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.
In ronnie/lilly, Barry is sent to kill a man - his freedom depends on it, as he is being blackmailed by Detective Loach to kill Ronnie Proxin, the man who is sleeping with his ex-wife. Throughout season two, we've watched Loach attempt to trap Barry, ostensibly to get revenge on him for killing Loach's partner, Janice Moss, in the painful finale to the first season. But as we discover in What!?, his efforts have not been what you'd expect from a cop - to get justice for his fallen comrade and friend - but instead to take advantage of Barry and have this other man killed.
And I think it's worth noting that the eponymous characters of this episode, Ronnie and his pre-teen daughter Lilly, are innocents here. Ronnie is sleeping with a divorced woman, and we don't even know if he is himself married - though even if he were cheating on his wife, it's hardly grounds for death. Lilly is a kid who comes home to see her father seemingly dead and strikes back at the attacker.
It's really only that we know Barry from the rest of the series that we have any reason to be rooting for him in this fight. And to be fair to Barry, he really does seem committed to avoiding killing - indeed, I don't think we've seen him kill anyone yet this season, though he came damned close in the prior episode once he met Sally's abusive ex Sam.
The episode is not quite a bottle episode, but it's a narrowly focused story with only a few key players. There's Barry, Ronnie, Fuches, Lilly, and Loach right at the end - everyone else is nameless.
It opens on Ronnie getting home, lighting up a joint, and going into his bedroom only for Barry to appear, first as a voice off-camera, telling Ronnie that he was sent to kill him, but that he doesn't want to do that, and instead tells Ronnie to go lay low in Chicago with family for a year until things blow over.
When Barry appears on screen, he's in a comedically amateur-looking set of anonymous clothing that he almost certainly got from work at Lululemon, complete with balaclava and ski goggles. Ronnie looks like he's going to cooperate, and Barry is very pleased to not have to resort to violence here, and thinks he can get out with a win-win. But we know better (and Barry maybe should too) when Ronnie grabs some things from his closet by way of a room absolutely festooned with trophies for martial arts competitions.
Ronnie's attack on Barry comes lightning fast, but Barry is also a capable fighter, even if he's clearly not prepared for such an opponent. After a well-placed jab to the windpipe, Ronnie begins to wheeze, and eventually the exertion gets the better of him, and Ronnie passes out, seemingly dead.
Barry prepares to leave, only for Lilly, Ronnie's daughter, to show up. At first, Barry finds his desire to be the good guy overwhelming any sense of the consequences of what might happen if she identifies him, and he tries to do what he can to do right by this innocent caught in the middle of this, even offering to drive her to Chicago himself.
But Lilly, like father like daughter, instead goes into attack mode. And if Ronnie was a martial arts juggernaut, Lilly becomes some sort of feral animal, flying at Barry in ways that seem supernatural, and eventually stabbing him in the back before running out of the house and disappearing into the suburban landscape.
Barry goes to Fuches, who is waiting in a car outside, his face drenched in a goatee of blood from his nose and mouth. Fuches, the usual prickish asshole he is, refuses to take Barry to the hospital (which, yes, might raise some questions) and so instead they go to a supermarket to get a needle and thread to sew up Barry's wound. But when Barry mentions the girl, Fuches initially figures Barry killed her as well, and, always playing the devil on Barry's shoulder, says that she's got to die. To Barry's credit, he never once agrees to this, but the hilarious element to the episode is that even if he were to try, killing Lilly would require a ton of great luck. In one of the best lines of the episode, all the better for being off-hand, Barry questions whether she's "of this world." When they find her on the street, crying on the sidewalk, Fuches tries to talk her into getting into the truck so that he can kill her, but she runs away - and then climbs a tree, hops onto the roof of a nearby house, and perches there like a gargoyle for several hours.
Launching herself onto the roof of the truck, she manages to slip inside and tears a chunk out of Fuches' cheek with her teeth before disappearing again.
Back at the same supermarket, Fuches - who, by the way, has managed to superglue his hands to the steering wheel of the truck after using it as a half-assed way to make up for the shitty stitches he made on Barry's wound - backs into a cop car while Barry finds that a definitely not-dead Ronnie has somehow tracked him down. As Ronnie the juggernaut threatens to destroy Barry, he's suddenly shot in the head by Loach, who then, possibly just to tie up loose ends, starts firing toward Barry.
And then Ronnie gets up and roundhouse kicks Loach in the head, killing him, and then goes down in a hail of gunfire from the cops, who have showed up. He sure seems dead, but after what he's been through one wonders.
Ironically, the chaos of the episode seems to get Barry off the hook - his blackmailer is dead, and so the one person who had put together that he was the one who killed Moss is gone - but there's definitely a sense that there are unresolved issues going forward.
In particular, while passing out from exhaustion (and not a small amount of blood loss,) Barry dreams of all the soldiers coming home from Afghanistan, each finding loved ones to embrace them as they return. But Barry sees only Fuches, a diabolical smirk on his face, nodding toward their dark future together. There's a moment as Fuches provides Barry with a getaway from the supermarket after all the chaos has gone down where Barry sees the version of Fuches from his dreams, only to snap back and see the panicked and helpless Fuches who superglued his fucking hands to the steering wheel.
It seems very much like Fuches is the true villain of the show - he's the corrupting influence who turned Barry's violent capabilities and tendencies to turn a profit with minimal risk or effort required of him. And certainly, one wonders if Barry might have a better life if he had been given the opportunity to build something resembling a normal life post-Afghanistan had it not been for Fuches.
But if there's one central idea to Barry, it's that no person is just one thing. Fuches is probably the least sympathetic character in the show (Hank is maybe no less evil, but he's just so bananas that you get the sense he truly does not understand right and wrong,) and whatever affection he might feel for Barry is outweighed by his sense that Barry is useful to him.
And yet, Barry is someone who wants to be a good person, but he's shown that he's not really willing to own up to the evil things he has done. He wants to erase and ignore the sins of his past. And so I do wonder if we're building to something where, if he could get rid of Fuches - by killing him or getting him arrested or whatever - he might think that his slate would be clean and he could be just another L.A. actor with a girlfriend he loves. But we've seen that he's willing to kill good people like Janice Moss if it means preserving his freedom and reputation. That's a choice he made, and it's not the choice of a good person, even if the other option would certainly ruin all that he held dear.
I get the sense that things in ronnie/lilly did, more or less, happen. But the subjectivity of the episode - moments like Fuche's knowing smirk at the end - does call a lot into question. Was Lilly really the feral ninja child she appeared to be, or just a girl who unexpectedly fought back? Was Ronnie really such an undying juggernaut, or did he just seem that way in the heat of the moment?
Barry had a number of fantasy sequences in the first season surrounding the ideal life he imagined living (like when Jon Hamm as Jon Hamm took a shit in one of his five bathrooms) but usually these fantasies called attention to themselves. One really has to wonder how accurate to the world of the story what we saw in ronnie/lilly was.
What I can say it was was a thrilling, uproariously funny, brilliantly shot and choreographed piece of television.
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