By Merrick · 1/5
Summary — What started as dark comedy tips into cartoonish sci-fi territory, with an unkillable opponent and a feral child that drained all the tension out of the episode.
I get that Barry lives in this weird tonal space between hitman drama and dark comedy, but this episode shoved that dial all the way over into something I couldn’t take seriously. The dojo fight with Ronny was the first warning sign — the guy soaks up an absurd amount of damage and just keeps coming. Then his daughter Lily turns out to be some feral rooftop predator scaling buildings and biting people, and at that point I’d checked out. What show am I watching? This isn’t dark comedy anymore, it’s a sci-fi creature feature with a hitman wandering through it.
The swerve into chaos felt unearned. The setup is a straightforward “tie up a loose end” job, and instead of leaning into the tension of that, the episode goes for shock-value bizarro escalation. I can see what they were going for — Barry’s life spiraling into the absurd, the universe punishing him with unkillable opponents — but it landed for me as cartoonish rather than unhinged-in-a-good-way.
Bill Hader is clearly swinging big as director here, and there are some genuinely well-shot moments, but ambition doesn’t automatically equal a good episode. By the time we got to the diner ending I was just relieved it was over.
Not for me.