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| Photo: HBO |
Well, that escalated quickly. After the heavy emotions of last week's "What?!" Barry opts for a dark comedy of errors with a dash of art house flick quirkiness in "ronny/lilly."
The episode opens in the home of Ronny Proxin, the man with whom Detective Loach's wife Diana was having an affair. Barry isn't seen but instead heard at first, which should've been the first clue things were about to go very wrong. Instead of keeping his half of Loach's deal--that he kill Ronny in exchange for dropping Janice's murder case--Barry attempts to strike his own bargain, asking that he leave L.A. and live in Chicago for a year so Loach and Fuches will think he did the deed. It's classic Barry: well-intentioned but hopelessly naive, attempting to apply half measures (shout out Mike Erhmantraut) in a situation that can only end with one person being dead.
Ronny surprisingly seems game, until he gives Barry a kick to the chest, knocking him unconscious. See, Ronny's a taekwondo master, and won't go down without a long, extended fight that doesn't skimp on showing the brutality of a bare-knuckle brawl. Ronny eventually dies (or does he?) courtesy of a broken windpipe, which leaves Barry to contend with his daughter, presumably the Lily referenced the episode's title. I'm not sure how to feel about the portrayal of Lily; on one hand, I get the whole episode is a departure from the show's usual narrative structure, that while what we're watching on screen is actually happening, it's also meant to have an absurdist edge to it. It's just...jarring to see a young girl react to finding her father's body by acting like, as Barry calls it, "feral mongoose." That said, Lily more than holds her own, inflicting stab wounds on Barry and taking a chunk out of Fuches' face.
The cherry on top of this disastrous sundae comes in the episode's final stretch when Barry has to stop in a store to get paint thinner for Fuches, who's superglued himself to the steering wheel--because what else could be the outcome of trying to patch up a horrendous stitch job by applying superglue to stab wounds? Lo and behold in aisle three, there's Ronny, who is alive and ready to rumble. The ensuing chaos ends with Ronny being shot by police (but not before he delivers a fatal roundhouse to Loach) and Barry managing to emerge from the whole scene relatively unscathed, taking off with Fuches in his car.
So what to make of all this? Is it really plausible Barry could just limp off from a scene inundated with police and news crews and not be noticed? That Fuches could do a hit and run on a cop and not be arrested? Will LAPD connect the dots as to why Loach, a homicide detective, responded to a fight in a grocery store? What will happen to Lily? What do the scenes of Barry walking towards a serene-looking Fuches mean? Honestly, I'm still processing everything, and while "ronny/lily" definitely kept me glued to the screen, I don't know how many more lucky breaks the show can cut Barry until it just starts to get unbelievable.
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