Spoilers for The Bear to follow
It’s the end of the road, both literally and figuratively, for The Bear. While no one’s totally sure whether or not the fourth season of FX’s restaurant series will be its last, there’s a strong feeling that the show’s titular restaurant is lurching toward closure. At the end of Season 3, viewers were left completely hanging as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and the rest of the gang waited to find out whether or not a negative review would totally sink their restaurant.
At the beginning of the Season 4 premiere, we quickly find out that the review was, in fact, negative. Or at the very least, it was mixed. It described Carmy’s cooking as chaotic and unfocused, and criticized the vibe of the dining room. The fictional diners and critics, too, could feel the chaos that swirled around our characters throughout last season, spilling out into a dining room with really bad vibes. Now, Carmy and the gang are on a strict timeline, given three months to save The Bear before Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) pulls the plug. He theatrically brings in an enormous countdown clock to hang in the kitchen, a sort of death watch ticking toward what feels like an inevitable closure just twelve weeks away.
At this point, nobody seems especially optimistic that this restaurant is going to beat the odds, but they’re going to try. As will be repeated many, many times this season (and countless times before): Every. Second. Counts.
There’s a distinct tonal shift in Season 4, away from the constant frantic breakneck anxiety that has dominated the show’s vibe since its inception. The stress and panic may be simmering under the surface, but these episodes feel funereal, a march toward an inescapable end. Carmy’s manic energy has taken a turn for the morose, finally having realized that the Bear’s problems are his own. He has been too unfocused, too distracted by his own inner turmoil, to get the restaurant where it needs to be. Or maybe it’s even worse, and Carmy’s mentally moved on from the Bear, just going through the motions until Cicero stops cutting the checks. Sydney, Marcus (Lionel Boyce), and Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) seem equally defeated by their experiences at the restaurant, and everything feels pretty gloomy.
Still, the employees of the Bear persist. Tina works tirelessly at improving her speed and experiments with new dishes. Marcus continues to iterate on new desserts. Carmy, though, is stuck rehashing the past in his own head. In Episode 2, we learn that he hasn’t even met his sister’s new baby — you know, the one that was born a few months ago, the one whose gestation inspired the viral potato chip omelette scene — probably because he’s been too focused on skulking around the restaurant ruminating on his failures. With each compounding layer of family dysfunction and trauma, it becomes a little more difficult to tell whether he’s totally checked out of the restaurant or is just convinced that his dream has already died. It feels a bit as if he’s walking around in a daze, allowing Sydney to simplify his menu without argument, avoiding arguments with Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and distractedly speaking in clipped sentences to everyone around him.
Reminders that time is running out are abundant — in addition to that big clock in the kitchen, there are many smaller timers, there to help the kitchen get dishes out in a timely (pun intended) fashion. Many episodes begin with Sydney or Marcus slapping their alarm clocks silent, and it’s a little difficult to not feel beaten over the head by the idea that the Bear’s days are numbered.
It is, as ever, obsessed with the romance of the kitchen, albeit this time with (blessedly) fewer big-name chef cameos. Episode 3 begins with a nearly three-minute-long montage of Sydney preparing a scallop dish in neon lighting that shifts between bright fuchsia and cool blue, lovingly basting a seared scallop with butter and pureeing a sauce with an immersion blender. We see the chefs tweeze, cook, stir, and plate dishes so many times that it’s difficult to understand when this work actually moves the story forward, and when it’s just a masturbatory tribute to the chefs that this show so obviously fetishizes.
It also seems to realize that it has neglected some of its more peripheral characters.
Ebraheim finally starts to get the credit he deserves for keeping the Bear’s beef window running smoothly, and Carmy eventually admits that he failed this stalwart employee, who’s maintaining the most profitable part of this business. Ebrahim grows more than just about anyone this season, pursuing a business education and finding a mentor who can help him hone those skills. If this had come two seasons ago, when Ebrahim was still largely relegated to silently slinging sandwiches out of the restaurant’s takeaway window while the show ruminated on Carmy’s culinary trauma, it would feel like a triumph. But now, with just a few episodes to go, it’s only a reminder of how much time was wasted on watching chefs plate pretty dishes, not digging into the meat of Ebraheim’s story.
Pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is also coming into his own. He is recovering from his mother’s death, selling her home and preparing for the next phase of his life, all while intensively working on developing a new dessert that involves shiso mousse in an edible vessel. Toward the end of the season, it’s clear that he has officially become one of the stars of the Bear’s kitchen, earning a major accolade from Food & Wine that will propel his career forward regardless of whether or not the Bear endures.
