Thoughts on BARRY's upcoming season finale and morality in story presentation

Some thoughts on next week's BARRY finale. Sunday's penultimate episode had Barry racing to stop his former partner Fuchs from murdering Barry's acting coach Gene. Complicating matters is that last season, Barry had to kill Gene's girlfriend Moss, a police detective, when she figured out Barry was a hitman.

Barry killed her and hid the body and her car in the woods - which is where Fuchs has led Gene, seemingly ready to expose Barry's secret to Gene before killing him and framing him for Moss's murder.

An obvious issue is that since Fuchs has presented himself as a friend of Barry's, even if Barry gets there in time, Gene will wonder what Barry's doing with someone that dangerous, how this person knew where to find Moss, and how Barry even knew to be there. It's a chain of questions that leads to the exposure of Barry's secret, making it possible that when Barry gets there, he might have to kill Gene.

Here's my speculation: We’ve already seen Barry murder two “good” people he didn’t want to. This is why I think we won’t see any scenario in which he has to kill Gene next week. That doesn’t mean Fuchs WON’T, but I also doubt that.

I think the most likely scenario is that Barry kills Fuchs, saves Gene and Gene gives the performance of his life convincing Barry he finds none of this suspicious. And the drive of the next season is Gene putting all the pieces together.

There’s too much meat left on Gene’s story for me to think he ends up dead next week. Killing Gene neither opens any doors, nor tells us something we don’t know. Keeping him alive offers more dramatic possibility.

I tweeted these thoughts and it prompted someone to ask, "How is it I’m still rooting for BARRY knowing he killed Gene’s GF? Was it the long delayed actually showing of the killing?"

It’s because the presentation of the story is all from his POV, which makes us complicit in his perspective. We understand the reasoning and the emotion of his choice. That identification makes us susceptible to Barry’s conviction he “had” to do it.

Moss is coded as the antagonist and so it subverts our default to see her as the hero, even though, objectively she would be. The show makes Barry charming enough that he wins us over. He kills people, but most of them are bad. Why should we care?

That’s how we’re seduced to his side. We see it all through his eyes. And at S1’s end, when our choice is “kill or go to jail,” we’re already on that dark side with Barry.

Because we had no other choice.

Didn’t we?

A response to that was: "And it’s not the same as rooting for a genuinely horrible person like in Breaking Bad. Barry’s not evil, he’s broken."

Here’s my question: “isn’t it?” Do the distinctions in motivation matter?

Supporting Barry seems different from supporting Walter White because his overall arc is coded as redemptive. He WANTS to be better, and we’re giving him points for effort. Walt’s is pretty clearly a decent fueled by lust for power. That trips our “bad guy” alarm more easily.

What Bill Hader and Alec Berg have done with BARRY is quite remarkable. There's no reason we should empathize at all with this hardened killer, but they make Barry so damn relatable that the audience is often seduced by the lure of seeing themselves in Barry's shoes. That's the power of writing and performing.