The final season of Barry is driven by one central question - "What is the worst possible choice a character could make in this moment?" It is the lifeblood of every single scene. The show has doubled down on its absurdity to the point that it's become an idiot plot except somehow in a good way. These people are all morons, their egos and delusions are always their undoing, and yet, every bad decision they make says something about who they are. 

Barry sees himself as the hero of this story, accountability is nothing to him but a tool to get what he thinks he deserves. Sally, the opposite, believing herself unworthy of her old life because of her past actions. Gene wants to honestly find redemption, but can't see the way his own desire for more than his washed-up career comes into conflict with that. Hank wants to be the top dog of LA, believing he can achieve that dream while still holding onto the man he loves, not seeing the wedge he's driving between them. They've all doomed themselves to hells of their own creation, in one way or another. Forced to live isolated, unfulfilling lives. Superficially getting what they always wanted but permanently severed from everything that once made them truly happy. Except, in a twist even more unexpected than the sudden time jump, Fuches. 

Somehow the most transparently self-serving character in the entire show is the one to see his vanity for what it is and to embrace who he is. He could have ended up like all the others, superficially happy as the mythical Raven but deeply unsatisfied without Barry in his life to manipulate. But unlike the others, he used his time alone and isolated to reflect. It's him who is somehow able to drop the thesis of this show, about how all of these people put on masks and pretend to be someone else in order to hide how much they resent themselves. He somehow gets out of this show with one of the only two happy endings, and probably finishes as the most emotionally mature and stable member of the cast.

It might not quite live up to the heights of the previous season, but the final season of Barry is still everything you could hope for. Every single event feels like part of an endless series of dominoes stretching out from that very first person Barry killed in the pilot of the show. It's absurd, but never random. Silly, yet nonetheless deathly serious. In doing so, it delivers what will probably go down as one of my all time favorite television endings: the exploitative and insincere Hollywood industry taking this story of a sociopath's violent streak and turning it into a heroic tale about a traumatized veteran whose faults can always be blamed on someone else. Barry Berkman died before he ever got to see himself praised for the hero he thought he was, and let's face it, the hero he never would have been, even if he had lived to turn himself in like he promised. People see the cruelty and injustice of violence all around them and constantly look for an explanation, a justification. It needs a logic. And to the world, the story of a veteran's PTSD being exploited is a more comfortable, easier to understand narrative than that of a sociopath who killed anyone who stood in the way of a life he wanted but never deserved.

Favorite episode: wow

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