"Yeah it’s essentially Barry killing the very idea of forgiveness (laughs)," he tells The Wrap. "I think the first version of it was in a gas station parking lot, of Barry meeting a guy wanting his wife killed. Barry takes the money from him and then shoots him and you just see his car slowly drifting backward because he was about to leave, so the car is stuck in reverse, and it’s just kind of drifting backward. And as that’s happening, Barry makes a phone call and it’s to the wife, and she’s like, ‘Is it done?’ and he says, ‘Yes,’ and so you see that Barry’s pulled a double-cross on this husband. That was interesting, and it was that for a while, and then I think I just thought it really has nothing to do with what the season’s about. It just kind of shows where he’s at. So it was kind of like, let me go write another version of it, and that’s what you saw, which is these two guys forgiving each other and then he shoots them."
ALSO:
Anthony Carrigan preferred learning about Barry Season 3 via long chats with Bill Hader: "Yeah, we would get scripts," says Carrigan. "But honestly, my favorite medium of learning about the storyline is honestly just talking to Bill. We would have these long phone conversations and he’d just get so excited about what he thought were gonna be great moments. Now granted, some of those things were red herrings because some of those things wouldn’t actually make it into the final cut. They would just be things that he thought were hilarious. But when those scripts did start to roll in, it was just a breath of fresh air, getting back to this thing that we all love to do and that we’re never gonna take for granted, ever again."
Barry is at its best when Barry as its worst: "Every new ball added to Barry’s high-pressure juggling act threatens to ignite the tinderbox that is his psyche and unleash whatever it is — rage? guilt? Armageddon itself? — that’s bottled up in there," says Lorraine Ali. "Barry knows he needs to fix something inside himself, but he struggles to pinpoint exactly what, or where to start, and feelings are tricky for the assassin. (That’s where stagecraft comes in handy.) As the tension builds in Season 3, so does the action, which leads to some dazzling shootouts, brutal gangster warfare and nail-biting escape sequences."