Barry's Return to Darkness Ends a Stellar Second Season

If I were to pitch Barry to someone who didn't know it, I might suggest that it's a bit like Breaking Bad, but a comedy. But that's not really accurate. Walter White pretty early on revealed himself as an evil man, and his justifications allowed him to commit more and more heinous things, with only the occasional effort to perform some kind of redemptive act.

Barry is about a man who wrestles with his evil nature, and wishes to be good.

We know Barry to be an expert killer - we see his first kills in a flashback of his time in Afghanistan, and we know that he has a unique talent for violence. And in this way, Barry is cursed by his greatest talent - his ability to dole out death. He would far rather have a productive talent - to be an artist, an actor. Even if he'll never be a great star, he just wants to define himself as something better, beautiful, and good. Like so many, he comes to Hollywood to reinvent himself, and so desperately wants to do that because the reality of what he is and what he has been is so horrible.

Season one of Barry ended with his murder of Janice Moss, the detective who had finally caught on to his criminal life. This act, and the earlier act of killing a former war buddy to prevent him from going to the cops, was an act of self-interested violence.

Because Barry does not want to be a bad person, but he also does not want to pay for his crimes by losing the new life that he's been trying to build for himself. To arrive in Los Angeles, connect with an acting teacher who, despite being sleazy in myriad ways, is still fundamentally caring and insightful, and to find happiness with a girlfriend who, while a bit self-centered and myopic, is ultimately just someone who is trying to find her own inner strength and be something more than just the victim she had been.

It's notable that season one ends with Barry's proclamation to himself that everything will be good and peaceful "starting... now!" after he kills Moss. Over the course of season two, at least until the finale, Barry does not kill anyone. Despite Fuches' hopes that he'll start killing for money again so that Fuches can take his 50% cut and Hank's desire for Barry's profound violent skills, Barry actually nearly makes it without ending another person's life.

He makes special efforts - he offers to take Ronnie Proxin to Chicago, and he offers training rather than direct action to Hank's Chechen mobsters. But all of his efforts at reforming his life come to an end when Fuches plays a hand Barry cannot deal with.

When Fuches discovers Janice's car, with her body stuffed in the trunk, he poses as a private detective and brings Gene to the site, showing him ultimate proof that the woman he loves is dead. Barry races to rescue Gene, thinking (not irrationally) that Fuches means to kill him to get to Barry. But Fuches, monstrous bastard that he is, doesn't actually wind up killing Gene - though he has framed him for Moss' murder and suggested he was going to kill himself over the guilt.

Barry does manage to save Gene by planting a medal Hank had given him in the car's trunk. "The Debt is Paid," offered by Hank as a way of saying thanks to Barry for his help, now seems to be an intimidating calling card that implicates their organization in Moss' death. Much as Barry had, in a Rube Goldberg-esque way, escaped Loach's extortion at the end of ronnie/lilly, this loose end is seemingly tied up.

But two things remain: Fuches has not only sold Barry out to Loach but also threatened an innocent man to get to Barry, and his fury finally gets the better of him.

Mere hours after Fuches has worked out a deal, settling the schism between Hank, Cristobal, and Esther, working his incredible skills of manipulation to avoid a bloodbath and hopefully get a taste of the profits, Barry shows up, coming for Fuches, but unleashing his horrific, nearly John Wick-level of violent talent upon the gathered gangs. Seemingly dozens of Burmese, Bolivian, and Chechen gangsters die in Barry's unstoppable rampage, including Esther. We even get a moment when Mayrbek, Barry's star pupil among the Chechens, pauses when he sees Barry burst in the door, thinking he is seeing a friend only to be shot in the head.

The thing is: the criminal world that pushes Barry to violence is itself governed by a strange and often comical set of rules and norms that makes them seem oddly harmless. Cristobal's endless patience with Hank's machinations, for example, seems to suggest that Barry's violence is something beyond even what these hardened gangsters are used to. Even Fuches, the devil on Barry's shoulder, does not wind up killing Gene. Is this because he has not capacity for violence, or is it just that he feels he can inflict more pain on Barry by putting Gene in legal peril?

My takeaway from ronnie/lilly was that Barry's epiphanic identification of Fuches as the source of evil in his life is actually self-serving and self-deluding. Barry would love to find that the darkness he participates in is something other than himself, something external that he will be free of if he simply cuts Fuches out of his life. Because of Fuches' insistences on insinuating himself into Barry's life, he's now come to the conclusion that he'll be forced to kill him.

