S04.E05: tricky legacies

[PrincessPurrsALot]

Quote

Things have changed.

Original air date 2023.05.07

[Galileo908]

So, yeah, this was a timeskip. Man, everyone BUT Barry is just done with that "life." I was wondering just how long it was gonna take for Sally to just snap. That bathroom scene was just the start. (EDIT: Sally got to act after all. As "Emily." While watching Natalie living the life she was supposed to lead.)

As "wholesome" as Barry tries to be, you can tell that the spector of "him" hangs over his family, just like the rest of the people in his life. Being obsessed with Lincoln (until he watches Truther videos), making his family watch streaming church services. John wants to play catch with all the "normal" kids, Barry shows him videos of kids dying in Little League. Out of EVERYTHING, that's one of the most messed up things I've seen in this show. How the hell was "Wholesome Barry" even more terrifying than the killer Barry?

"Look at all God's given us" said over an empty field was certainly a hell of an image. 

Knew it, Gene was gonna eventually make a movie about him and Barry.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Galileo908

[cpcathy]

Not gonna lie, I was super disappointed in the time jump. Are there only three episodes left? Will we go back in time again? Kind of frustrating.

[juno]

Hated this episode. One of my pet peeves in watching a show is time jumps. You get completely invested in the present moment and then all of a sudden the show goes somewhere completely else and you sit there and have to wait another week to resume the present situation. I am not invested in future or past Barry, only present. This suggests that they are running out of ideas and they are just filling in until the end. Really disappointing.

Edited May 8, 2023 by juno

[Dev F]

15 minutes ago, cpcathy said:

Not gonna lie, I was super disappointed in the time jump. Are there only three episodes left? Will we go back in time again? Kind of frustrating.

Why would we go back in time again? I assume the story will move forward from here.

I've seen a fair amount of grumbling that this episode was boring or a waste of time, but it's by far my favorite episode of the season, if only because it stuck with its (dark, disturbing) premise from beginning to end, whereas the rest of this season has kinda rambled up and down and back and forth—e.g., Fuches changing his mind about whether he loves or hates Barry like four separate times.

[Galileo908]

Just now, Dev F said:

Why would we go back in time again? I assume the story will move forward from here.

I've seen a fair amount of grumbling that this episode was boring or a waste of time, but it's by far my favorite episode of the season, if only because it stuck with its (dark, disturbing) premise from beginning to end, whereas the rest of this season has kinda rambled up and down and back and forth—e.g., Fuches changing his mind about whether he loves or hates Barry like four separate times.

Yeah I feel like this is all leading to something. I bet it'll all lead to something in the end. I was just riveted by this episode.

[Jaundiced Eye]

Bored to tears with this episode, to be honest. I felt just like the characters. They're living a fate worse than death.

[Cotypubby]

Well that was complete crap. Boring crap. How did they manage to drop the ball so badly when the show has been at such top quality for every single previous episode? It was like a completely different show with completely different writers. I did not care about any single thing that was happening because until they showed Cousineau I kept waiting for the reveal that it was all a nightmare of Sally’s and would snap back Barry standing in her living room.

I simply do not buy that the characters as we have always seen them would do this. 

With so few episodes left they waste one with this garbage. Wow I am so disappointed. 
 

They should have just left the end of season 3 as the finale. That felt real and satisfying.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Cotypubby

[Irlandesa]

I don't mind a time jump, but I hated this episode because I did not find much interesting about the time we jumped into. 

I still struggle with Sally's choice to leave with Barry, live in the desert, and procreate with him.  But the biggest stumper of them all for me was her decision to wear a wig instead of dying her hair dark at this point.  Just practically, it'd make sense if she did that.

I feel for that poor kid with Barry and Sally as his parents.  And how Barry kept looking for danger in the "innocent" things he showed his kid like baseball and Abe Lincoln.

The only good part about it for me was Barry realizing he's going to have to kill Gene Cousineau because even if it's years later, at least we're jumping back into a world I know and want to see.

