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.
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