Ryan Kirksey
The following recap contains spoilers for Season 5 of The Bear (with Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo as showrunners).
Was the juice worth the squeeze?
Near the end of the Season 5 finale of The Bear, “The Original Beef of Chicagoland,” Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) is interviewing for an internship at an architectural firm after leaving The Bear restaurant and the restaurant industry altogether. Why Carmy is even talking to people at an architectural firm remains completely unclear. Is it just because his “cousin” Stevie (John Mulaney) has a connection there? Is this what Carmy wants to do? Is this, perhaps the worst of all, the only thing he can find when he leaves being a chef behind?
In a conversation with the interviewer (Sue, played by Bonnie Hunt), she asks Carmy, “Moving on from cooking, that’s a big change, I’m sure. Do you have any ideas of what you want to achieve or explore?”
Carmy, because literally all he knows is cooking and trauma, proceeds to tell her a story about the service from a few weeks back, which is just a short summary of the first seven episodes of The Bear Season 5. It’s a story about overcoming chaos, making something from nothing, and watching everyone persevere towards a goal and achieve those goals. Carmy says:
“The obstacles, the hurdles, that’s kind of…that’s the juice.”
He conveys that those obstacles and how their team was able to push past them helped him see that his co-workers were more than tools that each have a part in executing a successful service. When they support and pick up one another, they become a family. In essence, on that day and in that service, the juice was worth the squeeze.
But we are left unsure whether Carmy can give up what he was clearly put on this earth to do: cook. We don’t know if Carmy gets an architectural internship. We don’t know whether he can leave his past behind and move on to other creative outlets. The clues we have are sparse. At Eva’s (Annabelle Toomey) birthday in the coda of the finale, Carmy is wearing a plain white dress shirt. That could mean a lot of things. He also has apparently reunited and reconciled with Claire (Molly Gordon). Is that because he has found something that made him happy outside of cooking, or because he went back to the thing that used to make him happy, which is cooking?
Carmy’s station at the end of The Bear is unclear, but most of our other regulars have found contentment, or are on the path to contentment. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) is presumably the head chef at The Bear, with its two new Michelin stars to keep it afloat for the foreseeable future. Richie (Ebon-Moss Bachrach) has been invited to an exclusive hospitality conference in Japan, and is on the verge of both becoming internationally recognized and beginning a lovely relationship with Jess (Sarah Ramos)—a pair which every reasonable person has shipped since Season 3.
Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is still an award-winning pastry chef, even without Luca (Will Poulter) there as a stage. He also seems to have taken a couple of steps towards some reconciliation with his father (Harry Lennix). Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) is the new chef de cuisine at The Bear and appears to be thriving (and has enough cash to buy food for the restaurant every day). Sugar (Abby Elliott) and Pete (Chris Witaske) are loving being parents and have a strong relationship with the Berzatto matriarch, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis).
And after a season of hand-wringing about what they would do with The Bear, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) is all in on Ebraheim’s (Edwin Lee Gibson) franchise plan for The Original Beef, and the two have set it in motion. All of the Faks are still Fakking it up every day, and Sweeps (Corey Hendrix) seems to have mastered his sommelier’s palette.
Even Bob Odenkirk’s Uncle Lee cracks a smile at Eva’s birthday party.
With a happy ending everywhere for the characters of a show that was so often about unhappiness, chaos, and trauma, is this the ending we needed or even deserved? Maybe a better way to say it is, after five seasons of perhaps the most out-of-nowhere smash hit of this decade, was the juice worth the squeeze?
In our podcast about Episodes 1-6, Caemeron and I talked at length about what the show became in Seasons 4 and 5, and how they may have tried but ultimately fell short of the magic of Seasons 1-3. Many of the character arcs peaked or seemed to be resolved by Season 3 (namely, Richie, Tina, the Faks, Donna, Marcus, and even Sydney to a point). What was left in the last two seasons was a show about whether or not a restaurant could survive financially and whether or not it would drive Carmy insane in the process.
After seven episodes of chaotic food prep, plate-adjusting, flood-cleaning, and trying to ignore an eager diner who has watched a little too much Hell’s Kitchen (Brad Morris), the climax of the season is when Carmy gets a call from Peter Clark (Gary Janetti) and learns that the Michelin rater was actually there months ago (in the episode “Scallop,” which was the high point of Season 4). The Bear earned not one but two Michelin stars because of that service.
Syd and Carmy are finally able to embrace and rejoice in the fruits of their labors, but it raises some interesting questions. The chaotic day that culminated in the service in the seventh episode, “Caramel,” was triumphant for Sydney and her cola-braised short ribs after Carmy dropped the last piece of lamb. That meal, it seems, shot her confidence into the stratosphere, but the Michelin stars were earned from Carmy’s chaos menu, which Syd hated. The cola ribs didn’t get anything but a couple of compliments. Is that enough to keep Syd going?
And what about the happy endings for each of the staff and the extended family? What about The Bear itself? If those stars were not awarded, would these people be in the same place? Would The Bear be open? It appears to me that those are both unlikely, and so it paints a dystopian picture of restaurants where you can come together as a family and succeed as long as you win the award you want. But what happens if you don’t?
After five seasons, I care deeply about the characters on this show, and I wanted them to have happy endings. In fact, I found myself many times feeling emotionally invested in who these characters are and what happens to them. I felt joy when Carmy and Syd embraced. I had a swelled heart when Jess took Richie’s hand on the plane to Japan. I felt relieved when Tina and her husband David (David Zayas) were able to share a stress-free walk in their neighborhood, and when Sugar was able to balance the books. I shed a literal tear when Ebraheim shares the franchise news with Rob Reiner’s unheard voice of Albert and ends the conversation with “As you wish.”
So as The Bear concludes, there will be a hole in my television-watching life that is big enough that Donna Berzatto could drive a car through it into her living room. But Seasons 4 and 5, for me, will always feel like the seasons where the showrunners cared a bit more about The Bear and its survival than about the people who truly made The Bear and The Bear feel alive.
There are not many TV experiences that can compare to finding Season 1 of The Bear for the first time. Or watching Richie sing Taylor Swift in “Forks.” Or watching Mikey (Jon Bernthal) get to know Tina in “Napkins.” I would have eaten any course put in front of me if it meant I got the dine on those masterpieces.
Was the juice worth the sometimes difficult squeeze over the last five years? Yes, chef.