[Dev F]

3 minutes ago, Irlandesa said:

I still struggle with Sally's choice to leave with Barry, live in the desert, and procreate with him.  But the biggest stumper of them all for me was her decision to wear a wig instead of dying her hair dark at this point.

I assume to keep up the pretext within her own mind that it's all a performance, which is probably the only thing keeping her going.

[thuganomics85]

Who knew that being a sociopathic hitman and an aspiring, egotistical wannabe actress would actually be healthier versions of Barry and Sally compared to what we just saw?  Those eight years clearly have done a number on them and it's just sad to watch.  Barry is just so ridged and scared of his past; hell, himself; that he's now isolated their son and preventing him from ever having a normal life, and spends his days giving off half-baked wisdom and droning on about Abraham Lincoln: all while not even bothering to get his son a proper bedroom with proper heating and air condition. 

Meanwhile, Sally just seems dead inside and makes one wonder why she ever agreed to this.  Sure, maybe her career would have never been the same as it use to be, but a door was open that could have potentially lead to something worthwhile.  Instead, she has doomed herself to this boring existence and in an unloving relationship with both her so-called husband and apparently her own child.  Sheesh, that was a bad call.

Natalie and Just Desserts thriving is both hilarious and sadly realistic, because yeah, the glimpses of it totally has a "mediocre reviews but HUGE streaming numbers!" vibe to it.

I know HBO isn't about the cross promotions, but I was totally hoping that the preacher they were watching was going to be one of the Righteous Gemstones!

Gene is back!  Looks like shit but he's back!  And Barry's next (final?) target....

Can definitely see why this episode won't work for many and it won't go down as one of my favorites either, but I have enough faith in Hader and company to think that this will payoff once the endgame goes down.  Even if it's likely going to be a bad one for most of these characters.

[SHD]

They Better Call Saul-ed us.

[PinkRibbons]

Count me in on finding this episode profoundly boring and kind of depressing. Word from the prestige podcast actually has Bill considering this one of the funniest episodes of the show. Funny how different perspectives work.

[MJ Frog]

Jesus Christ, that was grim. I am fine with the writers changing things up, and I am interested to see where this goes. But that was, oddly, the darkest episode in the whole series. 

50 minutes ago, SHD said:

They Better Call Saul-ed us.

Yes -- what was happening with Sally was so similar in some ways to Kim Wexler's story that it couldn't help but feel like a self-conscious reference to Better Call Saul. Except that Sally was the dark, alcoholic, strangling people in a bathroom, inverse of Kim.

Edited May 8, 2023 by MJ Frog
Articles are sometimes important.

[Slade347]

Eight years out of the game and apparently drinking a lot of beer as  led to Barry getting a Dad bod.  I like that little detail. That Barry would resort to watching truther videos to pass the time while Sally was watching her nightmare of Sally having the career that she thought she was supposed to have rang true to me. And of course, Gene can't stay on the sideline when the inevitable Barry film gets made. It wasn't one of my favorite episodes, but I have a feeling my opinion of it will improve when viewed in context of this season as a whole.

Lastly, I may be going to hell for this, but Barry's search for Little League Deaths gave me the single biggest laugh I've had this season. 

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Slade347

[heatherchandler]

23 minutes ago, Slade347 said:

Lastly, I may be going to hell for this, but Barry's search for Little League Death gave me the single biggest laugh I've had this season. 

I burst out laughing. 

[aghst]

2 hours ago, Jaundiced Eye said:

Bored to tears with this episode, to be honest. I felt just like the characters. They're living a fate worse than death.

I think that's the point.

It probably seemed exciting and romantic for Sally when she decided she'd go on the run with Barry.  Certainly she wasn't enjoying her life, what had become of her career.

So Barry evades capture or being killed by Hank but they live a very drab, off-the-grid existence, with Barry trying to right his mistakes with his son -- whom they named with a very generic John -- and Sally drinking herself into a stupor after she realized that life on the run wasn't any better than the life of an actress on the margins of Hollywood.

