Barry: the wizard
May 15, 2023 9:23 AM - Season 4, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Barry heads to LA to track down Cousineau. Fuches gets out of prison. Sally struggles to parent John.

Barry Recap: Justified Killings [Vulture / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA (21 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Sally struggles to parent John." -- these summaries are normally comically understated, but this one takes the cake.

"Fuches gets out of prison" was pretty awesome.
posted by umber vowel at 9:58 AM on May 15, 2023 [5 favorites]


Writers: Can we make people hate Sally? Like really hate her?

At least one viewer (me): OH HELL YES.

Sally went from being a pretty sympathetic character to just the worse abusive mother. I didn't mind her getting frustrated over John not wanting her burned grilled cheese sandwich, but straight up spiking his orange juice with vodka ARGH. I was 100% waiting for some horrible thing with John having alcohol poisoning and dying. Next up was waiting for her to accidentally shoot him by trying to use the gun to open the door...that locks FROM THE OUTSIDE? This doesn't even make any sense unless Barry and Sally thought they'd be making last stands in the family room with intruders coming in from the bedroom. Was this intentional, to make us realize Barry and Sally locked their kid in his bedroom at night, or just for the sake of the drama of the moment???

Needless to say, Barry's "we drop John off at an orphanage and kill ourselves" plan is currently the one has John's best chance for a better childhood involved. Not to mention, this was disturbing in its own right. What will happen when John goes, "Who's Barry?" 0_0 I really don't want this to have some kind of Thomas Hardy level ending where people die who shouldn't and it's just the worse.

Was it what's his name, the Dishwasher who was attacking the house? For as much as I was fuming about John's alcoholic slumber, this was insanely tense and played into my fears about John's safety. I think that's what triggered Sally to get the gun? John's well being?

Elsewhere in sunny California, we get a Blues Brothers inspired release of THE RAVEN. I very much enjoyed Fuches emerging from the prison like a dark winged butterfly from its chrysalis than seeing this evolution occur over time. I cannot wait for Barry and Fuches to meet, if only to see if Fuches remains the Raven, or even, what is it that Fuches wants out of Barry? The last time the two were in the same geographic location, Fuches earned himself beating after (pleasurable?) beating because he was trying to save Barry's life. Does he still have an affection for his pseudo-son/brother/hit man?

And Hank. He got it all and wants to pretend he wasn't complicit in the least in Cristobal's murder. Perhaps the most tragic figure in the show?

Gene's transformation seems legit...for now. Again, one more person I want Barry to engage with, if only to see if Barry would still want to kill him if Gene was actively trying to stop the movie. Gene's son took his dad's return, well? ish? (Yes, one more son who survived his parents' selfishness!)

And then we end up with Barry in the room with the person I really wanted to see him with the least. Not because Jim Moss isn't fascinating, and it seemed very likely he was waiting for Barry to resurface and saw Gene's resurfacing as a likely trigger, but...well, I want to see Barry engage with the other folks more!

Lastly, shoutout to having Barry jump from podcast to podcast looking for a Christian spokesperson to hop up and say, "No, you can kill, it's fine!"
posted by Atreides at 10:35 AM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


...that locks FROM THE OUTSIDE?

I think this is a clue that there was no home invasion- I think that Sally smashed up the house herself while she was blacked out. The shouts that we heard about being stabbed "in my eye" were things that were said by the man Sally killed back in S3.
posted by Uncle Ira at 11:29 AM on May 15, 2023 [15 favorites]


I recognize I’m not supposed to but I feel for Sally. I feel more for John and his existence is making this show a hard watch rn but I feel like she’d be doing better if she turned herself in for killing that guy or if she took John, went to a shelter for domestic violence survivors and started over. She has no agency and the learned helplessness that’s not unusual in those who have survived abuse. Get some antidepressants and google “how to make grilled cheese.”
posted by kat518 at 12:35 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]


I think this is a clue that there was no home invasion- I think that Sally smashed up the house herself while she was blacked out. The shouts that we heard about being stabbed "in my eye" were things that were said by the man Sally killed back in S3.

Gawd, this makes a lot of sense. Now I'm wondering if Barry purposefully didn't leave the gun loaded with just the safety on thinking this could happen.
posted by Atreides at 12:45 PM on May 15, 2023


Wasn’t there a hole in the house? Could Sally put a hole in the house?
posted by kat518 at 3:54 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


I don't recall seeing the hole in the side of the house after she stopped seeing the attacks. All we saw was the living room with furniture tipped over and items scattered everywhere.
posted by umber vowel at 5:25 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


"Fuches gets out of prison" was pretty awesome.

