Just a little bit of empathy with Leo could have helped their relationship without having to resort to an assist from strawberries. It’s one of the last in an endless line of Gene’s Almosts, tragedies big and small that he could have avoided with just one slight change from his inherent ways. Sarah Goldberg in “Barry” Merrick Morton/ HBO For anyone who may have missed that undercurrent, here’s Nate Corddry’s character to make it more apparent than ever. FBI agents have pitted former friends against each other for plea deals and (right before being executed by a roof-hiding assassin) played along at letting Barry ( Bill Hader) think Sally was coming with him on a witness protection deal. We’ve talked a lot this season about performances of all kinds, but haven’t yet really addressed how law enforcement stages deception. But he makes a “Barry” rookie mistake: Everyone on this show should know by now to not expect unconditional good things. With that tantalizing ray of hope, Gene talks himself into being justified in accepting the spotlight. Seemingly rewarded for his patience and being motivated by good intentions, a random phone call from a UTA agent tells him this new Barry Berkman project might be luring Daniel Day-Lewis out of retirement. There’s a faint glimmer when it looks like Gene ( Henry Winkler) might be heading for the former. “Barry” has dangled some endgame ideas of who might end up finding that elusive happiness and who will almost certainly end up facing a brutal punishment.

Steven Yeun Couldn’t Cry Filming the Church Scene in ‘Beef’ Here, she returns for “A Nice Meal,” a fourth and final Episode 7 to put a bow on these time jump transformations - not to show that all these characters are necessarily right back where they started, but that each of them has ambitions and impulses that they can’t shake. Writer Liz Sarnoff has long been helping “Barry” deliver some hard truths and difficult fates in second-to-last episodes of seasons (much like George Pelecanos did for “The Wire”). Add a few extra corpses to the Dubek family’s peaks and valleys and you get something roughly approximating where “Barry” finds itself now: desperation, death, and jokes. For all the shows that “Barry” shares DNA with - crime dramas, black comedies, metaphysical treatises on morality - as the end nears, it’s easiest to see “Barry” as basically a more dangerous version of “The Other Two.” Hollywood satire, over-confident narcissists plummeting to depths of their own digging, relationships shredded in a heartbeat.

The hopeless series