The Bear Just Couldn’t Help Itself

In an otherwise poignant finale, the show makes one final stumble into a familiar place.

Spoilers follow for The Bear series finale “The Original Beef of Chicagoland.”

At the end of The Bear, Carmen Berzatto finally does what he needed to do from the beginning. He quits his job as a chef and leaves the industry altogether. His family- and career-based PTSD is so wrapped up in food preparation that no amount of therapy would ever fully exorcise it, and at long last he’s accepted that the thing he’s good at is not good for him. It’s a culmination of everything The Bear has worked toward since its first season, a triumph for Carmy’s stability and self-knowledge and a tragedy at the same time — he’s given so much to this thing that will never love him back. If The Bear had stopped there, it would have been an appropriate, poignant end.

But restraint has never been among The Bear’s strong suits, and amid all the other fairy-tale endings at the conclusion of this show — a financially viable franchise plan for Sydney and Richie to inherit, an adorable birthday party, not one but two Michelin stars — the finale makes time for Carmy’s new path forward. He walks into a high-rise office building, sits down for an interview with a woman named Sue (Bonnie Hunt, always welcome), and follows the advice he’s just been given by John Mulaney’s Stevie: “You’ve got stories and trauma and darkness and food — people love it.” Carmy unleashes his many feelings. “I think I’ve always been searching for some kind of creative outlet,” he tells Sue. He likes drawing, he likes art. He likes colors. They chit-chat about Ever, the famed Chicago restaurant where Carmy once worked. The scene is deliberately coy: Is he writing a book? Is this therapy? (My God, finally?) At the end of a winding monologue about family, catastrophes, and his lack of leadership skills, The Bear gets to the kicker. “I think what I mean was,” Sue says, “what were you hoping to achieve or explore here as an intern at an architectural firm?”

This approach, where the thing you’re looking at actually means so much more, has been The Bear’s chief obsession for five seasons. You thought this was a plate of food or a simple job interview? Think again. There’s a whole world under there. The Bear has always been full of warmth and humanity, attuned to the tiny sensory details that give life its texture. But when it loses confidence in itself, especially when it leaves the kitchen, it loses the connection between the small physical things and the grandiose abstractions it loves so much. The Bear is among the best examples of storytelling on TV, but when it does slip, it ends up in a familiar place, the same one where it finds itself at Sue’s high-rise office: so far up its own ass that it’s hard to see daylight.

When The Bear linked the concrete, tangible world with the abstract framework of big human ideas, it had real magic. This steak bathed in butter that Carmy is preparing perfectly is not just a steak. It is a series of choices and experiences that led to exactly this moment: the grass the cow ate, the butcher who carved the meat, the chef who lovingly placed the cut in the pan at the right temperature and the right time. This brief, impermanent system to get protein and calories into the body is also a web of meaning. This spaghetti, this scallop, this insistence on perfect execution and careful presentation are vehicles for ambition, cultural representation, creative exploration, and the effort to process memories and desires. The tomato sauce, bubbling away on the backburner, is really your dead brother. This black cod is a middle finger to your mother; this perfectly plated pea pod, sliced open to reveal its row of brilliant green spheres, is your love and respect for your mentor. At its best, The Bear was king of the metaphor.

That’s why its visual style felt so powerful. No one needs to explain that a hamachi crudo is actually a condensed expression of the corrosive need for control, because the image can do all the heavy lifting. Syd does not need to express her culinary ideology through dialogue, because she can hand out a to-go container of family dinner and viewers will understand that she shows her affection through food. When everything falls apart, an overflowing pot stands in for overt speechifying. A precisely cut cube of squash helps you access profundity, so you had better see that cube right up close and linger on its 90-degree angles. 

When The Bear faltered, though, it was because it lost the confidence of those understated metaphorical connections and started hammering directly on its themes. The plodding montages of soil being tilled, gas burners firing, shaking hands holding tweezers, or Carmy staring at a Frank Lloyd Wright home became a cudgel, walloping viewers with how important and serious this all was. Did viewers understand that this montage of disjointed colors and shapes was about artistic constipation? Did they track the familial trauma replicated in this kitchen dynamic through heavy use of flashback and quick cuts to pointed imagery? Would it help for every major character on the show to mention that the Bear is really about family? The delicate tendrils of meaning that tied each lovely plate to some bigger idea got crushed under the weight of Jamie Lee Curtis’s blood-red fingernails flailing through the air, the embodiment of overbearing maternal monstrosity, or flattened by the third and fourth repetition of Carmy pushing his staff too far and then breaking down in the walk-in fridge. The tangible touchstones got lost under all the heavy-handed philosophizing.

Carmy’s foray into architecture in the finale is The Bear once again taking a stab at a big, heady idea and losing track of how it plays in the real world. On paper, in a grand and disembodied way, that field is an ideal next move for Carmy. It echoes the things he loves most about food: architecture is both highly functional and utilitarian and can be a canvas for astonishing beauty and innovation. It’s art with immediate, everyday implications for how people experience the world. That’s Carmy’s whole thing! But it’s another case of The Bear sliding into pretension. Yes, Carmy does like to draw. Will he enjoy sitting hunched over a computer for hours a day battling with 3-D modeling software? Will he be good at the part of the job that involves directly interacting with clients? Does he like math? How will he deal with licensing requirements if he never graduated from college? Is he going to be happy paging through zoning and safety regulations? Who knows. What matters is the theory of it, a mind’s-eye montage of Carmy with a pencil and a sketchpad in his hand, Carmy staring out over an empty lot and picturing future purpose.

The Bear’s thesis of artistic accomplishment in the kitchen is based on the grueling, infuriating, and necessary work of repetition and craftsmanship it’s been at such pains to depict over the last five seasons. Carmy’s decision to pursue architecture has no lived-in basis underneath its general theory of creativity; a sudden, detail-free swerve to a wholly different industry lacks everything that has made up the best of The Bear in all of its most glorious, humane, crazy-making persnickety particulars. It leaves Carmy’s resolution empty and unsatisfying.

Still, the final moments of The Bear find a way to root the series back in real feelings and tangible meaning. Carmy may be a lost cause, forever ping-ponging between his ambitions and the depressing way things fall short in the real world, but the last shot of the show is not of Carmy. It’s of Richie, who’s spent the season trying to diffuse his anxiety by naming the physical objects around him. Computer, desk, pen, he chants, teaching himself that the big themes don’t have to overtake him. He can be here, in the world. Those last frames show Richie clenching his fists and staring out the window of the first-ever airplane he’s ever been inside, on his way to a hospitality conference and terrified of takeoff. All the major themes are lurking just out of frame: He’s figured out how to leave the world where he grew up and finally found his purpose. But Richie is in his own body. He can hear the people chatting around him. He can feel Jess sitting next to him. He can hold her hand, take a deep breath. This is what relief feels like on The Bear: embracing, at last, what’s right ahead, dropping all the sententious signifying, and letting yourself experience the world around you, no overbearing monologue required.