Nightmare Fuel / Barry

Aww, what a sweet little gir- OHJESUS!

Barry isn't afraid to show its darker side since both the title character and the show can be goddamn nightmarish at times.

Season One

"Chapter One: Make Your Mark"

• Barry's swift executions of a group of Chechens that were targeting him for not killing Ryan (after they killed him themselves). It's quick, but it really illustrates how genuinely effective and dangerous Barry is as a killer.

"Chapter Two: Use It"

• Goran having his men torture Fuches by filing down his teeth to force Barry to agree to kill an informant. It's a brief but very disturbing scene with the combined sounds of Fuches' agonizing screams, Barry desperately yelling at the gangsters to stop and David Wingo's grim soundtrack.
• The last shot of the episode showing a Chechen gang member taking photos of Sally.

"Chapter Three: Make the Unsafe Choice"

• Barry strangling Paco to death.

"Chapter Five: "Do Your Job"

• Barry and Taylor raiding the stash house.
• Pretty much everything about Taylor. It's even mentioned that he's such a violent lunatic that he actually got kicked out of his PTSD support group.

"Chapter Six: Listen With Your Ears, React With Your Face

• The shootout between Vacha and Moss.
• The ending. Barry, Chris, Taylor and Vaughn driving on the airfield towards Bolivian gang members despite Barry begging Taylor to stop. Sure enough, they're ambushed by gunfire and crash their car before cutting to black.

"Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast, and Keep Going

• The entire scene with Barry and Chris which ends in Chris' death.
• Barry's emotional breakdown afterwards.

"Chapter Eight: Know Your Truth"

• Barry killing Goran and his gang. While the gang members go down quick, it's Goran's death that makes it so disturbing; Barry shoots him in the head right as he's about to kill Fuches, and the gangsters think Goran just missed, only for him to turn to them with a nasty exit wound in the side of his head exposing his brain and cracked pieces of skull that begins squirting blood. Staring at them with a blank look on his face, Goran sits down in a chair and his arm begins to wave his gun around randomly before he drops it, both of which are the results of his nervous system shutting down due to fatal brain damage.
• Barry killing Moss.

Season Two

"Chapter One: The Show Must Go On, Probably?"

• Hank telling Barry in a dead serious tone that he'll give him up to Goran's family as the real killer if Barry doesn't kill his new rival Esther (and he even says that they'll also go after his theatre group). Not only is it a glimpse of his terrifying dark side (that we have yet to see) it's also an utterly chilling reminder that for all of his many quirks he's still a mobster and a remorseless criminal who is not to be crossed or messed with especially when he's cornered. His utterly angry face throughout his speech doesn't help. By the end of it, Barry is unnerved to the core.
  • His final quote to him before he drives away: "Don't fuck with me Barry, it's not polite."

"Chapter Three: Past = Present x Future Over Yesterday"

• Barry showcases one hell of a Death Glare when Sally's ex-husband shows up.
• Immediately prior to the above, Sally has been trying to goad Barry into performing her domestic abuse scene. When Barry isn't giving her what she needs she goes full Cousineau and starts berating him. She takes it a step further and actually shoves and grabs Barry very aggressively, to his clear and obvious distress. He's blindsided and clearly shaken by it, but it's pretty frightening to see the normally sweet, shallow, sort of flaky Sally reveal this very hostile mean streak. Worse yet, the first time we, and her boyfriend, learn she has it in her, is in public, in front of everyone they know. It's never really challenged either, meaning Barry might have missed the first red flags for abuse. Even worse, is Sally's calculating look right before she starts. She grabs him to raise his hand to her throat and Barry draws back. He literally says 'Please, I'm not comfortable' and we see Sally think about it and then start shoving him. It's unbelievably cruel.

"Chapter Four: What?!"

