Barry Goes On The Road In The Best Episode Of The Season

Fuches, back at the ranch, acknowledges he used to be in some bad business. “I’m trying to put it behind me,” he says, before finding out that the cowboy’s daughter likes him and wants to be his girlfriend. (Fuches is a lucky, lucky man.) All’s over, right? Right? Uh, well, no. Fuches notices in the truck a copy of Variety (of course) with the story about Gene and Barry. And that sets him off, muttering about it as a sign from God, and so he commandeers the truck and drives away. Oh, and he calls back Jim Moss (who we now see is played by character actor Robert Wisdom), saying he does have information about who killed Janice. Uh-oh.

But there is a more pressing uh-oh, as we see next: Taylor’s motorbike siblings have located Barry’s new bachelor pad (with one of them watching Nick and Jermaine doing a spoken-word recording of sorts), and are on the hunt. Barry, for the moment, is nowhere near: he’s at Beignets by Mitch, talking to the man himself (of course), who wisely notes that Barry should “tread lightly” because of how long it’s been since he saw all of his pals. “People change, man.” After leaving the beignet shop, Barry starts heading over to Sharon’s house but is quickly surrounded by the bikers.

So, for a couple of weeks, I’ve been wondering here: when will Barry get an inkling that something is amiss? Up to this point, Barry has no real way of knowing what Fuches is up to, or that Fuches is up to anything. That changes here, in a scene that a) reminds me somewhat of the motorcycle chase at the end of “Raising Arizona”, and b) is … man, I don’t know, maybe the best scene of this season. If not the whole show. The chase quickly begins as Barry hears that the bikers got his photo from “Goulet” and that they should probably shoot him. Hader-as-director shows his action-movie chops by avoiding any quick cuts or fast edits. There are three bikers at first, but in an expert shot, we see through Barry’s rearview mirror that one of them gets stopped by a truck. The second biker, shooting at Barry directly, gets run into by our antihero as he tries to get free. While that still leaves two bikers alive, Barry is nothing if not coldly industrious: he takes the now-free bike from the guy who he ran into and keeps on driving.

Until they see him on the bike, that is, leading to another and more protracted chase that starts on a surface street but goes straight onto the freeway. What’s so effective about this sequence is, again, that Hader avoids any quick cuts. If anything, by largely switching between two angles — either one from behind Barry on the bike, or another with the camera essentially positioned on the opposite angle — Hader ramps up the tension as the motorbikers get closer and closer, until we realize that they have another sibling in a car on the freeway, ready to fire at Barry with a machine gun as needed. He misses, of course, and when he tries to hand the machine gun off to one of the bikers, it only causes the biker to run into a car. So it’s down to one of Taylor’s siblings. As the bike putters out, Barry gets shot at again, trying to escape into a local car dealership as Taylor’s sister drives her bike onto the dealership roof, trying to fire at him from down below. Good news for Barry! Because this is America, the angry car dealer has a gun of his own, and he has a lot better aim, killing Taylor’s sibling with two shots. And Barry — in a nice switcheroo during a single shot — is seen walking away, helmet off.