But as attractive as the notion that, without Fuches, Barry would be free to live a happy and good life is, the truth is that Barry needs to take responsibility for his own choices. There was always another option. At this point, the way out of that life is to turn himself in, to sacrifice the better life he wants in order to exit the one he despises. But his desire for the new life is greater than his distaste for the old one, and so he will continue to struggle in this purgatorial mixture.

In the end, however, even if Fuches has been chased off for now and Gene is free of police suspicion, the cat has been let out of the bag. Fuches didn't kill Gene, but he may have killed the lie that allowed Gene to act as a father figure to Barry. "Barry Berkman did this" is the message whispered to Gene at the trunk of Janice's car.

And we are left to wonder how far Barry will go to protect his freedom, or how much he'll be willing to sacrifice to preserve this fundamentally good man.

In ronnie/lilly, Barry Becomes Something... Different. And Amazing

I realize I'm a month or so late on this, but I'm catching up on Barry, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite shows.

A number of very complex issues come to a fore in the episode prior to ronnie/lilly, called What!? (the titular line-reading by Bill Hader that ends that episode was an immense moment of comic relief to what had been a very stressful episode.)

I'm going to give this the spoiler cut because it's really worth watching this show and being surprised by its twists and turns.

Good Omens

The novel Good Omens is funny - which I mean in two senses. It's a funny book, written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, both renowned fantasy writers, the latter of whom in particular is famed for his comedic take on the genre. And the novel is filled with humor - my elevator pitch for it would be "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Apocalypse" given its creatively silly tangents and humanistic absurdism. But it's also funny in the sense that it's clearly parodying the 1976 movie The Omen, a much more serious take on the premise of the antichrist being swapped into the family of an American diplomat. I don't know how lasting the influence of the Omen has been (I tried watching it once and found it dull) but it's notable that it has been nearly thirty years between the publication of this novel and the release of the new miniseries, while it had been only fourteen between the movie and the book.

Ultimately, while the arrival of the antichrist is a central aspect to the story, the core of it is the odd-couple relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel and a demon who have spent so much time on Earth that they've grown quite fond of the world and its humans and aren't all that stoked for this big, climactic apocalypse everything has supposedly been building toward.

Having spent so much time as opposite numbers - literally dating back to the Garden of Eden, where Crowley was the snake that tempted Eve and Aziraphale was the angel holding the flaming sword (until he felt sorry for the newly-banished Adam and Eve and gave them the sword as a parting gift) guarding the entrance - the two have spent more time together than in Heaven or Hell and have been enemies so long that they've become best friends. As they realized that each person balanced out the other's work, it became an excuse to kind of knock off work early and just enjoy the world.

The television miniseries scores an incredible casting coup. Michael Sheen plays Aziraphale and David Tennant plays Crowley. I may never have seen such precisely perfect casting before. Sheen nails Aziraphale's effete helplessness - a dorky guy who really just wants to read books and enjoy culture - and Tennant oozes rockstar cool even as he's dodging the demands of his more zealous demonic brethren. And the two have magnificent chemistry - one could interpret them as a bickering married couple who nevertheless have a clearly deep bond that they don't want to see broken by the outbreak of supernatural war.

There's an absurdist, almost dadaist quality to their efforts to prevent the apocalypse, particularly given that for several years, their plan to moderate the antichrist's upbringing to make sure he's not too evil but also not so good that people will notice that destiny is being disturbed, turns out to be a fool's errand because there was a mix-up when the children were swapped out, meaning that this kid is actually just the biological child of a random English couple while the real antichrist went to that family in the English countryside.

Of course, in this parodic version of the Omen story, the antichrist is not inherently evil - but he does have power to shape reality. The thing is, he's had a pretty normal upbringing for an 11-year-old English boy, so aside from having a clear leadership position amongst his three best friends, his desires are pretty standard for a boy his age.

The show holds pretty faithful to the book (I can't recall if the epilogue dealing with how Aziraphale and Crowley face punishment for their actions is from the book) with a couple of small changes. I would say that the entire series is quite enjoyable, but the brilliant casting of its two central leads leaves the rest of the show looking poorer in comparison. (I will say Jon Hamm is nearly as perfect casting for the Archangel Gabriel - who serves as Aziraphale's sort of corporate, falsely-friendly boss.)

