Barry threw everyone for a loop a couple of weeks ago when it featured an unexpected and seemingly permanent eight-year time jump at the end of Episode 4. Barry (Bill Hader) and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) have gone off the grid and have a child now, named John (Zachary Golinger). Barry is now "Clark" and Sally is "Emily." John is unaware of his parent's real identities and questions why his mother wears hair on top of her hair (a wig, but the odds are high that John hasn’t been taught that word). If you think you grew up sheltered, think again, because the life Barry has created for his child is utterly terrifying.

Related: ‘Barry’ Season 4: What We Lose When We Lose [SPOILER]

Barry Tries to Change His Past Through His Son

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Image via HBO

Barry is trying to escape the life he leads and start fresh. We’ve all seen the “leaving the past behind” and “changing identities in favor of a new life” trope countless times in other shows and films, but Barry’s interpretation feels much more sinister. Why? Because Barry is attempting to rewrite his history through his son. It’s not as simple as living happily ever after safe from danger. It seems that was at once a possibility but it's not the route that the show has chosen. Barry is perpetually paranoid, clinging to some sort of Evangelicalism, and has John reciting several Bible verses that he has cherry-picked to provide some sense of solace for himself. He has converted (or at least convinced himself that he has) to a life of faith, as long as the beliefs line up with his own interests. (Thanks to Bill Burr's recent cameo.)

Barry has created such an egregiously sheltered life for John with the core tenant that practically everything is a sin. When John wants to play baseball, Barry pulls up several worst-case-scenario YouTube videos of little leaguers dying in freak baseball accidents. I imagine Barry’s plan is to prevent any form of violence, no matter how minuscule, from manifesting in John’s mind, so he’ll never end up like his dad, but he is going about it all the wrong way.

The Remote Location Is Nightmare Material

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Image via HBO

Located in the middle of nowhere in a house that could easily be confused for one of the three little pigs’ estates, Barry and Sally are attempting to live a normal life with John, but it is clearly anything but that. Mundane scenes have never been this uneasy and deeply unsettling. It’s a combination of many things that causes the unease, but it is primarily because it’s just a facade masking a prison of Barry’s own making. He’s trapped himself in there with Sally, and they have even brought a child into the world only to keep him locked up with them. Their everyday life is comparable to that of any dystopian tale, except everything in the outside world is still perfectly intact. Things grow to an unexpectedly terrifying level in the episode titled “the wizard” when Barry leaves Sally and John at home to kill Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) back in LA.

The thing is, while Barry might have convinced himself that he has adjusted to his new life as Clark, Sally is the furthest from convinced. It’s rare to find a scene where she isn’t drinking or completely drunk, resorting to some questionable actions at her job just to feel something. Sally makes a wholesome (albeit burnt) grilled cheese lunch for John, but he doesn’t want to eat it. Frustrated by his whining, Sally shoots a defeated look over to her bottle of vodka and slips some in John’s juice.

John passes out shortly after and Sally takes account of her screwy life for probably the millionth or so time. It’s then that we see the figure in an all-black skin suit looming behind her. It is the scariest and most jarring scene in recent television, especially for a show that isn’t billed as a horror. For what feels like an excruciatingly long amount of time, the figure stalks Sally but keeps her back to them. The dramatic irony is cranked up Sally reaches her room, still pursued by the home invader, until she walks through the door. The door shuts and locks behind her and two things become immediately evident. Someone is in their home and John is asleep right next to them.

Though it isn't revealed in the episode, it is likely that the invader is one of the aforementioned diner tough guys, as another party begins ramming their truck into the house again and again in a scene that feels like it could only happen in the worst nightmare. Sally tries to assemble the gun Barry left behind for her but by the time she does, her house has been ransacked and evacuated, with John still strung out on the couch. The scene itself is a masterclass in suspense and all the proof anyone needs that Bill Hader deserves to direct a horror movie à la Jordan Peele, but the scariest scene here isn’t about the skin-suit home invader...it’s Sally’s parenting. While Barry is trying to instill some confusing morals into his son, it seems as if Sally has just given up. And while it could seem easy to blame Barry for locking them away, she is complicit just as much as he is since she decided to flee with him.

Barry and Sally's Past Haunts Their Present

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Image via HBO

At the time they fled Los Angeles, both Barry and Sally were struggling with their personal demons. Sally is watching her former assistant and friend, Natalie (D'Arcy Carden) find fame and success, while she tries to upstage her acting mentee in front of a high-profile director, only to bolster the mentee's confidence tenfold. And Barry is of course on the run with his face in the center of multiple people’s dartboards. Their decision to run off was exhilarating at the time, a promise of a better life together, away from the mistakes of their past. Instead, their trauma only continued to grow and spilled over into their parenting.

The pair is bending the rules of society and editing history as seen when Barry tried to explain Abraham Lincoln to John through half-truths and lies. And since the Barry clan is practically isolated from the outside world entirely, John has no one else to go to correct him. Essentially Barry and Sally are playing God as they mold John’s view of the world in the likeness of their personal distorted vision. It is very disturbing to think of the potential ramifications of John’s future as this kind of practice sadly happens in the real world and never ends well. In the end, Barry is trying his best to keep his son out of harm, to stop him from turning out as he did, but if things continue to progress the way they are, John will turn out worse than his father ever was.