A couple of years ago, a surprise episode of The Bear would have been one of the highlights of the year. The stressful, tightly compressed comedy-drama about a restaurant in Chicago hit television like a juggernaut when it launched. It felt like nothing else and it was all anyone could talk about.

How things have changed. Two disappointing seasons have taken all of the wind out of The Bear, so when it was announced that a special episode had dropped (before what is expected to be the final season this summer), you would have been justified to feel trepidatious.

The good news, then, is that the new episode, Gary, isn’t terrible. A two-hander about Cousin Richie and Mikey Berzatto, written by Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal (the actors who play them and are co-starring on Broadway in Dog Day Afternoon), it concerns a road trip to deliver a mysterious package to an unknown customer in an unfamiliar city in the hours before Richie’s wife gives birth.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Gary is a flashback episode. The premise of The Bear revolves around the aftermath of Mikey’s suicide, and Richie is presently a fully reformed front-of-house expert who no longer dabbles in the sort of low-rent shenanigans that Gary concerns itself with.

Gary has a warped road-trip feel to it, even though Gary, Indiana, is so close to Chicago that you could be there and back in just over an hour. The Bear still isn’t a comedy by any stretch, but the meal made out of a trip of such scant distance is one of the funniest things it has done in years.

Part of what makes this work is the fact that, at least in the show’s early days, Richie was the living embodiment of Chicago, pushing back hard at the first sign of gentrification. Here, as soon as he leaves his home city, he becomes a fish out of water: spiky, prickly and too loud by half.

Keeping such a narrow focus allows Gary to stop itself from drifting into many annoying Bearisms. There are no showy cameos allowing actors to chew the scenery with one eye on an Emmy. It isn’t set inside a high-end restaurant, so we don’t get any breathless bootlicking à la Chef’s Table. You may be pleased to learn that there is not a single montage.

Nevertheless, some Bearisms slip through. As fun as the opening moments are, with the pair being vociferously obnoxious in a succession of Gary locales, the bottom soon drops out. Richie and Mikey wind up in a bar, where we’re treated to lots and lots (and lots) of sequences of Richie being gregarious and Mikey being soulfully depressive. Things soon pick up, but it leaves the sense that Gary is agreat 30-minute episode of television trapped inside a fitfully mediocre 60-minute one.

One scene, though, just about makes up for this. Fuelled by booze, drugs and self-loathing, Mikey makes a speech aimed at Richie that curdles as soon as it leaves his mouth. It is a miserable, angry, lacerating monologue delivered like a closing time punch-up. Moss-Bachrach’s silent pain at being on the receiving end makes it truly uncomfortable to endure.

What really sells this scene is the fact that we’ve already seen Richie evolve beyond this point. We know the joy that discipline and attention to detail give him. We know that he has always been a tremendous father. We know that he makes it through and that Mikey does not. You have to weather a fair amount of self-indulgence to get there, but it’s a wonderful scene that should go down as one of The Bear’s greatest moments.

It bodes well for season five that Gary was released as a standalone episode. When The Bear is at its worst, it loses interest in the restaurant and prefers to meander through endless flashbacks and bottle episodes. Gary may be a sign that The Bear wants to clear the decks and regain its focus. The episode also appears to inch the show’s plot forward; the final scene jumps to the present day and implies that Richie will spend much of the next season injured. We’ve been burned by The Bear before, but if the show is indeed adopting its former guise, it will be all the better for it.