Maybe it's Hader giving his character a Twilight Zone kind of poetic justice.

Sally amuses herself by stealing from the till, messing with Bevel, whom she knew was no bad boy.  In Succession, Kendall, feeling morose about killing the waiter, steals gum from convenience stores, to feel alive, to try to snap out of his funk.  Maybe similar thing going on with Sally.

They're living low profile so no fancy cars or other things.  Yet Barry and Sally have nice laptops to keep connected to the world they left behind, which involves Sally having to watch her former assistant thrive as a TV star.  But Barry won't buy poor John a comforter, the kid has to spoon his mother to warm himself with her body heat.

It appears the Google alert that Sally probably set up years ago snap them out of their funk.  That means running into not only Cousineau but Hank and others again.

It's not going to be as simple as just killing Cousineau, who may be capitalizing on his involvement with Barry but who is probably doing this because of the tragedy with his son.

The gang will get back together, just 8 years older.  Wiser?  Still funny?  Definitely the latter, probably not the former.

 

[heatherchandler]

Why didn’t they buy John a heater or comforter?  I don’t get that.

[arc]

Sally is soooooo over her fake life by now.

Barry is a horrible father. If I understand this right, he's raising the kid in near total isolation. No games, barely any interactions with the neighbors, no school, no sports. What a terrible life he made for John.

Overall, I really didn't like this episode, and I've enjoyed this series the whole way through, present episode excluded. Maybe it needed a full episode to push that much ennui and dissatisfaction with a mundane life and the foreboding worry that the people they're hiding from might find them ... but this might be one of those times where I'd rather the show just tell me what's been going on and what's up next rather than showing me for this long.

4 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

Why didn’t they buy John a heater or comforter?  I don’t get that.

I'm guessing they're fairly broke? Sally's the only breadwinner. They're in the middle of nowhere, so maybe Barry bought the house with his hitman money; who knows how much of a stash he has left. But they don't even watch church TV on a big screen TV, just on a laptop.

[carrps]

I was assuming Barry still had a bunch of money left. How was he buying so much stuff otherwise? As for not getting his kid a comforter (symbolic much?), Barry is as self-centered as he ever was. In the beginning, he was opening that package with what looked like dozens of extension cords. Is he buying that stuff to fill his emptiness? In any case, I was thinking how awful life in that town appeared.

Do other mothers wear hair on top of their hair? LOL.

[SHD]

17 minutes ago, carrps said:

In the beginning, he was opening that package with what looked like dozens of extension cords. Is he buying that stuff to fill his emptiness?

When I saw that, I thought he was getting stuff to set up a computer for his son or something like that, but then didn't see anything else in the delivery that indicated that. It was such a pronounced shot that I feel like it needed to have meant SOMEthing. Just not sure what.

[shapeshifter]

Would this qualify as being a "bottle" episode? I usually like so-called Bottle Episodes when others don't, and I might have liked this episode more if I'd never read any comments here from smarter viewers about last week's episode introduction of the 8-year time jump, which I presumed was just another of Barry's delusional dreams. Maybe I would have enjoyed been surprised?

 

13 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

I still struggle with Sally's choice to leave with Barry, live in the desert, and procreate with him.  But the biggest stumper of them all for me was her decision to wear a wig instead of dying her hair dark at this point.

13 hours ago, Dev F said:

I assume to keep up the pretext within her own mind that it's all a performance, which is probably the only thing keeping her going.

Thanks for that explanation of Sally's wig, @Dev F. It makes sense. 

 

9 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

Why didn’t they buy John a heater or comforter?  I don’t get that.

4 hours ago, arc said:

I'm guessing they're fairly broke?