• Barry, consumed with some twisted sense of justice, goes to Sam's hotel with the intent of killing him (based solely off of what Sally told him about their marriage ^note which we discover may or may not have been embellished, making Barry's reaction all the scarier) and when Sally is the one to open the door, he comes dangerously close to shooting her in the head. He disappears before she notices he was even there, but the look on his face as he hides down the hallway reveals that he's scared himself with this stunt. It's no wonder he goes out and cries in his car afterward.
• The truth finally comes out about what happened in Korengal: Barry's squad mate and best friend gets shot in the face and Barry, witnessing an apprehensive-looking villager duck into a nearby doorway, goes after him. Barry kicks the man's door in and immediately pumps him full of lead while the man's wife watches and screams in terror. The rest of Barry's troop bursts in shortly thereafter and forcefully restrain him, informing Barry that the man he's just killed is nothing more than an ordinary villager and the one who shot his fellow Marine was an enemy sniper on a rooftop that they've already dispatched. The look on his face as he realizes he's just committed not only a completely senseless murder, but a war crime is almost beyond description.

"Chapter Five: ronny/lily"

• Lily. Just look at the current page image.
• After receiving a punch to the sternum that audibly cracks his windpipe and has him struggling for air, Ronny is left whistling almost every time he breathes. Though much of the fight (Ronny whipping out the nunchucks; Barry's defeated reaction) is ridiculous and played for comedy, you can hear that his refusal to stop fighting is slowly asphyxiating him through hyperventilation. Eventually, he teeters back while moaning like he's being strangled, drops to the floor, writhes in agony, and passes out.
• Barry's injuries throughout the episode as well as the fact he begs and begs Fuches to take him to the hospital, getting weaker and more emotional with each plea as Fuches just keeps ignoring him and taking him after Lily. Bill Hader turns out to be able to play 'horrifically wounded' as well as he portrays everything else, adding to the horror of his condition as he looks and sounds just... so done, and so hurt.
• Barry's flashback of meeting Fuches when he got discharged from the army. The fact that this contrasts to other soldiers happily greeting their family members, that Fuches is grinning and wearing a black suit and that this all happens in complete silence doesn't help.
  • The flashback could also be viewed as a hallucination about dying induced by Barry's injuries, showing him realizing Fuches is not unlike the Devil, who offers Barry help, support, purpose, but in reality his tricking and manipulating him constantly, binding them ever closer and damning them to the same hell.

"Chapter Six: The Truth Has a Ring to It"

• Barry tapping into his trauma over killing Detective Moss in order to perform spectacularly. Not only does this officially confirm her death to anyone who was wondering about her fate in the Season one finale, but his shocked reaction over killing her ends up slowly turning into a cold and empty glare.

"Chapter Seven: The Audition"

• Fuches pointing a .45-caliber gun point blank at Cousineau's head, who is currently frozen with shock at the sight of Janice Moss' body. Mercifully, the sound of approaching law enforcement vehicles (and perhaps his own conscience) makes Fuches choose not to fire. Though what he does instead is perhaps worse.

"Chapter Eight: berkman > block"

• The slow head turn and eerie glare that Barry gives Sally after she gives him a hard slap to the face to get his attention right before their scene during the showcase. She thinks she's genuinely helping him get into the proper head space to play an abusive spouse, ironically unaware that he's already harboring a barely-restrained murderous rage over Fuches' antics (thus resulting in his inability to concentrate). No doubt many a viewer expected him to take it out on her in that moment. To make this worse, Bill Hader himself stated in an interview that Barry would've killed Sally had she not deviated from the script.
  • Made even more chilling by the fact that Barry's Murder Soundtrack kicks in as she hits him. All season long we've heard whistling desert winds when Barry's trauma/anger gets so overwhelming that he's about to murder someone. It's our indicator he's checked out mentally.
    • The very fact Sally slaps him. It's abusive, completely unexpected, sudden and a pretty shitty thing to do to your boyfriend, even if it's "for a scene". Barry is clearly not in a good headspace and Sally whacks him. Could be an indicator she's got a much meaner side to her.
• Bill Hader's downright terrifying performance during Barry's massacre at the Burmese monastery. Gone is any semblance of humanity from the man as he storms through the building, indiscriminately putting a bullet between the eyes of anything and everything that moves in his attempt to find and kill Fuches for his betrayal, making not a sound except to occasionally shriek the name of his target as he goes along. The guy spends all of season two deliberately choosing not to kill people and ends up with a bigger body count from this incident than the entire first season combined. He bears a truly chilling expression on his face of pure, seething hatred from the moment he bursts in the door and doesn't snap out of it until he goes back through the building and realizes what he's done after Fuches escapes via car. The last glimpse we see of Barry as the season draws to a close is of him slowly descending into a darkened hallway ^note the lights having been shot out during the rampage, indicating a new chapter has begun in his life.
  • One moment that stands out in particular is when Barry guns down three men in quick succession only for one of them to stand and walk for a few steps while choking on blood from a gunshot wound in his neck before bleeding out while Barry moves on.

