Barry’s final season turns into the worst version of itself

polygon.com:

Barry was so close it hurt.

HBO’s dark comedy is, by design, almost unrecognizable from the show it started as. What began as the quirky story of a hitman (Bill Hader) who wanted to turn his life around by becoming an actor (though he couldn’t fully shake his assassin ties) is now, in its final season, a harrowing exploration of the damage wrought by the delusions of one bad man. In some ways, it’s always been that. This time it’s just much less funny about it.

It’s fascinating to untangle the ways Barry may have arrived at its current situation. Season 3 spent a considerable amount of time wrestling with Barry’s delusions about what it meant to be a good person, going to great lengths to demonstrate that even when he was trying to protect people like his girlfriend, actor Sally Reid (Sarah Goldberg), he was motivated by a monstrous selfishness and barely concealed fury that began to infect those around him as well as harm them.

In its final episodes, Barry takes its cast further down the dark path Barry Berkman set everyone on. Barry is locked up, finally captured in a sting in which his former friend and acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) agreed to be the bait. Gene, a washed-up actor when Barry met him in season 1, has since become a cartoonishly self-centered version of himself, a self-important dodderer convinced the world must hear his story. Sally — barely coping with the shame of her relationship with Barry, a moment of rage that went viral, and the PTSD of killing a man in season 3 — has given up her career in Hollywood to become an acting teacher who still sees herself as her greatest student. And NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), the hapless Chechen mobster who can’t quite disentangle himself from