I figured Barry's book about Lincoln cost about the same as a comforter. 
I noted that Barry refers to it as "My book," not "our book" or even "that book about Lincoln."
Refering to it a "comforter" rather than, say, a "blanket" seems deliberate.
Poor John is reared with parents who never comfort him?
John punching the neighbor kid seems to say that Barry is inadvertently raising John to react with violence when he feels powerless or even just slighted. 
Did anyone else get a chill of dread when the neighbor kid invited John over so he could teach him how to use a bat? 

 

12 hours ago, PinkRibbons said:

Count me in on finding this episode profoundly boring and kind of depressing. Word from the prestige podcast actually has Bill considering this one of the funniest episodes of the show. Funny how different perspectives work.

Bill Hader thought this was funny? Should we be worried? 

[Irlandesa]

19 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

Would this qualify as being a "bottle" episode?

I wouldn't call it a bottle episode.  Bottle episodes are usually done in a way to save money. They tend to rely on an existing set (usually 1) and don't have too many guest stars.  This episode had new sets, including the house, the restaurants and the studio and there were quite a few guest stars.

[Andre LaPlume]

Reserving judgement until we see how it ends.  I have faith. But it's definitely tough to have such  a slow paced episode when binging is not an option.    However it seems like we are in the same place as we were before the time jump - Gene going public with his Barry story and Gene’s life now in danger.

[sistermagpie]

11 hours ago, heatherchandler said:

Why didn’t they buy John a heater or comforter?  I don’t get that.

I thought maybe the idea was that Barry was giving John the things he, Barry, thought he needed, and that had turned into him mistaking his own needs for John. So he was going out of his way to learn about Lincoln which was his new obsession, telling himself it was for John. But meanwhile John's right there with a more than reasonable request and he just forgot about it because it didn't penetrate his mind.

I notice when Sally asked about homeschooling (I admit I laughed out loud when she just drank while Barry talked before breaking in to ask about dinner) she asked something like "What are you learning?" instead of "What are you teaching him?" as Barry corrected her.

[cpcathy]

Another disappointment, for those of us who listen to the Ringer podcast that is released after each episode: Hader is standing with the WGA and won’t be discussing each episode until the strike is over.

[HollyG]

I also hated this episode. I didn't mind the time jump, but I didn't need to see an entire episode of it. 

Maybe Sally can play herself in Gene's production and become a star after all.

[EtheltoTillie]

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Would this qualify as being a "bottle" episode?

I hadn't thought of that, but it could be.  There are varying degrees of bottleness that people use in the definition.  Most of the usual cast members were not included. 

To be a bit OT, I was going to say that the roast episode of Mrs. Maisel was a bottle episode, so compare that?  YMMV. 

Edited May 8, 2023 by EtheltoTillie

[PurpleTentacle]

17 hours ago, SHD said:

They Better Call Saul-ed us.

Except that was actually good. This was just boring and depressing.

[PurpleTentacle]

5 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Bill Hader thought this was funny? Should we be worried? 

He basically has to say that, lest this season gets categoraised as a drama in all the award shows, with much stiffer competition.

[peachmangosteen]

I thought this was one of the funnier episodes this season. Mostly dark humor but the stuff with Natalie was just regular funny.

But it was also really unsettling and bleak. 

[Jaundiced Eye]

Following a masterpiece like Succession didn't do this episode any favors. Not that the two shows are in any way comparable, but immediately following a "10" with a "1" was painful. Ouch.

[Galileo908]

17 hours ago, aghst said:

They're living low profile so no fancy cars or other things.  Yet Barry and Sally have nice laptops to keep connected to the world they left behind, which involves Sally having to watch her former assistant thrive as a TV star.  But Barry won't buy poor John a comforter, the kid has to spoon his mother to warm himself with her body heat.

And Sally only comforts John when they think they're in danger. 

The biggest laugh in this episode for me was the reveal that Barry stood outside the entire night.

17 hours ago, aghst said:

It appears the Google alert that Sally probably set up years ago snap them out of their funk.  That means running into not only Cousineau but Hank and others again.