To top it off, it was an absolutely brilliant use of the "The Wizard."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:02 PM on May 15, 2023 [4 favorites]


How long have the "Next Week on Barry" teasers been so hilariously uninformative?
posted by whuppy at 6:42 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


I thought The Mandalorian had found a good use of Bill Burr. But ex-hockey player turned pro-murder podcasting pastor might be the best use of Bill Burr.
posted by Gary at 7:54 PM on May 15, 2023 [12 favorites]


Man, I love Stephen Root so much. The montage of his prison release is a top five Barry moment for me.

Just so, so much.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:15 PM on May 15, 2023 [8 favorites]


My interpretation of the Sally scene was that the dark figure following her around in the house and the voices were all part of a drunken nightmare, but the truck ramming the house and leaving the hole in the wall was real. I might be mistaken though.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 4:48 AM on May 16, 2023 [3 favorites]


Stephen Root Finally Gets His Revenge [Inverse]
posted by ellieBOA at 8:04 AM on May 16, 2023 [3 favorites]


I don't recall seeing the hole in the side of the house after she stopped seeing the attacks. All we saw was the living room with furniture tipped over and items scattered everywhere.

Yeah, that's my recollection too. I think Sally really did flip all the furniture over (while John slept on in his vodka coma), but that everything else was just in her head.

I'm wondering if Barry purposefully didn't leave the gun loaded with just the safety on thinking this could happen.

But if that were the case, why leave Sally with the gun at all? As soon as she loads it, John's in just the same danger he would have been anyway.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:53 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]


I think Barry spends a lot of time just carefully Not Thinking about things he's definitely thought about. So his gun safety approach to his kid is some mix of worrying that his kid could be like him, repressing that there's anything unusually violent about himself (because all boys are Like That), and being in denial about how dangerous it would be to leave Sally around a ready-made weapon (disabling the weapon so that it would be useful to her if she were sober enough, to sort of push blame for anything bad that might happen onto Sally).

I couldn't entirely figure out what was happening in the attack scene, which puts me with Sally I suppose. I'm leaning toward "genuine attack" (concluding with the truck ramming the house) that pushed Sally into a flashback of her last near-death experience. I felt like the guy really was in the house, too -- just that he realized he didn't want to do anything violent directly to Sally or her kid, and settled with scaring the life out of her instead. Absolute cheers to Sarah Goldberg's perfect, ultra-deliberate, drunken not-stumbling around the house.

When Barry first started looking for justification for murder in Christian podcasts, I thought that...wasn't such a big ask, actually. The one they gave us (justified killing in a minor league exposition game) was funnier than I expected.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:16 AM on May 16, 2023 [3 favorites]


I replayed the shadow-man's presence in the house, and when Sally enters the bedroom there's an edit where it's the shadow-man who starts slamming the door behind him, but is no longer there when the door closes. The silhouette was also the general shape of Barry, and I think it's more symbolic than real. There was no intruder in the house.

This makes me think that the car attack also didn't happen. The bed would have pinned Sally against the tall boy (that's what those chests of drawers are called in some catalogs!). She walks out to the aftermath of her own blackout.
posted by kandinski at 4:30 PM on May 17, 2023 [3 favorites]


Having been raised by an alcoholic mother, this episode was triggering as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Right down to learning my mother's past wasn't at all what I thought it was (though not quite finding out her name wasn't even her real name).

Having sat with it for a few days, I've mostly landed on everything that happens in the house being a black out hallucination and Sally tearing up the place herself. As others have said, she has no agency, no power in this situation, or at least she doesn't feel she does. And the property destruction is a way of her subconscious trying desperately to express that.

God I remember when we first flashed forward and my immediate reaction was, "that can't be real. There's only booze and a donut in the fridge. That wouldn't be true if they had an actual kid together." Boy oh boy. I don't often say this, but put CPS in control of that child immediately.

I got a good laugh out of Barry saying "boys instinctively know how to turn off a safety."

Nohobal felt like Entertainment720 for organized crime. I'm sure we'll learn it doesn't really do anything. Just an empty attempt for Hank to outrun his guilt.
posted by dry white toast at 9:12 PM on May 17, 2023 [5 favorites]


I got a good laugh out of Barry saying "boys instinctively know how to turn off a safety."

This line distracted me: it was a Glock; it doesn't have a safety. What a weird choice by the show's armorer given that line. (I believe it was the same pistol model as the one Barry snatched from the fed in the botched prison hit, but it's also bog standard cop issue.)
posted by supercres at 10:51 PM on May 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


(Though in retrospect, I guess it's a more strategic lie for Barry than "It doesn't have a safety")
posted by supercres at 10:55 PM on May 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


The line was “Boys instinctively know how to operate guns and cars” though wasn’t it?
posted by chill at 11:18 PM on May 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


When Barry goes to buy ammo and the clerk is legally required to show him photos of what guns can do. And he’s like um, yeah.
posted by bunderful at 7:16 PM on May 20, 2023


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