Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Season 4 of The Bear (with Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo as showrunners).
The one thing that is clear for the staff and anyone in the entire orbit of The Bear restaurant after Episode 1 of Season 4, is that change is coming and it is inevitable. After the mixed review from the Chicago Tribune that bridged Season 3 and Season 4, Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) and The Computer (Brian Koppelman) bring in what has become known anecdotally as the Doomsday Clock. Counting down from 1,400 hours, The Bear only has a little less than two months of funds before operations will cease. Something drastic will have to happen for the restaurant to remain open. Over the course of the next nine episodes, plenty of things happen—large and small—but none of them add up to a complete answer of whether customers of The Bear, or viewers of The Bear, will get to sample any more of the dishes they have to offer.
Over the course of the season’s final nine episodes, each of the primary characters, and many of the secondary ones, confront their pasts, look at who they have been, and come face to face with the patterns that have developed that make them who they are. By finally confronting those, many of these members of the nuclear and extended Berzatto family start to understand more about their purpose, their place, and what their plans should be moving forward.
With so much to break down, it makes the most sense to look at these characters and their journeys inside this season individually, and look at how the interconnectedness gives them all the family they seem to be seeking.
Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto
Season 4 of The Bear for Carmy is about finally realizing how to confront his past, and why that is important. His brother Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) spiral and eventual suicide, his toxic family and their inability to connect, and Carmy’s own self-flagellation that he has been doing ever since he was under the tutelage of David Fields (Joel McHale) are all intertwined into making Carmy the chef he has become, and also why he finally decides he needs to leave the kitchen of The Bear at the end of the season.
Season 4 forces Carmy to confront these things head-on, and he faces not only the potential end of the life of the restaurant, but also his love of being a chef and cooking food dying as well. He has faced so much loss that he has been unable to process, he finally decides he needs to learn who he is outside the kitchen, and he can continue his self-improvement outside of it. Carmy’s decision to leave both has practical and financial ramifications for The Bear (one less large salary, one less ownership share to go around, etc.), but also will have psychological impacts on the rest of the crew.
For better or worse (most of the time it’s been worse), Carmy was the “dad” or the “big brother” of the group, and since those two relationships were two that have caused him the most pain in the past, he hasn’t known how to play that role. Carmy consistently talks this season about needing to “be better,” but ironically, his not being around the restaurant anymore might allow everyone else to be better versions of themselves.
Passing the torch to Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Evan-Moss Bachrach), and Sugar (Abby Elliott) means Carmy can finally stop running and face some things, like his mother and Claire. As Season 4 ends, it appears he is on the road to healing both of those relationships. He is finally evolving from someone who is governed by his past and his trauma to someone who can use it. And after all, the greatest chefs are always the ones who are evolving.
Sydney Adamu
In a way, Sydney has always been in Carmy’s shadow in this series. It’s Carmy’s food that inspires Syd to pursue her dream. It’s Carmy’s Beef restaurant that Syd seeks out for employment, it’s Carmy’s chaos menu that The Bear first decides to serve, and it’s Carmy’s often authoritarian style that drives wedge and after wedge between Syd and her boss.
But Season 4 is really a showcase and love letter to Sydney Adamu. Ayo Edebiri gets to display the full range of what she can do throughout the season, but especially in Episode 4, “Worms,” and the finale, “Goodbye.” In “Worms,” she shows how she can act opposite a 12-year-old, and give us, the audience, what we really needed: a breakdown of exactly what Syd is going through with the decision of whether or not to work for Adam Shapiro in words and analogies we can understand.
In the finale, she goes toe to toe with Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy as they finally confront the tension that has built up between them, and how their inability to communicate led them to this rough place. Syd carries the weight of her decision, her dad’s heart attack, and the pressures of her job underneath a tough exterior, but she finally realizes that the “family-family” she needs is right there inside the walls of the restaurant.
Carmy rightly knows she is the one to lead The Bear. Her talent is unmatched, but her leadership, her empathy, her creativity, and her pattern of always doing the right thing set her apart. And the way you can tell in her eyes that she made the right decision when Carmy says he “smokes” Adam Shapiro is sublime.
Richie Jerimovich
Is it possible that Richie’s decision to hire Jessica (Sarah Ramos), Garrett (Andrew Lopez), and Rene (Rene Gube) is the one that eventually saves The Bear? After bringing them over from Ever, the efficiency and processes at The Bear certainly improve, but that group is also able to instill a sense of confidence in everyone from Richie to Tina to Neil Fak (Matty Mattheson) to Sweeps (Corey Hendrix).
That decision shows that Richie has learned not just how to treat every night like the Super Bowl, and how to make motivational speeches (something he still can’t do), but that he has just as much a right to be part of the new ownership agreement in the finale as Carmy or Syd or Cicero or anyone else.
