Casualties Mount Up On A Disturbing New Episode Of Barry

Someone who’s having a very good morning is Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who’s woken up by her assistant Natalie (D’Arcy Carden) to see that her show “Joplin” is on the front page of its streaming home BanShe. But when they go to a coffee shop, Natalie is livid that “nobody’s noticing you.” That’s not the worst of it, because when Natalie revisits the BanShe home page, “Joplin” is nowhere to be found, having been replaced by something called “The New Medusas.” A less deathly, but no less ominous uh-oh for Sally.

Barry, meanwhile, is still none the wiser about things like his old Marine buddy snooping around or the vengeance army from last week’s episode. He’s also been kicked out by Sally, per the breakup at the end of last week’s show. So Barry is returning spiritually to his old acting stomping grounds. Though they’ve been absent for the first half of the season, we get to meet once more a pair of Barry’s fellow acting students, with whom he’ll be staying again: Jermaine (Darrell Britt-Gibson) and Nick (Rightor Doyle). It’s a big step down for our antihero, especially since they’ve turned Barry’s old room into a workspace hodgepodge.

The so-called “man of the hour” is Gene, who’s back on the set of “Laws of Humanity,” having inexplicably impressed the producers when he punched Barry on set two weeks ago. That said, since he got clear of Barry last week, began to make good with Joe Mantegna, and got a boatload of money, Gene seems to be living large. He’s also aware that he has to make good, so he goes out of his way to apologize to the showrunner for the time when he threw hot tea on him (as a PA on “Murder, She Wrote”). Though the apology is brief, Winkler sells it as well as you’d think as being genuine, and is met with a near-tearful reaction. Things are going well for Gene … so the other shoe has to drop soon, right? That’s how it always is with “Barry.”

The next scene is another one that requires your good memory (or the “Previously on” recap). In the first season, Barry’s attempts to knock out the Bolivian cartel went poorly, in part because he was saddled with three fellow Marines, including the extremely rash hothead Taylor (Dale Pavinski). Taylor died quite ignominiously, and though Fuches at the time had wished Taylor was killed earlier, he’s now using it to his advantage. In the middle of the desert, Fuches is trying to convince Taylor’s sister and brothers, all of whom are BMX motorbike riders, to take vengeance. And at first, surprisingly, the sell fails: his sister Tracy is uninterested in taking on Barry. That is, until Fuches says that Barry owes Taylor “$1,700 for a hot tub!” (An important fib that ties to Taylor’s weird conviction of putting a hot tub in the desert, which he stated to both Barry and Fuches in season 1.) So that would be three different sets of vengeance soldiers — Taylor’s siblings, the mother and son of the man we first saw Barry kill, and the father of the acting student from the series pilot — to watch out for, Barry.