And then there’s Sydney, the show’s true emotional and moral center. We finally get to learn more about who she is outside of the kitchen, the movies she watches, and the way she zhuzhes up a box of Hamburger Helper while doling out advice to her cousin’s kid. We see her navigating some really tough family stuff with both grace and regret, informed by the knowledge that her culinary pursuits have deeply impacted her life and the lives of her loved ones. Most importantly, we see her admit out loud that Carmy is a pretty shitty boss to her, one who can be greedy with the spotlight and jealous of her success. She absolutely nails it when she describes the vibe at the Bear as “energetically musty,” and it’s hard not to think that the same sort of stale funk has settled over everything else in this show up until now.
It isn’t until Episode 7 that we get a taste of the classic, frenetic The Bear energy that enraptured us in the first place. The Berzatto family has assembled for the wedding between Tiffany (Richie’s estranged ex-wife, played by Gillian Jacobs) and her rich boyfriend Frank (Josh Hartnett). Richie’s moping about the family he lost and worrying that Frank will take his place in his daughter’s heart, Natalie and Francine Fak are screaming at each other, and Carmy and his mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) are struggling through awkward, pained conversation. There is a degree of healing between the Berzattos at this wedding, but like many of our own families, the dysfunction here cannot be untangled in a few half-hour episodes.
What we do see, though, is Carmy finally experiencing a little emotional growth. He apologizes to Sydney for being such a dick to her, and acknowledges that her creative force is a large part of the Bear’s success. In one of the most emotionally hefty and vulnerable scenes of the series, he makes tentative peace with his wacky mother Donna (the inimitable Jamie Lee Curtis continues to do some of the best acting of her life in this show) over a plate of chicken and roasted carrots. This scene is the visual equivalent of letting the steam out of a pressure cooker — a little terrifying, but totally necessary. He hears the things that most of us want to hear from our parents — that Donna screwed things up, that she knows she was mean and drank too much and took out her own pain on her children. This feels like the moment of emotional catharsis that the entire series has been leading up to. He also starts slowly figuring things out with Claire (Molly Gordon), the childhood sweetheart that he completely neglected in pursuit of “running” this restaurant.
Carmy isn’t locking himself in walk-in fridges or having any more nervous breakdowns, but there is still a sense that he’s unsettled, unable to really lock in and figure out what it takes to make the Bear work.
Ultimately, he decides that he can’t make it work, and that walking away is the best thing he can do for both the people around him and the actual restaurant. He draws up an agreement that would leave the Bear’s ownership to Sydney and his sister Natalie (Abby Elliott) and plans to step away from not just the Bear, but from restaurants for good. Sydney is, of course, furious at Carmy for leaving, both because she’s losing her mentor and because they are the definition of codependence, both feeding off each other’s damage. She eventually concedes to taking over the Bear, but only if Richie gets an equal part of the ownership stake.
Despite Syd’s initial reaction, maybe stepping away is actually a good thing for Carmy. The show certainly wants us to believe that some time spent away from a kitchen, weaving baskets or working in a grocery store, is exactly what he needs to find happiness. What is less clear, though, is how he comes to this conclusion. Is it a genuine realization that restaurant work is killing him, or just another example of avoidant, self-sabotaging Carmy running away from the problems that he has created? Who can say?
On some level, it feels like Carmy is just scampering off to go “find himself,” leaving Sydney, Natalie, and Cousin Richie to pick up the pieces. How can he extract himself from the Bear, the restaurant that’s literally crafted in his own image, at a time when its future is the most uncertain it has ever been? And if there’s one thing we know about being a chef, it’s that the kitchen always calls you back. It’s something that Luca (Will Poulter), the hot pastry chef that Marcus staged with in Copenhagen, reminds Tina toward the end of the series. “You start to thrive on the pressure, then before you know it, you can’t fuckin’ wait to get rocked. You need that pressure,” Luca says. “Then the challenge becomes, can you live without that pressure?” Luca knows that he cannot. Carmy likely will soon learn that he can’t either.
Ultimately, Season 4 is doing a lot of work to reassure us that even if the restaurant’s business isn’t going to be okay, its people are going to be alright. They’re figuring out their shit. Marcus is on the rise, both professionally and personally, and Sydney’s finally in charge of the kitchen because she deserves to be there. Carmy no longer looks like he’s going to fling himself in front of the nearest train, and that largely seems to be because he’s realized that he cannot continue to torture himself and those around him in pursuit of culinary excellence.
By the end of the season, The Bear makes abundantly clear that this is, at its core, a show about family, not a show about a restaurant. It’s about the Berzattos, and the ways in which they bring people like Sydney and Marcus and the raucous Fak family into their chaotic, yet magnetic orbit. It’s about why everyone stays with them, despite the screaming and the drinking and the chaos. After four seasons, it’s clear that a new kind of blended family has formed here, not through blood but through trauma-bonding and stress and hard work. And despite all the screaming and fighting and accidental stabbings, there’s a whole lot of love, too.
