The last time we visited the establishment formerly known as the Original Beef of Chicagoland, in The Bear’s Season 4 finale, its future appeared to be in doubt. Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), the visionary chef and co-owner of what was now a fine-dining destination called The Bear, had just dropped a bombshell on its key staffers: He was leaving the restaurant. Syd (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) had acquired the skills to run the place on their own. And as he saw it, his exit would both force him to build a life outside the kitchen and save the co-workers he had come to care about from his dysfunction. By extension, it would presumably relegate Carmy, the show’s protagonist—and a man whose depressive brooding evidently fascinated the writers for far longer than it did most viewers—to a less prominent role in the series. Considering how much richer some of the supporting characters' storylines had turned out to be, it seemed like a promising direction.

On Tuesday, a new episode of The Bear suddenly showed up on Hulu, in advance of its fifth and final season. (For each of the past four years, the FX series has dropped a full season on the platform in late June.) Not a single scene takes place inside the Beef-slash-Bear. The only main cast member who appears in the hourlong “Gary” is Moss-Bachrach. And guess what? It’s one of the increasingly uneven hit’s best episodes in ages, a standalone that fleshes out a crucial relationship and suggests how much better the show could be with Carmy on the sidelines.

Set several years before the most recent season, “Gary” is mostly a two-hander between Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, who plays Mikey Berzatto, the older brother and former Beef proprietor whose death sent Carmy down a psychological spiral. (Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach, who are currently co-starring in Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway, also scripted the episode.) The pseudo-cousins have been sent on an errand by Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt, who doesn’t appear in the episode). All they have to do is drive across state lines to nearby Gary, Indiana and drop off a sealed cardboard box with unknown contents. It sounds minor, but Richie has decided this possibly illicit cargo means Jimmy is trusting them with more responsibility. “This is a potentially transformative day,” he tells Mikey, who looks like he’d rather spend the day in bed.

Richie is anxious to get the job done, because his wife Tiff (Gillian Jacobs, glimpsed in the opening scenes and heard in phone calls whose urgency increases as the episode continues) is convinced she’ll go into labor at precisely 5:15 pm. Theoretically, they have plenty of time. But when they get to Gary, Jimmy’s contact isn’t ready to meet up. So they have to waste some time in a timeworn city whose ambiguous claim to fame is as the hometown of the Jackson family. As they imitate MJ’s vocalizations, riff on the implications of naming a daughter Althea, trash-talk their way through a pickup basketball game with some local teens, and trade service-industry pleasantries with their server at a hot dog spot, we see how these two can bring out the best in one another. In the past, The Bear has generally shown us Mikey at his most charming (see: hiring Liza Colón-Zayas’ Tina on the spot in “Napkins.”) But when he’s stuck in his own head, as he is today, he needs someone to coax him out. Richie seems proud of his ability to do that.

It doesn’t take long to glimpse less healthy aspects of the friendship, though. Basketball and fast food soon give way to sharing a 40, which in turn leads to Mikey stopping by a random house to buy cocaine. Then Richie spots a bar that he swears came out of nowhere. Mikey refuses to go inside at first. But when Richie sends out a new acquaintance, Sherri (Marin Ireland, excellent), to persuade him to come in, he acquiesces. (I guess Richie knows Mikey’s type.) The gregarious Richie has, of course, already made friends with half the population of Gary, regaling them with the tall tale of the time he pooped his pants in front of his super-hot math tutor.

Mikey gets drawn into a conversation with Sherri, and she follows him to the bathroom to do some more lines. It’s with her that he really lets his guard down, talking about things he’d never banter about with Richie. He recalls how, when he was a kid, his mother (Jamie Lee Curtis’ Donna) could soothe him just by scratching his back, but that she would also sometimes blindside him with cruel indifference. “I didn’t understand how that could be the same person,” he says. You can tell that the memories still hurt—and you can see how he, Carmy, and Donna all share that double-edged personality, each in their own way capable of charming and inspiring other people but also of profoundly wounding them. For Mikey, this duality seems rooted in nihilism. “Nothing f-cking matters,” he tells Sherri. Meaninglessness can be “bliss” or torture. “If nothing matters, it sets you free,” she agrees. “But then where are you, right? You’re nowhere.”

It’s Richie who finally gets the call from Jimmy’s contact. Before they leave the bar, Mikey gives a speech ostensibly expressing his love for Richie to the good people of Gary. “He’s happy,” he says of his friend’s impending fatherhood. “You’re full, and I love it.” Then his tone shifts: “If he is involved, he’s gonna f-ck it up.” And in a callback to Richie’s self-deprecating yarn: “His entire life is a f-cking bed that he took a sh-t in the middle of, and he just smears it.” This is a horrible moment, one that lays bare the absolute worst side of Mikey. It’s so obvious what he’s doing, too drunk and high to conceal his jealousy of a buddy who has love in his life while Mikey’s most intimate exchanges are happening on the floor next to the toilet with a coked-up woman he’ll never see again. Although Richie doesn’t seem to realize it (or why would he go on to fulfill this awful prophecy, destroying his marriage before finding redemption at The Bear?), Mikey is projecting his own self-loathing onto the person who cares the most about him. If anything, he’s the friend who sabotages things. Maybe if he hadn’t let his phone die, the drop—which turns out to be no great vote of confidence on Jimmy’s part—would have happened earlier. In the end, when the dashboard clock reads 5:15, they’re stuck at a railroad crossing.

Fans will surely spend the time between now and the as-yet-unannounced Season 5 premiere date speculating on what happens in its final scene: fast-forward to the show’s present timeline, where Richie is sitting in his car, lost in what the editing implies are memories of that day with Mikey, when another vehicle barrels through the intersection and smashes into his empty passenger side. Is he dead? Critically injured? We can’t know, though I would be disappointed to see this wonderful character’s arc end so sadly—especially if it means less of Moss-Bachrach in the final season. Whatever happens, and despite the fact that Bernthal’s layered performance is the episode’s standout, I appreciate “Gary” as a Richie episode that functions as a sort of counterweight to his hard-earned transformation in “Forks.” Yes, people can change. But that doesn’t mean we never get stuck in the dark corners of our pasts, tempting our regrets to rise up and annihilate us. Like Mikey and Donna, Carmy may be a lost cause. His struggle no longer illuminates much of anything. Richie, though? As long as he’s still breathing, I wouldn’t count him out.