with how many characters Bill Hader and his writers have introduced to the series, how many old, completed plotlines they've opened back up again, rather than move their story forward. But this episode, which relies hard on happenstance, made it clear to me that this was always the point. We were always going to wind up with a bunch of contrived situations crashing into each other.

Besides Barry winding up at the mercy of a man whose life he ruined:

Sally is offered a writing job on The New Medusas, the show that killed her own project, Joplin
Natalie now runs her own show (Just Desserts, which has a perfectly overused, driven-into-the-ground pun name) at the same TV network and her project is a little too similar to Joplin for Sally's taste
NoHo Hank is in Bolivia looking for Cristobal and ends up getting The Vanishing-ed to a concrete prison cell, assumedly by somebody working for Cristobal's wife
Fuches is brought to the police by Janet Moss's father after a failed attempt to lead another potential killer toward Barry
Albert Nguyen puts Fuches' story together with Gene's and realizes his old army buddy Barry is probably murdering people
While Annie films his MasterClass, Gene is confronted by Janet's dad (working off information from Albert) and, in a shot right out of GOAT film Total Recall, Janet's dad realizes Gene is lying in an effort to protect the man who turned his life around, but who he was trying to kill just a few episodes ago

This is complicated, it relies on coincidences and, if you didn't think about Barry at all in the two years since its last season aired, you could have forgotten who a few of the characters in this episode were. I rewatched the first two seasons in March and I didn't remember Ryan Madison's name. When all these different threads come together, it's divine. I still have misgivings about the way Barry's turned into such an unlikable character. I'm not saying this season has been perfect, but this confluence of events—the motorcycle chase, the press junket, Vanessa Bayer… I think I've been watching a show that is no longer spotless, but is perhaps more necessary.

And it made me happy to be alive. And I will show it to my son when he's old enough. And I am lucky to live at a time when this good stuff is being made. And I cannot keep the world from my child, who will start breathing something like ten hours after this post goes live. The cost of buying a house and the racists and the rapists and the alt-right who are just joking and the slugs saying trans women aren't women and Israel and Lindsey Graham and Rob Schneider and Purdue and billionaires laying people off and the good chance that OCD is inherited and the cost of certain art books in museum gift shops and the school shootings and the empathy desert that we all have to live in, after the school shootings. I can't do a fucking thing about any of it.

I have been failing my son for the past nine months because I am bringing him into a world with all of this—and he doesn't even have teeth. But I am also bringing him into a world with Barry. It won't fix anything, but if he enjoys it like I do, my son will be able to store it away and maybe after he watches a public option get struck down by some politicians, or an old friend he hadn't seen since the seventh grade is killed by a drunk driver, he'll be able to think, "This world is hell but at least I got a few great season of Barry." And I know that sounds dramatic, but the world is hell. We’ve been getting a few great seasons of Barry and I hold a place for them in my heart, like a light, for when the night is too long.