Season Three

"forgiving jeff"

• Strap yourselves in folks, for Season Three starts off with a BANG, showing that Barry's Sanity Slippage from the previous season finale has only gotten worse during the intervening time.
  • The very first scene is of Barry eating a donut while some poor soul, Which we later find out to be the "Jeff" in question, cries and begs for forgiveness offscreen. The complete lack of emotion shown by Barry in this scene is just chilling, what once would have caused him to feel some semblance of remorse is now little more than an inconvenience.
    • We then find out that this is because Jeff had sex with Barry's client's wife, and now the client has forced Jeff to dig his own grave! The client then decides to take it up a notch and asks Barry to get his toolbox so he can cut Jeff's eyelids off so he "see himself suffer"
    • AND THEN! When the client and Jeff come to an understanding, with the client finally forgiving Jeff, Barry shoots the both of them dead! It's such an unexpected action for the character, and it firmly cements that this is not the same Barry as Seasons 1 or 2.
  • The final bit of nightmare fuel that this episode has is Barry's PTSD melding with reality. He begins to see bullet wounds appear on the faces of those he loves most, i.e. Sally and Cousineau. The first appears with such shock that the entire world just goes mute, while everyone else just carries on like nothing happened. It's a stark contrast from Barry's other, more innocuous fantasies, and it apparently appears unbidden, which may be a sign that he's not all there anymore.
• The confrontation between Gene and Barry, where Gene tells Barry that he knows he killed Janice and that he can either go to the cops and turn himself in or Gene will shoot him right there. Making it worse is the fact that preceding this, we see Gene essentially saying goodbye to his son and grandson, which gives the implication that he genuinely wasn't prepared to be coming out of that meeting with Barry alive one way or the other. Although there's a brief moment of comic relief when Gene's gun quite literally falls apart, the NF comes roaring back as Barry takes a moment to process what's just happened and then lunges over Gene's desk ...and we cut to Gene on his knees in the same place that Barry killed Jeff and his client with Barry pointing a gun at Gene's head. Considering Season 1 had Barry kill both Chris and Janice for the "crime" of knowing what he was, and Season 2 had the monastery shootout, it seems genuinely and awfully plausible in that moment that Barry, for all he owes Gene and claims to love him, will end up shooting him.

"limonada"

