AT THE HEART of The Bear has always been a melange of existential questions: is it worth pursuing your life’s passion, even if the pursuit causes you pain? Is it ever possible to actually deal with grief? If you’ve made mistakes in your life, can you properly atone for them?
The series, which began in 2022, entered our orbit like a firecracker. Its first season fizzed with a combustible energy, thanks to speedy editing, a soundtrack of uptempo American rock and amped-up performances.
This was a sizzling soupçon of TV at its best: a story revolving around a grieving, troubled but talented chef, Carmy Berzatto (aka Bear), played by Jeremy Allen White, and his plans to revamp his late brother’s beef restaurant in Chicago. White was mired in a complicated mourning for a complicated brother and was swiftly discovering that the restaurant was leaking money.
It was a compulsive watch, a meal best gorged on in one go. But as The Bear’s seasons stretched out to three and then four, it began to feel like things had soured somewhat. The flashes of genius that made it stand out in 2022 were still there, but critics and fans alike found themselves cracking knuckles and furrowing brows, wondering if The Bear had lost some of its gloss.
And so we get to season five, which is the final season of The Bear. An important season. A chance to show us what The Bear is made of.
Will we wave the team off in tears, or be glad the restaurant door has closed behind them?
Return to the kitchen
Season four ended with Carmy relinquishing his stake in The Bear. But any questions about whether he’d be reappearing in the final season are answered in episode one.
Yep – he is back, albeit temporarily, happy to sign on for another shift. There’s a big sigh of relief here, because Carmy, for all his flaws and faults, is the fulcrum around which The Bear arguably revolves.
Yet since season one, the rest of The Bear team have been allowed to come to the fore too, and this ensemble feeling is what brings so much warmth across all these seasons of The Bear. They’re a family – a messed-up, fractious family, but a family no less.
We have watched Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Sugar (Abby Elliott), Tina (Liza Colòn-Zayas), Marcus (Lionel Boyce), Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) and Neil (Matty Matheson) and newer characters like Luca (Will Poulter) and Jess (Sarah Ramos) argue, shout, push, pull, abandon each other and find their way back together. Now, as we prepare to bid them all adieu, we want to feel like we understand what’s next for them, and whether they will be rewarded in some way for their grafting.
But from the first episode of the fifth season, the crew are put under immense pressure. The entire season is set across one day, meaning the show feels like being trapped in a seven-episode-long pressure cooker. It’s a clever conceit, because it focuses the action on the day after Carmy and Sydney spoke about him leaving the restaurant. Immediately, everyone is plunged into dealing with the here and now.
Stormy days
The here and now, it transpires, is a soaking wet, miserable one. Chicago is experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime storm. In a show of pathetic fallacy, dark grey clouds are pressing down on the city, spitting out rain and (drama number one in the show) blocking up drains at the restaurant.
Each episode is cast in a blue-grey light that emphasises the darkness outside. It’s as though every moment is taking place at nighttime, reflecting the dark, stormy troubles facing the Bear team too. Money is extremely tight, to say the least. Produce is at a minimum. Pressure is at bursting point. (And some things do actually burst.)
The Bear loves a good metaphor, and this pathetic fallacy might seem a little heavy-handed at first. But it works. The low-lying thunderclouds feel like they’re trapping the staff of The Bear in a world of their own, forcing them to face their troubles.
It’s how the staff deal with these troubles that shows us how much The Bear team have evolved since day one. They have long worked on moving past the stereotypical, macho aggression present in professional kitchens. They are all seeking maturity. It’s what they do when the vice is pressing on them that shows their true mettle.
So we see how Sydney – now the kitchen’s leader – finds herself lost for words and overwhelmed at moments. But we also witness how she overcomes this. She is capable, empathetic, skilled, and she now understands her own power.
Movingly, we note that Richie (Carmy’s cousin), a man who began the series as a ball of barely-hidden rage wrapped in self-loathing, has tapped into his own sense of zen. He is, in a word, trying. Some of the comic moments in the series come from Richie’s attempts at getting the team to ‘maximise’ their work at a time when money and resources are at a minimum.
Carmy is clearly glad to leave, but there’s a reluctance there too. He is emotionally glued to the restaurant and his team. He’s helped bring them to the level they are at now, but he needs to leave to allow them all to breathe. His relationship with Sydney has a gentleness to it that’s hard-earned.
No one in The Bear has reached Nirvana, but they all have stores of humility, calmness and grace that they can now dip into. They are but human beings, and we’re right there with them as they go with the sometimes intemperate flow of life.
While the central focus of the season is the staff gathering their courage, dealing with crises and putting on a professional face for customers (who arrive in the final two episodes) there are some lovely asides. Conversations between Luca and Marcus about McDonald’s burgers become less-than-subtle but nonetheless welcome metaphors for fine dining versus commercial fast food, raising questions about what really satiates us and what the former can learn from the latter. A scene where two experts talk about wine becomes a way of ribbing so-called food connoisseurs about their clueless snobbery.
Woven in between the kitchen drama are other slices of life: Sugar’s stress as her dramatic mother DeeDee (Jamie Lee Curtis) minds her son for the first time; Liza’s advice to Sugar about being a working mother. Meanwhile, out on the streets Uncle Jimmy is trying to figure out the future of the restaurant from a business point of view.
The Bear is a heightened version of reality, and its intensity in turn is amplified by an almost constant electronic soundtrack. It’s a technique also employed in Industry to similar dramatic effect. Quick cuts and the occasional montage also serve to move things forward at a clip, as do close-ups of screens, clocks and the chopping of vegetables.
We never lose sight of the fact that time is ticking and the pressure is on. In the finale, a few seconds of a close-up on Richie’s eyes tell us all about the tension he’s feeling as a food critic gets ready to have a crucial meal.
Maturity
The final season of The Bear gives us every element that we desire as this story comes to a close. It’s focused, with its time constraints ensuring that – unlike in other seasons – the narrative is lean. The constant dramas, particularly in the first few episodes, are almost comic in their ludicrousness, and the pace is a little slow, but it coheres to ensure that we’re given plenty of opportunity to see how everyone in The Bear has matured.
And in the end, that is what this series is all about. It’s impossible not to directly contrast it with season one, to see what has changed and what hasn’t. The Bear restaurant itself has been transformed into a fine-dining restaurant. Behind the scenes, it creaks and groans. Still, its food is top-tier.
And the team making that food, they’ve been on a journey too. They’ve been finding their way back to integrity, to vulnerability, to honesty. They’re not pushing away the difficult, sticky emotions that stick in their gullet. They’re embracing it all: the chaos, the uncertainty, the rough edges.
They don’t achieve perfection, but what in life is truly perfect? Well, this final season of The Bear is certainly nearing it. Yes, its sentimentality is far too sweet at times. Yes, the pathetic fallacy is like lumping a fistful of salt into a soup.
But somehow – perhaps it’s just this reviewer, eager for these characters to have the ending they deserve – the off-kilter ingredients come together. Accept the sentimentality and the slow-ish start and it’s the send-off the Bear team deserve: revelatory, moving, humane, and struck through with a welcome dark humour. In other words: delicious.
The Bear is streaming on Disney+ now.