What is redemption? Let us take it as given that we need saving from our fallen natures. Can we achieve redemption in this life, or must it wait until the next? St. Augustine famously worked over these questions in his autobiographical Confessions.
They are not the stuff you would expect to find delved into by a half-hour black comedy about a hitman-turned-actor. But in its final season, which recently wrapped, that is what HBO’s “Barry” did, and with surprising earnestness at that.
Spoilers Ahead!
The show’s fourth and final season jumps eight years ahead at its midpoint, with our eponymous assassin (show co-creator Bill Hader) and his struggling actress girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) in hiding, under assumed names, out in flat blank plains of rural America. They have had a son together, John, from whom they have not only concealed their true identities but also the bloody history that brought them to this desolate place. Having escaped from countless mortal dangers in Los Angeles, they now see danger in such everyday pastimes as baseball.
Sally, calling herself Emily, works as a waitress and wears a brown wig over her blond hair and drinks too much. Barry (now “Clark”) seems to have no job but spends a lot of time listening to vaguely evangelical podcasts, using God as the shovel with which he hopes to bury his past self. Those he has murdered on behalf of mobsters and out of rank self-interest are buried already: Who is left to say he