While I'm a Gaiman fan (I keep meaning to read more Discworld books and form a stronger opinion on Pratchett) I think that the story and its style works a lot better in the fun tangents than in its master plot - something that was true of the book as well as the series. There's a bit of a feeling of anticlimax, even as things get very big toward the end, but if the story is an excuse to hang out with these fun characters, it feels very much worth it. Notably, in episode three, there's an extended sequence showing Aziraphale and Crowley's friendship developing over the ages, from Eden to Noah's Ark, Jesus' crucifixion, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution, and World War Two, which is an invention for the show and wonderful piece.

At six episodes, it's not a massive time investment anyway, and worth it for Sheen and Tennant alone.

What Makes a Good Twist?

The big twist ending is a trope that I first became fascinated by in the late 90s (and the early 00s, largely watching movies from the 90s.) Different movies have accomplished them in different ways, and I think there are a lot of different forms a twist can take.

I wrote a post not long ago about spoilers. Plot spoilers have always been a big deal - there's a story that someone walked out of the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back and said (and by the way, this one's past the statute of limitations) "I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke's father!" thus drawing the ire of the fans looking forward to their own viewing.

This post is going to have some spoilers, but generally not for anything that hasn't been around for over ten years. (And if I do get into other things, I'll put it behind a cut.)

But spoilers are, I think, a broader conversation than twists. Twists, naturally, can be spoiled, but so can other things. If you're, say, making a climactic film in an 11-year, 22 (or whatever the count was) film franchise, certain characters dying would be the grounds for spoilers, but it's not exactly a twist - when the stakes are raised and the threat is made out to be enormous, it's not surprising that some of the good guys might pay the ultimate cost. You might not want to know who does, but it's not exactly a twist.

Given that it's the subject of the post, let's talk about what it is, exactly, that we mean when we talk about a twist.

Often, it's sort of the opposite of dramatic irony. This term is used to describe situations where the characters are operating on limited information while the audience knows better. When Hamlet considers killing Claudius but decides against it given that his murderous uncle has just been praying and, he assumes, atoning spiritually for killing Hamlet's father, Hamlet decides he can't kill him now as it would result in Claudius going to heaven with a clean soul. Yet the audience knows that Claudius has found himself unable to ask forgiveness for his deeds, meaning he's still damned. Hamlet's failure to do the deed then is what leads to all the other deaths in the play.

A twist tends to involve some character - sometimes even the protagonist - having some vital piece of information that the audience knows nothing about, only for this information to be revealed later on.

But that's not really the complete picture.

I suppose such a thing could be a mild twist. But if we use that definition, it would mean that every Agatha Christie-style murder mystery has a twist ending, only because we know that someone's the murderer, but we don't know who that is until it's revealed in the end.

So we also have to take into account genre expectations.

Murder on the Orient Express is maybe the most famous of the Poirot mysteries by Christie. But the thing about it is that even within the mystery genre, it has a twist ending. Like most Poirot stories, a person is murdered (and as is often the case, someone who rightfully deserves a number of enemies.) Seemingly by coincidence, there are several different people who all have some connection to the victim - a mob boss - who are on the Orient Express with him when he is stabbed to death. Each has a motive to kill him, which is actually rather standard Agatha Christie fare. So, knowing the genre that she more or less invented, we expect to have Poirot's suspicions jump from suspect to suspect until he arrives at the final proof that tells us which of these people it is. But then there's the twist: they all did it. In this case, it's not exactly the character who has information that the audience doesn't, but instead it's that the author knows that the rules of locked-room mystery stories can be changed, while the audience is expecting them to remain consistent.

One of the best-executed twists, to my mind, is that of Fight Club. Fight Club, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, is thematically dense with ideas about capitalism, sexuality, misogyny, violence, and toxic masculinity. But it also contains a mind-blowing twist that has become something of a cliche by now (a TV show, which I won't name here because it's from more recent than 10 years ago, paid homage to Fight Club by playing a cover of Where is My Mind? which is the song that ends the film, while doing essentially the same big twist.) All throughout, the film has centered around the nameless narrator (and it's a tribute to the film that when you first watch it, you might not even realize you never got his name) and Tyler Durden, the charismatic ubermensch with whom he forms first the eponymous Fight Club and then the anarchist terrorist organization called Project Mayhem. When the narrator tries to stop the insanity that has gotten way out of hand, he comes to realize that Tyler Durden is not a real person - that Tyler is just a persona that has allowed him to act out his every unfettered, id-based impulse.