• Barry’s full on freak out in Sally’s writer's room. It's completely unprecedented and something so out of line for Barry. While it's not physically violent, it’s definitely intimidating and sure to unnerve any audience.
  • There's something particularly distressing about how Sally, after having been screamed at by Barry, goes out of her way to order and set up dinner for him, and even buy him a new game controller after his had broken earlier in the day. It's clear that this is an old survival tactic from her marriage to Sam, and puts their relationship in a new and very troubling light.
  • Subtle, but the absolute willingness of Sally's coworkers to ignore Barry screaming at her and how shaken she is afterwards. None of them step in or ask her about it afterwards except for her teenage costar, who is told that Barry is "a great guy". It's a harrowing representation of how easily people will ignore obvious signs of abusive relationships for their own comfort.
• The efficiency of Fernando’s agents, Las Aguilas. It takes them all of 10 seconds to infiltrate and light up the Chechen nursery. Spooky.
• In season 2, Barry wouldn’t even pretend to entertain the notion of killing a young girl when she was actively kicking his ass and he wasn’t convinced she was “of this world.” Now he doesn’t hesitate to threaten to murder Gene Cousineau’s similarly aged grandson.
• It's quite mild compared to other things, but Barry's complete switch from the volatile but still genuinely adorkable guy he was in Seasons 1 & 2 to, as of the end of the episode, a man who is clearly now more than a little unhinged casually threatening to kill Gene's son and grandson if Gene doesn't give him exactly what he wants and outright demanding that Gene express love for him (as well as his apparent inability to even recognize the awfulness of his freak-out at Sally at all, when the last season featured him initially unable to even pretend to hurt her) is really quite unnerving.
  • Barry’s eyes during his threat to Cousineau, simultaneously tearful and enraged, only add to how unstable he is slowly becoming. They almost bulge out of his head and his stare looks like it can pierce through your soul. The incredibly close zoom in to Barry’s face as the episode concludes doesn’t help.
  • Also, the fact that all we hear is Cousineau’s grandson playing his PSP game during the credits forces you to revaluate your views on the situation the characters have found themselves in. Shit just got real.

"crazytimesh*tshow"

• Seeing Sally crying about her show being canceled, Barry asks her where he could find Diane Villa, head of streaming service BanShe and producer for Sally's show (which she canceled after low response from the algorithm), and tells her the plans of what he could do her. It is downright frightening.
  Barry: Do you know where she lives?
  Sally: I don't know... what, were you gonnna, like, send her an angry letter or something?
  Barry: Oh, nothing like that. I'm just gonna freak her out a little bit.
  Sally: Freak her out how?
  Barry: Oh, there's a lot of ways. It's, you know... nothing bad. No, it's just... like, for instance, I could... send her a picture of herself sleeping. You know, just as a way of being like, "Hey, not cool what you did to Sally, you know?"
  Sally: ...so you'd break into her house?
  Barry: Oh, she'd never know I was there. The whole point is to isolate her and make her feel like she's going insane. So, I would just do little things, like replace her dog with a slightly different dog, or, you know, change the furniture in her house so she thinks she's shrinking. You know, basic stuff. Most of it I learned in the military. Some of it on a subreddit. You know? Basically, just plant a seed, and then they just kinda hang themselves, so it's super nonviolent. But by the end of it, like, her brain will have essentially eaten itself, you know? But that's on the table if you want it. Okay?
  • What makes it even worse is that Sally's expression becomes increasingly horrified as she listens to him while Barry just keeps talking in the same soothing tone that he used when he was genuinely comforting her. And he's genuinely shocked when she yells at him to get out afterwards. Barry has become so entirely disconnected from the world and people around him that he actually sincerely believed that offering to drive Sally's boss insane was an appropriate response to the situation.

"710n"

• Thanks to Fuches, Barry now has practically an entire army of people after him, all made up of people close to those he has killed throughout the series. The sheer relentlessness of Taylor's sister and her gang of motorbike buddies as they chase Barry through the streets of LA is genuinely terrifying. The episode ends with Chris' wife, previously having been chatting with Barry with no sign of anything being wrong, coldly telling him to die while she watches him choke on some beignets she just poisoned.

“candy asses”

• Sally’s meltdown toward Natalie when she finds out the latter got her own show, which is more or less a sitcom like spin on Joplin. In particular is the rather unnerving way that Sally roars ”YOU ENTITLED FUCKING CUNT!” in Natalie’s face.
  • It's especially nightmarish because Natalie's show isn't a spin on Joplin. Joplin was a dark, emotional drama about domestic violence, while Natalie's show is a Rom Com about a mother and daughter running a cupcake store; the only thing the two shows have in common is that they star a single mother and daughter. Additionally, Sally claims to be upset because Natalie stole her real-life story, but as Natalie points out, Sally doesn't actually have a daughter, so the one connection between Natalie's show and Joplin is a fictional element of Sally's story anyway. Sally's extreme egotism is normally Played for Laughs, but it's genuinely frightening to see her delude herself into thinking that Natalie only succeeded by copying her and that that somehow justified verbally abusing and threatening her.
• Jim Moss can be seen as walking Nightmare Fuel, he not only manipulates Fuches and an increasingly erratic Barry into getting themselves caught, he also was a psychological warfare expert who convinced his POW captor to commit suicide, and manipulated Gene into helping him take down Barry. The real kicker? He's supposed to be one of the good guys. Think about that for a second...

