RocktheCasbah Without spoiling it for others, I appreciated both flash-forwards, including the coda, as I thought the show really needed to depict the lingering and formative consequences of its traumatic plot points to land any kind of ending.
The show is high concept but rests on some conservative conceptual scaffolding: that we can't really know others or ourselves, that we're constituted by our damage and doomed to be ruled by our desire for the strictly unattainable.
Where the concept retains its real cleverness is that for Barry, Sally and Gene, for different reasons, that unattainable object of desire is attached to the dream of becoming a great actor, a dream that is itself already constitutively fake.
The three of them are all incrementally thwarted by this ground, that there's no 'there' there when it comes to acting. At the basement there's nothing there but someone else who tells you you've acted brilliantly. Only one of these three characters ends up escaping the trap. Acting, just like being a hitman, is a strictly vacuous, instrumental and pragmatic life. One might as well ask a sniper rifle for insight into the terms of its existence as ask an actor.
As the satirical THE MASK COLLECTOR makes clear, not only are we barred from the truth of our own existence, others are also barred from this barring. Each of us never truly grasps each other also never accesses the truth of their lives.
For each of us there's always someone who seems to understand how life works and live in contentment: in the show this is the function eventually taken up by the formerly neurotic and insecure Fuches. But this appearance is illusory, and by transforming Fuches in this way, the show also eliminates him as a secondary protagonist and reduces him to a funny plot device. This is something of a dramatic loss, as Fuches' position as Barry's manipulative guide and bad conscience who completely lacks Barry's gormless agency was one of the original and interesting aspects of the premise.
By the time we get to those developments Barry and Sally have had to live under explicitly fake identities for years, but when this is disrupted we're reminded their real identities are no less fake.
I don't think the Hank arc went nearly as well. The character and Carrigan's performance are fascinating, but his plotline descends into a cartoonish Vince-Gilliganism that didn't interest me.
The gap to the final coda felt necessary to the show's purposes, anyway. The setup bore some resemblance to similar epilogues in moral novels: take for example Raskolnikov's ending in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. The seeming desire to wrap the work up and provide a degree of closure also took the material away from Hader's Lynchian inspirations, but that's not a problem. It ends up a properly nihilistic morality tale: the wrong man is damned to life in captivity, and the other wrong man becomes a hero in death, but it doesn't seem to matter as life itself is revealed as a form of complex, groundless and inescapable punishment, the unjustified just desserts of all who live.
