Barry: ronny/lily
April 29, 2019 11:19 AM - Season 2, Episode 5 - Subscribe

An encounter that Barry never could have predicted has surprising effects.

Bill Hader embraces absurdity and breaks Barry wide open (Vikram Murthi for TV/AV Club)

Bill Hader wrote, acted in and directed this episode, and at the end of it he was "a shell of a man."

Fun fact: the tree that Lily climbed was fake.
posted by filthy light thief (17 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was wonderfully weird, but also expanded the story.

Fuches is the devil to Barry, and it's telling that in his vision, instead of leaving the battlefield to join family or friends, he walked down the middle and made a deal with the devil.

It'll be interesting to see where they go in three more episodes, and they have a 3rd season, as of April 10.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:23 AM on April 29, 2019


This was kind of a jump the shark situation for me. The slapstick and violence and outrageous hijinks are fine. Demon girl pushed it over the top, took me out of the story, tho. At some point, I'm going, "okay, wtf..." Maybe they'll pull it off next week. But if it transitions into more silly cartoonishness, I'm out.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:39 AM on April 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


This was one of my favorite episodes of television of all time.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:15 PM on April 29, 2019 [26 favorites]


I really enjoyed it (although I'm also happy that this isn't how the show is every week!).

The stunt actors were phenomenal. The house was such good set design -- realistic yet trippy, with all those karate awards. I liked that the little girl was this weird demon spawn but Barry still didn't want to actually kill her. And that the dad was wearing pajamas the whole time haha

Anyway, interesting how Barry suddenly realized that he'd signed his soul away when he went into business with Foches, and couldn't get back in the car with him. The show's got a very Dr. Faustus thing going on, and I like it!
posted by rue72 at 4:11 PM on April 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


This was kind of a jump the shark situation for me.

Are you sure? Henry Winkler wasn't even in this episode.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:48 PM on April 29, 2019 [38 favorites]


quite a wild ride, although i feel like i want them to be going somewhere specific with such a stylized, screenwritey flavor in this episode, weaving in and out of dreamworld logic and generally early-coen-brosing it up. it did stretch against credulity at times, and i can't get past the fact that barry blows past "must not kill" to "gotta go back in to kill the kid" so fast, but this was a pretty wonderful bit of television!
posted by rotten at 6:12 PM on April 29, 2019


Every second of that was phenomenal.
posted by oulipian at 6:53 PM on April 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


This episode had me recommending it to someone who subscribes to Acorn (more British than PBS’s version of the BBC), but who is also a martial artist. How many other shows can attract such an audience?

Horrified by hilarity. I was rolling, I was laughing so hard. 3rd season? Yes, more!
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 10:28 PM on April 29, 2019


i can't get past the fact that barry blows past "must not kill" to "gotta go back in to kill the kid" so fast

When he first goes back for her, he's yelling out that he's going to take her to visit her relatives in Chicago -- I think he was hoping he could clean up the situation without having to kill anyone else.
posted by jdherg at 11:27 PM on April 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


This was one of my favorite episodes of television of all time

Yep. Bill Hader is just about my favorite person in television right now. Phenomenal. I laughed ("what am I getting again?" "NEEDLE AND THREAD!", That INSANE sequence in the grocery store), I (almost) cried (that thousand yard stare when he's arriving home from Afghanistan only to find....Fuchs). Just amazing.

I've never seen a show quite like Barry. It's something else.
posted by biscotti at 5:15 PM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


This was kind of a jump the shark situation for me. The slapstick and violence and outrageous hijinks are fine. Demon girl pushed it over the top, took me out of the story

The post-credits "making of" at the end of the episode helped this along for me. It was written and directed by Hader and it was just kinda plopped in there. "Fuchs = devil" was really the only thing it was meant to cover, everything else was just fun (and I imagine also a learning experience for Hader's future ideas). I'm pretty sure they can't carry ersatz-zombies forward, so the episode had an entirely different investment for me.
posted by rhizome at 7:37 PM on April 30, 2019


This entire episode was pound for pound a better sequence of war, loss and compromise than the Battle of Winterfell. Much more interesting zombies and freaky white walkers, AND the shots were actually lit well enough to see!
posted by FatherDagon at 10:24 AM on May 1, 2019 [14 favorites]


Yesterday was just shitty on an epic level work-wise and just... a low point for the year for me, personally. I finally got to a work stopping point and made myself dinner, sat down on the couch with my #1 TV-watching cat, and put this episode on.

My friends, this tiny slice of television was battling a mood so foul that all hope seemed lost. I was just going through the motions, and wanted to take my mind off everything for 30 minutes. Five or ten minutes in, I was completely absorbed and laughing my head off. Was it fully believable? No. Was I willing to suspend disbelief and just go with it? Hell yes. I need to get my brother to see this, he doesn't have HBO in any form but he'd love this.

Kudos to Bill Hader. And Stephen Root, they were masterful in this.
posted by jzb at 10:41 AM on May 1, 2019 [9 favorites]


It was like the Coen Brothers on crack. Absolutely phenomenal. I loved the desert scene where everyone's coming home from the war to their loved ones and all that's waiting for Barry is Fuchs, dressed in black and looking like the Devil.

I can't wait to see where this show goes from here, and I'm stoked to learn it's been renewed for another season.
posted by essexjan at 1:11 PM on May 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


I just wanted to point out that nothing got really weird until after Barry got beat up the first time. I am just going to pretend that he got his bell rung and that everything afterward was amplified through a haze of disorientation and eventually blood loss.
posted by komara at 10:41 AM on May 4, 2019 [4 favorites]


When he first goes back for her, he's yelling out that he's going to take her to visit her relatives in Chicago -- I think he was hoping he could clean up the situation without having to kill anyone else.

Not only that, Barry is wearing the ski mask and goggles so he can protect his identity to find a way out of killing Ronny. He didn't hide his face for any other murder we've seen him commit or attempt so far, the only way to save Ronny was to make sure he couldn't be identified. When he turns around to go for Lily, he pulls the mask back down showing again that he wants to deal with her without killing. If he intended to kill her, he'd have no reason to hide his face.

I thought it was a clever way to show us what's going on in Barry's head while making it easier to shoot the fight scenes with a stunt double.
posted by peeedro at 6:09 PM on May 4, 2019 [6 favorites]


According to Hader, the entire episode was written for the little girl. Someone suggested they use her as an extra, and they decided to create an entire episode around her character.
posted by Brittanie at 7:16 PM on May 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


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