A nice meal
Barry reveals a secret that changes Jim's plan.
"a nice meal" is the penultimate episode of Barry, the 31st overall, and the seventh of its fourth season. Liz Sarnoff wrote it, and Bill Hader directed. It debuted on HBO and HBO Max on May 21, 2023. In the episode, Jim Moss psychologically tortures Barry, who escaped prison eight years prior and returned to Los Angeles to kill Gene and control his legacy. Moss changes his mind after Barry reveals a key detail Gene withheld. Meanwhile, Gene seeks to reclaim his fame, and Hank attempts to kill Fuches and his crew.
Quick Facts
- Series
- Barry
- Director
- Bill Hader
- Writer
- Liz Sarnoff
- Photographer
- Carl Herse
- Editor
- Ali Greer
- Airdate
- 21 May 2023
- Length
- 30 minutes
Facts from the source article.
Plot
Jim Moss puts Barry through psychological torment, forcing him to imagine the deaths of everyone he cares about. At the same time, Gene and Tom launch a boycott of Barry’s biopic, which gains public support. Hank brings in a group of assassins to eliminate Fuches and his crew. Right before Jim starts physically torturing him, Barry drifts into a daydream where he tells Gene he’s sorry for handing over a duffel bag with $250,000. This catches Jim off guard, and he checks the story against Lon O’Neil’s notes, finding it matches. Gene gets a call from Matt Iserson, a UTA agent who says Daniel Day-Lewis wants to end his retirement to play Gene in the film. Gene sets up a meeting. Sally, now in Los Angeles with John, phones Gene asking for help, but he tells her to come to his house instead of canceling. The assassins’ heads are delivered to Hank’s office in boxes. Hank and his assistant fire a rocket-propelled grenade at Fuches’s gang but miss and have to run. Hank gets away and decides to have Gene kidnapped to get to Barry. Gene meets Iserson, who explains the studio wants Mark Wahlberg for Barry, but Wahlberg is uneasy about playing a cop killer. Gene argues that his own past with Barry is more layered than a simple hero-versus-villain story, so Barry can still come across as sympathetic. He agrees to meet Wahlberg in Beverly Hills. At Jim’s house, Barry tries to cut his way out of the garage with a knife, but he accidentally wounds himself and passes out. Sally reaches Gene’s house, but nobody answers. John asks what they’ll do when things go back to normal, which makes Sally walk up to a police officer to confess. The officer doesn’t recognize her, and she freezes, seeing a hallucination of the man she killed. After the officer walks away, Sally watches Hank’s Chechen men pull John into a van and then come for her.
Production
The episode's title was revealed in April 2023. Executive producer Liz Sarnoff wrote the episode, while series creator and lead actor Bill Hader directed it. This marked Sarnoff's fourth writing credit and Hader's seventeenth directing credit. Henry Winkler commented on Gene's actions, stating that Gene absolutely wants to do the right thing but is so egocentric and spotlight-starved that he cannot help himself, realizing only afterward that he has made a gross mistake.
Reception
The episode was watched by 0.237 million viewers, earning a 0.07 in the 18-49 rating demographics on the Nielsen ratings scale, a slight increase from the previous episode. "a nice meal" received critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 100% approval rating based on 6 reviews, with an average rating of 9/10. Matt Schimkowitz of The A.V. Club gave the episode an "A" and wrote that amid all the plate stacking, the episode lives up to its name, feeling like a welcome diversion from pain and misery, and that for a show that has never cared much what the audience thinks, it plays to the rafters. Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone noted that the episode ends with Barry once again shot from behind, a motif Hader has used multiple times this season, and that the only question left is how many other significant characters may wind up on that beach. Ben Rosenstock of Vulture gave the episode a 4-star rating out of 5 and wrote that even aside from strong punchlines, there remains something essentially comic about Barry's view of people trapped with themselves, unable to resist the pull of the dark side, and that with one episode to go, it feels like everyone's fate is set in stone.
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