It definitely showed just how brittle Barry's facade was that it instantly fell apart the moment he saw the headline. 

[TV Glotzer]

I’m LOL’ing because I LOVED this episode!  I thought it was brilliantly creative. 

I also think Succession is a pitiful joke of a show so clearly I am in the minority here. 

[Superb Owl]

I neither loved it or hated it. I just mostly felt sad for that poor kid. And I don't even like kids that much. 

 

[Dev F]

5 hours ago, PurpleTentacle said:

He basically has to say that, lest this season gets categoraised as a drama in all the award shows, with much stiffer competition.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion as to whether the episode was good or bad, funny or unfunny, including Hader, so it seems sort of unnecessary to postulate a weird conspiracy theory as to why he'd pretend he thought it was funny when he does't. Hader's comments about finding one particular episode especially funny in an interview will have zero effect on whether the show is classified as a comedy or a drama for awards purposes. It's always been a slippery and somewhat arbitrary distinction—I remember the producers of Northern Exposure getting up to accept the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 1992 and pointing out that the show was a comedy—and there isn't some rule-grubber at the Television Academy who will run down the hall with a transcript of Hader's podcast to stop a show that already has more than thirty nominations and five wins in comedy categories from submitting in those categories again.

[Milburn Stone]

I find myself agreeing with those of you who loved it and those of you who didn't.

The episode was awesome in its power to make me feel as trapped, hopeless, and depressed as the characters in it.

It was brilliant and I hated it.

[aemom]

I did not really like this episode because I kept waiting for someone to wake up/stop hallucinating.  We've already seen Barry hallucinating many times with scenes in the desert, and this did not look like a real way to live:

A house quite literally in the middle of nowhere.  How are they getting electricity, internet access, and cell service?  How far does Sally drive into town to get to her job?  It seems like such a fake scene and they are both so awful to John, that it was very hard for me to become invested in any of it.

But wow - full credit to Sally for her commitment to this whole life being an act.  Not only does she wear her dark wig all of the time, but she keeps dying the hair underneath it blonde.

Wondering what happens next.

[shapeshifter]

8 minutes ago, aemom said:

I did not really like this episode because I kept waiting for someone to wake up/stop hallucinating.  We've already seen Barry hallucinating many times with scenes in the desert, and this did not look like a real way to live:

Yes.

8 minutes ago, aemom said:

A house quite literally in the middle of nowhere.  How are they getting electricity, internet access, and cell service?  How far does Sally drive into town to get to her job?

There are lots of places like this. There are generators for power, cell phone service comes from satellites now, and internet can come from a tethered phone. Probably a sceptic tank instead of sewer.

I lived for 15 years with my kids in a place that was 10 miles to town for work.
The school was closer, and there was a school bus. Not quite so isolated, but a few of my kids' classmates lived a little further off the grid, and John seems to be like one of those. 

My kids' school was next to a farm where one of my kids' classmates rode a pinto horse to the edge of the fence next to the school in the morning, dismounted, and hopped the fence in time for class.

So, by the end of the episode, I accepted that it was real.
But I will not be surprised if it turns out it was not entirely really real. 
The Gene Cousineau part seems real enough.

 

[aemom]

21 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

There are lots of places like this. There are generators for power, cell phone service comes from satellites now, and internet can come from a tethered phone. Probably a sceptic tank instead of sewer.

This is very interesting and all of it fits, except for the generator.

Generators are loud and you need gasoline to run them.  Keeping a front porch light on would be a huge waste.  Big miss on that for realism in my book.  We should have heard the generator on at least some of the time - and perhaps someone filling it with more gas.

This show has always been good about a lot of things, so I'm going to hold them to a very high standard to make things believable.

[Cotypubby]

47 minutes ago, aemom said:

I did not really like this episode because I kept waiting for someone to wake up/stop hallucinating.  We've already seen Barry hallucinating many times with scenes in the desert, and this did not look like a real way to live:

A house quite literally in the middle of nowhere.  How are they getting electricity, internet access, and cell service?  How far does Sally drive into town to get to her job?  It seems like such a fake scene and they are both so awful to John, that it was very hard for me to become invested in any of it.