“starting now”

• The whole episode, frankly. As Bill Hader points out in multiple interviews regarding this finale, there is only one actual joke in this episode, the rest of it is just pure stress.
• Barry's complete breakdown when Albert confronts him. He becomes almost animalistic, screaming and sobbing on the floor, in a way that feels like he is only just now coming to terms with everything he's done for the very first time. It's incredibly disturbing to watch, and even Bill Hader has since stated that he gave himself a panic attack acting it out.
• The entire scene where the surviving biker gang member ambushes Barry and Sally. Sally, who has been pushed to her limit this season, finally has an onscreen kill. Just the horror of her nearly being choked to death and viciously fighting back is a far cry from where she was in Season 1.
  • While he is trying to choke her, the shot lingers on Sally's face for an uncomfortably long time. There is a very brief moment, right before she suddenly stabs him with the knife, where you would not be faulted for thinking "Oh my god, he actually killed her" because her entire body and face goes completely still.
  • While no one would fault Sally for fighting back against her assailant, it's still an extremely brutal scene. She stabs him through the neck, which causes him to bleed out of his eye. The biker, in shock, doesn't seem to understand what's happening, and wanders off into the recording booth. Sally then viciously beats him to death with a baseball bat, which the audience neither sees or hears fully due to the recording booth blocking both the noise and his body.
  • Barry's reaction when he wakes up and sees Sally in the recording booth adds a whole new level of horror to the entire thing. This is a guy who has both seen and committed murder fairly regularly for years and is unnervingly comfortable with the idea of murder as a baseline solution to any given problem... and he's legitimately horrified by what he sees of both Sally's attack and the biker's body as he drags her out of the recording booth. Not to mention the fact that Sally herself is a barely functional, traumatized mess in the immediate aftermath.
• NoHo Hank overhearing the Bolivians unleash a panther on Akhmal and Yandar in the other cell. What exactly happens can only be guessed by the horrific sounds and screams, as well as the pool of blood that seeps under the wall. Apparently the sight is bad enough that one of the guards vomits, with Hank witnessing it seep under the door.
  • When Hank rescues a suffering Cristobal and tightly embraces him, his eyes slowly widen into a haunting Thousand-Yard Stare, and everything is deadly quiet. It's clear that no matter what, Hank is deeply traumatized and will never fully recover from this nightmare.
    • And that's not even getting into what happened to Cristobal himself; when Hank finds him he's been subjected to a severe course of electroshock conversion therapy by Elena, who repeatedly shocks him while forcing him to watch a male stripper dance, stopping only to forcibly lay his hands on her face and body. It's a truly chilling concept on its own, but the fact that Cristobal barely responds to Hank shooting both Elena and the dancer before reaching out to hold him implies he's going to have permanent damage going forward.
    • Even the moment building up to this reveal is disturbing, as a clearly terrified Hank makes his way down the hall to find Cristobal as distant music echoes through the building while the lights are flicking and the silhouette of the dancer can be seen in the doorway, with the camera blurring it to make it look distorted and unnatural. A lot of people have pointed out how it all feels like something out of a horror movie.

