Each season of The Bear seems to be distilled into a singular phrase trickled out through the episodes. Season one: Let it Rip. Season two: Every Second Counts. Season three: I think is supposed to be “Keep Going” but when I watched it through the second time, I decided it should be: You Good? That question is asked around 20 times over the 10 episodes. And maybe they aren’t just asking each other, but also us.
Because it seems that, with season three, you either loved it or hated it. People thought it was either aimless with little plot development, or an innovative tasting menu of episodes that don’t conform to expectations.
For my part, I’m in, I’m good. I watched it through twice, because there are so many important things that are understood only with the benefit of hindsight. I love that about these writers, they build, in layers. As such, I kinda have to address this season. In layers.
The Hero’s Journey
If you read my hottest of takes on season 2, you know that I think we are watching these characters on a journey of metamorphosis, which has its costs. We left season two with Carmy locked in the walk-in. I would argue that the reason people didn’t love this season is that, in so many ways, Carmy is still locked in that cooler. And that’s uncomfortably real, and hard to watch.
The first episode of the season is called Tomorrow: The next day and the days that lead to it. We open with a look at a scar on Carmy’s hand: this season is about scars. Then it proceeds as a whirling flow of memories that is a crazy-great depiction of what most of our minds do on a spin. Within the montage of how-did-I-get-here-what-the-eff-do-I-do-now we see back through Carmy’s past and many of the people and places that he’s passed through, while he’s trying to grasp how things are coming apart in his world at the present: this season is about ghosts.
And what do scars and ghosts both do? Hold us to the past.
Carmy not only refuses to let go and go forward, with an armful of everything he’s learned from what he’s been through, but he reverts to the version of himself that he was right before Mikey died. The most unhappy, but maybe the most “in control.”
He subtracts, which is the lesson he was taught from the chef who traumatized him, we’ll call him Trauma Chef. It’s there in the first episode, on the green tape, and in every following one as he tries to control and form his world into something knowable. Put everything else in a box and move it to the back. And pretend you’re doing it to be better.
Again, hard to watch as you see him subtracting the joy in his life by cutting out Claire, subtracting the support of a more fully-realized Richie by shutting him down, subtracting the original innovative vision of the menu by forcing it into old paradigms (hello, foam? really?) and eventually squeezing Sydney’s influences completely out.
The scene in the ninth episode where he says, to Syd, “I don’t want it to be so hard for you to keep up with me,” was the heartbreak for me. It wasn’t an offer of support, it was a warning. Total delusion that it’s her problem keeping up, not that it’s his rigidly set non-negotiable blinders that’s dragging everyone else into the locked cooler with him.
In that same episode, titled Apologies, Carmy actually goes into the walk-in and allows himself to miss Claire (cue their song, Strange Currencies, but layered over the other chaotic strings melody, brilliant) and the moments of peace he felt with her. There’s a second you think he might break free. In the hero’s journey, this is the innermost cave, the heart of darkness where he has to face his fears, like that he may be so scarred that he would give up love in pursuit of perfection. But he can’t completely leave the cooler yet.
In the final episode, Forever, Carmy has to face his ultimate ghost, the Trauma Chef from his past. A hero must face their greatest challenge in order to move forward. For Richie, it was letting his past marital failure go, for Marcus it’s letting his mother go, for Sydney it’s been trusting herself and letting fear go (she got her own apartment!) Carmy confronts the chef, but truly he is just confronting himself and his behaviors over the season.
And while it feels good to see him understand what that has done, and lets us root for Carmy again, we don’t get the feeling of a Hollywood win, no swelling violins, no fist pump in the air. Because he still has big battles on the road back. That is why the impending review, the financial quandary, the cliffhanger. That is why the “to be continued” and the fact that season four has already been mostly shot. I’m sorry for everyone that wanted a bow tied on the season, but we are so not done here.
Carmy is only just out of the cooler. Insight is just the beginning of metamorphosis, now comes the work: seeing the path is one thing, walking it is another. And if you paid attention to the topic at hand in Carmy’s support group meetings (about apologies and how it’s unfair when someone gets well and gets to ask forgiveness while the loved ones still have to live with all the baggage) you’ll know that Hollywood endings are bullshit and boring anyway.
There are three more stages in the typical heroic journey, we still have the resurrection (a moment of death and rebirth: maybe the review?) the return (maybe a reconnection with Claire?), and the freedom to live (maybe trusting his team to create The Bear alongside him?) I think it’s super fitting and a neat little nugget of foreshadowing that, as we wait to see what the make-or-break Chicago Tribune review reads, we get a shot of the only thing hanging on Syd's apartment fridge door: the ghost of the first review from season one that is titled “Beef Evolves with the City.” Because: does it?
Season 4 is coming! You good?
The Origin Story: Mothers
Thank gawd Donna Berzatto came back, JLC4evah.
This season was also haunted by motherhood. In the best and worst ways. There is no story of death and rebirth, of metamorphosis, of change and the self, without mothers, sorry.
DD is, of course, the OG source of family trauma. She looms over this whole series. There are so many great articles about children of alcoholics, and how Carmy and Sugar’s responses are so typical, that of course you understand why Carmy craves both chaos and control. He was raised to.
Sugar’s hero challenge is confronting her mother WHILE IN LABOR with her own daughter! She says the things, she both forgives and accepts help from DD, and voices out loud that this is the end of their generational trauma. She will do and be better.
But DD isn’t the only mother here.