Yup. The whole thing was just so fake seeming that I was not caring about any of it.

Listening to the Ringer podcast interview with Bill Hader, he says that he didn’t intend for the audience to think it was a fantasy in which case I think he failed quite badly. Too much focus had already been spent on dream sequences that looked exactly like this episode. 

[shapeshifter]

1 hour ago, aemom said:

Generators are loud and you need gasoline to run them.  Keeping a front porch light on would be a huge waste.  Big miss on that for realism in my book.  We should have heard the generator on at least some of the time - and perhaps someone filling it with more gas.

This show has always been good about a lot of things, so I'm going to hold them to a very high standard to make things believable.

Were there solar panels?
That could explain why John was cold at night.

[iMonrey]

On 5/7/2023 at 10:42 PM, SHD said:

They Better Call Saul-ed us.

Yeah that's the vibe I got from it too. Although I was never crazy about Better Call Saul so that's not a show I want to see copied. 

[TVbitch]

Well, that was uncomfortably bleak, which was probably the point. For Sally, going on the lam with Barry probably seemed like an exciting "fuck you" to her life of disappointments, but she found out all too quickly that the thrill only lasts a short time. Meanwhile, Barry is so obsessed with keeping his son "safe," that he is totally ignoring his son's needs. Even though I was probably feeling what Hader wanted me to feel, I got a bit bored with it. I would have liked to know more about what was going on inside of Barry.

Hader started getting more experimental with the "feral girl" episode of Season 2, which didn't work for me and took me out of the "reality" of the Barry universe. In Season 3, I thought he expertly dialed in a brilliant mix of experimental/artistic scenes that stayed within the framework of the plot and the tenuous mix of comedy and horror. Here, it maybe went a skosh too dark, but I am just going to trust that he is moving toward the endgame he envisions, and it will be satisfying. 🤞🏼

[tennisgurl]

Holy shit was that a depressing episode. How is "trying to be a normal guy" Barry so much creepier than "murderous hitman" Barry? The years have not been good to Barry or Sally, Barry is trying so hard to avoid his past and curb any violent impulses in his son that he spends all his days rambling about Abe Lincoln, throwing out bits of random bible talk without context, and traumatizing his son by showing him videos of kids dying in freak baseball accidents because he threw a baseball around with the neighbor kid, and Sally is just on autopilot, playing the longest most miserable part of her life. Running off with Barry probably seemed like an exciting adventure when he showed up after his prison break, going on the run after being burned too many times by Hollywood probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now she's clearly utterly miserable. 

God help this poor child, John is going to have a LOT of issues after this childhood, hopefully he can find some people who aren't Barry and Sally to be around. It seems like Barry and Sally have kept him almost completely isolated, isn't allowed to make friends, cant play sports, cant go to school, cant even get a damn comforter, Barry makes everything from baseball to Abe Lincoln sound scary, what a miserable existence. It also seems like he has a distant relationship with both of his parents, Sally being totally checked out and Barry just repeating platitudes and scaring the crap out of him. I think Barry is trying to curb any aggression out of his son, but keeping him so isolated and afraid of the world is just going to make him worse, without any kind of socialization he's not going to know how to properly handle his feelings. I thought it was especially galling when John was just asking why he cant have a proper room and Barry gives him a long lecture about god giving him what he needs and about "whining" while he's grabbing up his Lincoln book that he just got. 

Of course Gene appears out of nowhere the second he hears that they're making a movie about Barry, even though he has to know he would be in danger, he cant help himself. Is his son alright?

Sally's idea of purgatory must be sitting alone in a cheap wig in a crappy house in the middle of nowhere watching Natalie living her best life being a massive success. 

[Joimiaroxeu]

"Hope we can be together the next time in harmony?" WTF? One day John is going to say that to the wrong person and things will go sideways.