Now, here's the thing about Fight Club: I predicted the twist.

There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the movie when Marla, the woman who inadvertently helped to spawn the Tyler Durden persona, comes to see the narrator and speaks with him while Tyler is in the basement. When Marla asks who the narrator is speaking with, the movie just moves on, but I thought "hold on, wouldn't it be obvious that it was Tyler? Unless Tyler doesn't exist?"

So yes, I did predict the ending. 

But it was not predictable. It was inevitable.

See, here's the thing: upon a second viewing, Fight Club seems to beat you over the head with the truth of the twist. From early on, you get lines like "Sometimes Tyler would speak for me." Or you'd see him popping up in single-frame flashes (spliced in, like the porn he inserts into children's movies) well before the Narrator actually meets him. In such a stylized movie, we're expected to simply dismiss these the first time around as anarchic stylistic touches. But the movie is actually screaming the truth at us, and yet the truth is so outlandish that we work hard to explain it away.

And that, to me, is the essence of a good twist.

The same friend who first recommended Fight Club also encouraged me to see Memento, which has its own twist. But the Christopher Nolan movie I like the most (sorry, Dark Knight) is the Prestige, which manages to use one massive twist to misdirect - not unlike a magician - from the even bigger one.

I previously wrote an extensive summary of the plot, but realized that would be about the length of the preceding post, so to boil it down: there is one twist in this movie that would normally seem to be the big one that leaves audiences talking about it. The film centers around the bitter rivalry between two stage magicians in the 1890s, Borden and Angier. But we eventually discover that Borden is, in fact, two different people.

This twist works similarly to Fight Club, in that on a second viewing, knowing what we know, the signs are obvious. Christian Bale gives subtly but distinctly different performances depending on which Borden twin he's portraying, to the extent that you can develop a sense of one brother who is ambitious and vengeful and the other who is humble and cares more for his wife and child.

But what's remarkable is that this twist is, itself, kind of a misdirection from the larger twist. And that twist is that The Prestige is a science fiction movie.

The lengths that the Bordens go to hide the fact that they are two people is remarkable. But then we discover that Angier bought what amounts to a cloning machine from Nikola Tesla. And we find that Angier has, essentially, been killing himself over and over in front of an audience in the hopes of luring Borden to be implicated in the death.

The horror of what Angier has done, and the shocking genre shift showing us how he accomplished it, pulls the rug out from under us. Perhaps we felt we were clever, maybe figuring out the truth about the Bordens because that's the kind of twist this sort of movie is expected to have.

And much like an expert magic trick, it uses our own cleverness against us.

And again, the twist is telegraphed - the title shot at the beginning of the movie is a field of top hats that have been duplicated by this device. Yet, perhaps like the single-frame splices of Tyler Durden, we might dismiss this as a metaphorical or stylistic image. We don't yet have the context to understand the profound significance of the image.

I don't know if it's just the movies I watched around that era or if there were a lot of those sorts of movies then. 1999, the year of Fight Club, also saw the release of the Sixth Sense, another movie famous for its massive twist.

The examples I've mentioned so far are, I think, examples of well-executed twists.

What's interesting is the way that films have shown themselves to be, actually, sort of short-form versions of storytelling. Television has become more novelistic, and a few prominent TV adaptations of novels have shown that you can tell much broader, more sweeping stories. I just watched Good Omens (which probably deserves its own post,) which was done as a 6-part miniseries (roughly 6 hours total.) Previously, I could imagine such a story being more likely to get a 2-hour big-screen adaptation, but TV is becoming a more popular medium for adaptation, maybe thanks to Game of Thrones.

But when it comes to twist-focused stories, film has the advantage of forcing you into a certain degree of narrative economy. If you watch something like, say, Lucky Number Slevin, you know that there's going to be some big reveal, and it's a joy to watch and wait for the truth to be unpacked.

Films are also generally seen in one sitting, which means that the twist ending is part and parcel with the entirety of the narrative. I think this part is particularly important when you talk about stories that really pull the rug out from under you regarding characters and their true natures.

Um, spoilers for Game of Thrones.