He stayed at The Beef to take care of Mikey and look after him, but really, he belonged at The Beef, and he belongs at The Bear, because he is family. His last name might not be Berzatto, but he is just as important to Carmy, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the rest of the crew. In this show, he evolves from someone with a pattern of volatility and chaos into someone with purpose (which is what he was looking for at the beginning of Season 2), and someone who understands he belongs with these people.
This purpose also helps him understand what kind of father he can be to his daughter, even if his ex-wife Tiff (Gillian Jacobs) and her new husband Frank (Josh Hartnett) will have their own way of raising their girl. In “Bears,” the super-sized and magnificent Episode 7 with the Tiff-Frank wedding, Richie shows how much he has grown when Frank seeks his advice about his daughter. The Richie from Season 1 would have wanted to throw Frank right into the wedding cake, but now, Richie realizes his role in the larger family and how they really can’t survive without him.
Natalie (“Sugar”) and Pete Katinsky
Sugar and Pete (Chris Witaske) often serve as the model of responsibility and organization in this chaotic world of The Bear restaurant, and Abby Elliott plays the new mom, full-time employee with joie de vivre and a sense of frazzlement that we can all relate to.
She has become a caretaker of sorts for the restaurant and the people there, which is a perfect mirror to the new role she has to play at home. She, more than anyone, needs structure and less chaos at the restaurant so she and Pete can focus on raising a family. Not to mention, her feud with Francine Fak (Brie Larson) has now mercifully come to a shaky ceasefire at the end of “Bears,” so she has knocked one big stressor out of her life. Now she just has the restaurant that is ambiguously situated as “Goodbye” closes, and Sugar learns that Carmy is leaving and the partnership will be her, Sydney, and Richie.
It does still leave a lot on Natalie’s plate to figure out. Cicero is still lurking with a plug he can pull at any time (and not just on the clock). The Computer seems to like Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) and Arthur’s (Rob Reiner) idea about franchising The Beef window at the restaurant. Will that be enough to save them in the short run?
But Natalie seems to be left in a good place to get them through the storms that are ahead. Her relationships with Carmy, Donna, Richie, and Francine all seem to be in a good place (Neil is another story, and I’m not sure he will ever be able to hold Sophie). But Natalie, like everyone else at the restaurant, deserves some peace going forward, and she is certainly helping to create it.
Tina Marrero
My girl Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) finally made the pasta in under three minutes! Over the course of this series, I think Tina became my favorite character. From the iconic Season 1 smile when Sydney tells her they believe in her and want to send her to culinary school for training, to seeing the same smile when she gets encouragement from Jessica, and finally gets the pasta in the time she wanted, her journey has been amazing.
Her insecurity has now become confidence. What Mikey and Sydney saw in her has finally been realized, and she is not only a brilliant chef but also someone who takes initiative, works brilliantly as part of the team, and has confidence in herself. But as rewarding as her journey was, I almost wish there was more Tina in this season. She was featured heavily in Seasons 1 and 3, but this season, much of her screentime is spent learning to make pasta faster and inventing methods to improve her efficiency. The one scene with her (real-life) husband, David (David Zayas), was a heartfelt amuse bouche that I wish had more bites to it.
Marcus Brooks
Am I too invested in a television show if I am just as emotional about Marcus (Lionel Boyce) landing on Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs list as I am when my own children receive some kind of award? Probably so, but that’s conversation for another day. That was certainly a wide range of emotions from not knowing who called Sugar in that scene in “Tonnato,” to not knowing what the good news was, to initially thinking Syd would have made the list, to Marcus being called out for being a top new pastry chef and The Bear crew giving him all the well-deserved props.
Marcus’s journey from bread baker to training in Copenhagen to becoming a creative tour de force to being named a best new chef is one of the most fulfilling of the entire series. Along the way, he loses his mother, has a will-they, won’t-they moment with Sydney, struggles with the relationship with his father, and is eventually motivated to become the chef he can be by Luka (Will Poulter). I want The Bear to succeed for the sake of every member of this crew, but I think I just might want it most for Marcus.
It’s no accident that The Bear centers around both a restaurant and a family. As Carmy and Mikey talk about in the season’s first episode, those two things are forever intertwined. Families eat together to celebrate, they eat together to mourn, and they eat together to connect.
Just as every meal served at The Bear has just the right amount of seasoning and ingredients, this Berzatto extended family seems to have all the components of something truly special. Sometimes food can be sweet, bitter, sour, salty, warm, or savory. So can families.
It’s hard to say after the end of Season 4 if we will get more of this family or this restaurant. It seems to be purposefully left ambiguous. But we did see the clock in the restaurant run out, and if this was the last time we got to eat with this family, I am very grateful for the meals we shared together.
