At the beginning of the last season, Barry tried to settle into civilian life with a regular job. At the beginning of this season, he’s gone completely the other way. This time, Barry is back to contract killing. He’s not working with Fuches anymore, but rather picking up odd jobs from strangers on the dark web. As he becomes more and more disillusioned, Barry is less and less concerned with whether he’s a good person. Just when the series seemed to be settling into a familiar formula, the story has taken a wholly unexpected turn.
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As usual, Hader and Berg strike a pitch-perfect pace with the storytelling of this episode. Every scene has enough room to breathe without sticking around for too long. In the edit, cuts are used mercifully to eliminate unnecessary filler and keep the plot moving. Instead of showing NoHo Hank introducing himself to the cops and being taken down to the station, he leaves the office and the episode cuts to the interrogation room.
After a couple of years off thanks to a lengthy writing process and a global pandemic, the actors effortlessly slip back into their roles. Hader brings more depth and darkness to Barry than ever before as he briefly gives up on his quest to become a better person in the wake of the monastery massacre. Performance-wise, Hader continues to do the impossible with this role: making the unsympathetic sympathetic – and in the context of a comedy, no less. Anthony Carrigan’s NoHo Hank is still bubbly and upbeat in the face of gangland conflicts and Sarah Goldberg’s Sally Reed is just as self-absorbed (and hilariously oblivious to that self-absorption) as she always was.
The third-season premiere of Barry recaptures the tone of the first two seasons perfectly. What makes Barry unique is the combination of high-octane genre situations and everyday mundanity, and “forgiving jeff” has plenty of that. Barry stands in the flower section of Ralph’s, speaking to a client over the phone about the cheating, manipulative husband she wants him to kill, and he cuts her off to ask which flowers best say, “I love you.” Like the first two seasons, “forgiving jeff” occasionally interrupts its gritty realism with a slight surreal Lynchian edge. Throughout the episode, Barry hallucinates gunshot wounds appearing in the heads of people he cares about.
Before its end credits roll, “forgiving jeff” follows up on the biggest bombshell from season 2. In the second-season finale, just as Barry’s acting teacher Gene Cousineau was about to give up hope that his girlfriend Detective Moss’ killer would ever be found, he remembered what Fuches whispered in his ear when he took him to see her body: “Barry Berkman did this.” Thankfully, the confrontation between Gene and Barry that fans of the show have waited three years to see doesn’t disappoint. The scene is just as tense and unpredictable as it could be, and the complicated emotions are nailed by Hader and Henry Winkler, whose well-established father-son dynamic from the first two seasons comes crumbling down in a single conversation.
The opening scene – the episode’s namesake, in which one of Barry’s clients forgives his target, Jeff, and calls off the hit – introduces the notion that anybody can be forgiven if their remorse is sincere enough. This notion sticks with Barry as he tries to figure out his next move. Hank explains to Barry that forgiveness has to be earned and Gene tells him to “start f****** earning it!” The writers are heading into the endgame of the show now, with all the secrets out on the table. The conflict in “forgiving jeff” begs the ultimate question: can Barry be forgiven? This question has been posed since the very beginning of the series, but now that Barry has something specific to seek forgiveness for and all the parties involved know about it, the show can finally start answering that question.
With the shocks and surprises of “forgiving jeff,” another rollicking season of Barry is just getting started. The premiere culminates in a thrilling cliffhanger ending that raises the stakes of the characters’ interpersonal conflict and sets up a wild storyline for the rest of the season to explore. What happens next week is anybody’s guess, but Barry Berkman’s third outing has kicked off with the same combination of deadpan hilarity and high-stakes, nail-biting tension that made the first two such a disturbing delight.
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