Summary
“Ronny/Lily” is a strange yet highly entertaining episode that was reminiscent, for me, of a small slice of Quentin Tarantino.
This Barry Season 2 Episode 5 recap for the episode titled “Ronny/lily” contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Last week on Barry led us to one of the more revealing moments in the series when his acting coach/de-facto therapist Gene tells him, “I pray human beings can change their nature. Because if we can’t, then you and I are in deep trouble,” and proves to Barry that he’s talking about his feelings instead of acting out his feelings, which shows progress. Barry now feels so good about himself he runs over to Fuches’ hotel, unveiling it all in front of Detective Loach, who he didn’t know was in the bathroom listening to the entire revelation that he is becoming a better person.
Loach puts a gun on Barry, tells him to sit down, and when you think he is going to take the law into his own hands, he tells Barry that it will all go away if he kills his ex-wife’s lover. This, of course, leads to the title of the episode, “What?!” The last 15 minutes of the season’s fourth episode were an intense, emotionally-driven ride that ends with a storyline shift that leaves the audience as shocked as its lead character.
This culminates in an episode that is almost as offbeat and different than the series; I was worried it would lead to a “jump the shark” moment (which was ironically derived when Barry’s own Henry Winkler jumped a shark in an episode of Happy Days) but ended up being one of the most exhilarating, inspired, weird, and darkly funny episodes the series has ever done.
The episode titled “Ronny/Lily” starts with Detective Loach’s wife’s lover, Ronny, walking into his house, finding a window open, then while walking through the house, senses someone is inside it. Barry, off-camera, as he turns around, tells him, “Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. I’ve been sent here by Detective John Loach to kill you. I’m not going to do that.” He then tells him that he will drive him to his family in Chicago, there is a car outside, and that he needs to stay out there for about a year.
Ronny agrees; as Barry keeps talking to him, he walks around his house calmly collecting his clothes and toiletry items from the bathroom, all the while we see trophies, medals, and pictures of this man’s martial arts accomplishments (actor Daniel Bernhardt plays Ronny, who has his own martial arts studio while his credits include John Wick, Atomic Blonde, and of course Blood Sport 3). Suddenly, with a massive redwood of a tree trunk leg, he spins around and kicks Barry square in the stomach, sending him through the closet door. This leads to a near seven-minute fight, where Barry cracks Ronny’s windpipe. Still, the Foodfight (2009) star battles Barry (even pulling out an impressive set of nunchucks) until he falls over, apparently dying of asphyxiation.
Barry, who thinks his work is now done while maintaining his good-guy status by Ronny only dying because he defended himself, begins to walk out of the house when Lily, Ronny’s pre-teen daughter, comes in from karate practice and sees Barry standing in the hallway bloodied and battered. She runs past him, calling for her father off-camera; Barry goes after her, then finds something he didn’t expect: Lily makes Logan’s Laura/X-23 look like a nuisance mosquito you swat off your shoulder.
She then runs around fighting Barry like a deranged spider-monkey on meth, jumping off walls, tables, hanging from pot-racks, and manages to stab him a half-dozen times in the back with a paring knife. Finally, after a 4-minute battle, Lilly leaps out of the window, jumping over fences and bushes away from the house. Later, when Barry tells Fuches that Lilly is gone, he refuses to take him to get medical attention until they find her. When they do, she runs up a tree, then sits on top of a house roof like a gargoyle, and then leaps on top of the car as they speed away. Hence the very close to jumping the shark moment, but it is a comedy and a dark one.
Later, Fuches, who now has his hands superglued to the car steering wheel, needs Barry to get some paint thinner at the store to free his hands and still has blood all over his face. The store manager sees him, then looks to his right, where Barry hears a familiar gasping of a broken windpipe. To my great shock (and delight), Ronny is in the pharmacy section as well, in a neck brace, and we see Barry, who is actually very relieved that he is standing there, you know, not dead. While Barry reassures him that his daughter is alive, he attacks him, even the store manager, and as everyone runs out of the grocery store, the cops arrive.
As Ronny stands over Barry, looking like Jon Ham getting angry who turns into the Hulk, he is shot in the back by Detective Loach, who then tries to kill Barry by yelling to drop a gun (which he does not have) to cover up his part in the plan. Amazingly, while Leanna Rhymes sings the words, “How do I ever, ever survive?” from “How do I Live” over the store’s airwaves, Ronny gets up and sends a roundhouse kick that breaks Detective Loach’s neck, killing him.
Then, the cops enter, putting a couple of dozen bullets into our new hero, also killing him (we think; at this point, I’m sure they don’t know if they should kill him or hire him). Barry manages to escape out the back, meeting Fuches in his car, still attached to the steering wheel, yelling at Barry to get in the car while cops are running around the store.
“Ronny/Lily” is a strange yet highly entertaining episode reminiscent of a small slice of Quentin Tarantino for me. Bloody, action-packed, offbeat, funny, and surprising in the way characters pop back up in the story, which is quite an accomplishment for a 38-minute story arc. This chapter closes a question on dealing with Detective Loach but opens a new one, as Lilly is still out there and can identify both Barry and Fuches. “What?!” was the best episode of the season.
Still, chapter five leveled out some wraps up a storyline a little too conveniently, was about to jump the shark, settled down, and lets the laughs come on strong (I had an Anderson Cooper giggle-fit when I heard Leanne Rhymes’ song pop up on the loudspeakers), while nearly keeping me on the edge of my seat not knowing what was going to happen next.