This season starts with the loss of Marcus’ loving mother, and he shows us how grief and sorrow can turn to gratitude. Marcus is the most complete and healthy person on this show, and through his eulogy, we understand that his mother’s love was foundational. It’s a lyrical and perfect balance to Carmy who can’t, and won’t truly grieve his brother’s passing.
Tina’s story, told so beautifully in the episode called Napkins, is of course her origin story with The Beef (and allows us a perfect scene with Mikey) but it’s all for her kid. She’s desperate for a job so that she can keep her apartment and her son can stay in his school. We never see him, but he’s there in pictures on the fridge and just a shout-for-dinner away, as her purpose.
Sydney’s very lack of a mother makes her the person who has to remind her dad to take his meds. She’s been mothering so many people (she patiently teaches Tina to raviolo, she’s there with Marcus when he cleans out his mom’s house) that of course she’s conflicted about taking a new job that centers her ambitions, it doesn’t feel natural, but she’s fighting through that.
And then there’s Chef Andrea Terry, who has been the central positive female role model in Carmy’s life. In contrast to Trauma Chef who yells and belittles him to make him into something harder and stronger, Chef Terry softly bids him to work faster. And he does. She doesn’t baby him, and she holds him to her very high standard, but she does it with humanity, and he thrives. She’s the one who sent him to Copenhagen, she’s the one who sees his potential as a human, not just a cook.
In the final episode, she asks Carmy to call her Andrea, inviting him to see her as a person. Which is what all mothers really want, in the end. I have truly appreciated seeing motherhood in all these facets, its delicate fury, its desperation, its ringing hope. It makes the season so much richer than the other two, for me.
Legacy
There has been much consternation about the amount of celebrity chefs in this season. For a show that seemed driven to honestly show the darker underbelly of a working kitchen over a glitzy toque licking of the upper echelon, it may have seemed that the creators “sold out” and used the show’s popularity to attach some glammy names to the credits for their bona fides.
Maybe it was a bit of that, but I think it was also something else.
There’s a lot of talk of legacy this season, particularly in reference to kitchens. True, they shot in Copenhagen with Redzepi, at The French Laundry with Thomas Keller, in NYC with Daniel Boulud, but they also did a brilliant intro on episode two where they shot actual workers in Chicagoland restaurants, letting them make direct eye contact with the camera, and wave. It’s never really one or the other, it’s forever and always both.
Featuring those chefs had less to do with their appointed tasting menus and high-profile clientele, than it did with the foundational lesson of tying a chicken, or wrapping a simple piece of fish. That is legacy. Knowledge and kindness pass, a reputation and awards do not travel.
Sure, that’s a simplification and plenty are angry at how fine dining has been built on the backs of free labor and within kitchen cultures more like the Trauma Chef than the soft spoken depiction of Keller, whose kitchen has been accused of being toxic too. But if we learn anything from The Bear it should be that no one is fully cooked and there can be evolution, especially when we take the good lessons and leave the bad. Don’t we all need to believe that is true?
In its essence, legacy is about change. You can’t leave a legacy unless you move on. Integral is the act of passage. And it should not be missed that the final episode, the gathering of these real-life gliterrati of the food world happens at a funeral dinner. Ever is closing because Chef Terry wants a life, she wants to go to a party. She’s done what she came to do in fine food, did it her way, and it’s now time to move on. To change. To make room for what’s next.
This is the balance and what makes the cameos bearable to me, that it’s not a glorification of their tweezered plates and creative prowess, but an homage to the lessons learned. You really get that through the dinner table banter: it’s the same folly that would be found at many kitchen crew dinners, from failures to proud moments and back again. And then there’s Terry’s toast:
“People often talk about restaurants as in: What’s the history of it? What’s the impact it’s making? Who has worked there previously? What awards have they won? What about their, quote, chef? I think what I’ve learned over the years, in all the places I’ve worked, is people don’t remember the food. Sorry! It’s the people they remember.”
Fine dining has to evolve to survive, and it can only survive through the people it has nurtured. It won’t work to beat it into someone, like Trauma Chef did to Carmy. His attempts to reclaim that model are what’s killing The Bear. There’s no joy in it.
It’s most important to me how we close this season, in Syd’s new apartment with a newly unemployed Andrea Terry diving into the kitchen to make freezer waffles for the partying crew that includes Tina, the Faks*, Richie, Chef Jess and others. It’s a true post-shift party passing bottles, sharing snacks, tossing off the aprons and living real … but maybe its also a post-era party, in which more people are invited, guards are let down, and still there’s caviar on a waffle and a quality good time to be had. Wouldn’t that be a great legacy?
One question: where was the Malort?
* If you thought there was too much of the Faks (Neil Geoff and Teddy) this season, I invite you to see them as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Timon and Pumba if you need. They are comedic relief, of course, but also the fate whisperers. They introduce the idea of haunting, they bring Carmy’s words to Claire, they comfort DD and anoint her a grandma (her legacy), and in one seemingly random scene, they hang the pictures of the critics in the office. To stare down upon them all. As if, that might be something to think about later ….
WOW
Wow! Ok, everyone who didn't like this season should have to read this...Stephanie your analysis is amazing!!! That first episode was so annoying because I didn't really get it (hate watched it twice), but the payoff of staying the course was wonderful. Then you come along and make all the complex stuff pretty simple and point out so many things I don't really think I saw... with all this new insight, I think I'll rewatch the whole season again to really appreciate what the writers were trying to tell us (besides Every Second Counts, and even that seems more deep than it did before...). Bravo!!! 👏🏼