Season Four

“it takes a psycho”

• Hank's murder of his and Cristobal's new crew in the sand room and his almost accidental murder of Cristobal. The entire scene is chilling. We don't see or hear the rest of the men struggle as they're sucked under, but Cristobal manages to keep his head above the sand for a few moments and desperately cry for Hank to save him before slowing sinking below the sand himself. We are then treated to a black screen as Cristobal's screams become muffled and slowly die out before Hank arrives just in time to dig him out.
  • The fact that this is NoHo Hank of all people who orchestrated this is a whole new brand of terrifying. It was implied in his last scene of Season 3 that he was traumatised by the experience but this episode shows just how much the whole ordeal changed him. And the fact that he knows how far gone he is, not even bothering to argue with Cristobal's assessment of how cold-blooded his actions were and instead merely focusing on trying to stop him from leaving (before giving up on that as well), makes it all the worse.
• The situation most of the characters are in for the duration of the episode: Barry has escaped from prison and several of the characters have every reason to believe he's going to come after them. The fact that he's not seen until the very last scene of the episode fills the runtime with a non-stop sense of complete dread.
  • When he finally does make his appearance, it's a scene straight out of a horror movie. Sally looks into a darkened room and we can just about see the shape of a man in the shadows. Then he slowly limps into the light, revealing a face still swollen and bruised from his prison beating. If Sally didn't immediately give him what he wanted, things could have gotten ugly.

"tricky legacies"

• The episode overall is filled with Realism-Induced Horror, as we see Barry and Sally's new lives unfold into a portrait of utter emptiness and despair.
  • Barry has styled himself after a Standard '50s Father-type, while closely controlling every part of his son's life. He's apparently homeschooling him (while being clearly ignorant of the subject matter) and telling him Blatant Lies about his past. The most chilling part comes from when John starts playing catch with one of his friends in the neighborhood; after Barry finds the catcher's mitt in his room he makes John watch videos of children being killed in baseball accidents, all to keep him isolated from anyone who could possibly break their cover.
  • Seeing the previously driven, ambitious Sally reduced to an alcoholic Empty Shell is just as frightening as it is sad. She's reduced to working a dead-end waitressing job, barely able to show affection to Barry (who criticizes her drinking when their son is out of earshot and barely speaks to her otherwise) or their son. When hooking up with a coworker who had previously harassed her, she begins choking him out, only stopping because he'd pushed her wig off when trying to defend himself. She's later shown getting him fired by (possibly falsely) accusing him of stealing from the till, showing that her resentments have only made her mean streak worse over the Time Skip.
  • The last we see of them in the episode has Barry and Sally reacting with fear to a knock at the door, and Barry retrieves one of his guns from a hidden safe while Sally hides out with John in the bathtub. When Barry goes outside and sees nothing, he stands in the same position until sunrise, just waiting for any threat that could possibly arise.
  • The episode ends with Sally finding out that Gene is going to be a consultant for a movie about Gene's ordeal with Barry and he eerily states: "I'm going to have to kill Cousineau." The old Barry is back...

"the wizard"

• Everything involving Sally this episode.
  • Sally gets a knock on the door, and a male voice threatens to get her and "that boy of [hers]." She systematically locks the door and starts to lock all the windows in the house. And while she's doing this, a tall figure appears, covered head to toe in black, looking akin to a shadowman, and starts quietly stalking Sally around the house. It is absolutely terrifying to watch.
  • When she walks into her bedroom, the door closes behind her and she begins to have auditory hallucinations of the biker she murdered. He tries to wake John up from his slumber, but he says "he's not breathing". Sally reaches for the gun parts lying on her bed, assembles it, and pulls the trigger repeatedly, aiming at the door even though the gun has no actual bullets in it.
  • Then a truck rams into the house so hard, it tilts over, causing all the furniture in the house to break and fall over itself, making a complete mess out of the living room. Upon first time watching, it almost feels like an earthquake is happening.
  • The next time we see Sally, she's curled up in the middle of the living room, desperately calling Barry to come back. Her mental state has gotten so bad, she is hanging from a metaphorical edge.
• Barry gets kidnapped right as he's about to get the jump on Gene. The next time he wakes up, he's inside of a garage, handcuffed to a chair, sitting in front of Jim Moss.

"wow"

• The gory aftermath of the shootout between Hank's and Fuches' men. Fuches covers John's eyes while walking him out, but the audience sees a man with his lower leg blown off, another with his intestines spilling onto the floor and one that has gone blind.
• The final shot of Barry with his brains hanging out of his head.

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