Standing next to your car chugging vodka straight from the bottle. Did Barry not know Sally was a drunk or did he not care? Just like he didn't know his kid's pot pie was still frozen. Utterly oblivious.

John was so emotionally abused. The social isolation, and the self-serving religious indoctrination by his father, his mother being anything but maternal. Barry and Sally were deeply messing him up and it'll be horrible when John realizes what they did to him.

If anyone's taking a vote, I didn't hate this episode and I also didn't think it was funny. I just felt so sad for John.

[Dev F]

13 hours ago, Cotypubby said:

Listening to the Ringer podcast interview with Bill Hader, he says that he didn’t intend for the audience to think it was a fantasy in which case I think he failed quite badly. Too much focus had already been spent on dream sequences that looked exactly like this episode. 

Some of those scenes were memories of real past events (e.g., young Barry meeting Fuches), and some of them were Barry imagining what his future might be like (e.g., dancing with Sally at a wedding as an old man), so it's sort of a convergence of the previous examples for this one to turn out to be a real future event, as it were. And it's not like the show has never before featured sudden, jarring flash-forwards (e.g., the season 1 finale) or scenes of Lynchian surreality (e.g., "ronny/lily") that at first seem like fantasy but end up being literally true.

And the one thing the show hasn't been known for is teasing a daring shakeup of the status quo and then taking it back. It's always been the sort of show that fearlessly throws itself over every cliff, status quo be damned—in seemingly deliberate contrast to the sorts of crowd-pleasing antihero dramas the show has always witheringly satirized. So while the history of TV in general certainly offers ample precedent for elaborate fantasy fakeouts, the history of Barry in particular led me to assume the flash-forward was legit.

Edited May 10, 2023 by Dev F

[sistermagpie]

30 minutes ago, Dev F said:

And the one thing the show hasn't been known for is teasing a daring shakeup of the status quo and then taking it back. It's always been the sort of show that fearlessly throws itself over every cliff, status quo be damned—in seemingly deliberate contrast to the sorts of crowd-pleasing antihero dramas the show has always witheringly satirized. So while the history of TV in general certainly offers ample precedent for elaborate fantasy fakeouts, the history of Barry in particular led me to assume the flash-forward was legit.

Yes, it seemed like a fantasy at the end of the last ep because of the context, but once this ep started and they were there, I couldn't imagine the show going backwards because it would totally go against the way the show works, where the fantasyis almost always better than the reality. Of course, in a way Barry is living a fantasy--one where the frozen pot pie right in front of him isn't still frozen. (It's funny this is happening the same week another show did have a fantasy fake out that made some angry, though in that case, imo, the fantasy was totally in keeping with that show that's often about how subjective experiences shape reality.)

Edited May 10, 2023 by sistermagpie

[Milburn Stone]

14 hours ago, tennisgurl said:

God help this poor child, John is going to have a LOT of issues after this childhood, hopefully he can find some people who aren't Barry and Sally to be around. It seems like Barry and Sally have kept him almost completely isolated, isn't allowed to make friends, cant play sports, cant go to school, cant even get a damn comforter, Barry makes everything from baseball to Abe Lincoln sound scary, what a miserable existence. It also seems like he has a distant relationship with both of his parents, Sally being totally checked out and Barry just repeating platitudes and scaring the crap out of him.

You've put a thought into my head with this. Was this Barry's childhood?

(I don't mean we're seeing a fantasy of Barry's childhood in Barry's head. I'm with @Dev F in thinking that what we're seeing in the future is real. I mean that the sins of Barry's parents, which turned Barry into Barry, are being visited now upon John.)

[pasdetrois]

On 5/7/2023 at 11:07 PM, Jaundiced Eye said:

They're living a fate worse than death.

This episode personified "bleak." That cheap little (modular?) house on a barren landscape. Shudder.

I guess no cable/satellite service, as they used laptops for all of their entertainment, even worship.