How to (hopefully) escape a bear

So it is quite obvious that the first two seasons of The bear had a whole birth/death thing going on. The series picks up after the shocking and sudden suicide of Mikey Berzotto (John Bernthal), and the first season chronicles the slow, inevitable death of his restaurant, The Beef, under the stewardship of his little brother Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The second season tracks the birth of The Bear, the new restaurant that rises from the ashes of The Beef, as well as the evolution of many of its employees from a sloppy blue-collar crew to a meticulous, cultured, highly efficient team. And Carmy flirted with the idea of ​​creating a life for himself outside the kitchen through his relationship with his old flame from back in the day, Claire (Molly Gordon).

But while the first season ended on a fairly clear triumph, with Carmy, Richie and the rest of the Beef staff suddenly having a lot of money and a plan for the future, the second season ends on a much darker note. The Bear manages to open its doors on time and have a successful premiere, but Carmy’s relationships with Richie and Claire are in tatters – victims of Carmy’s anger and fear.

There was a kind of dry run for the disaster that concluded the second season, near the end of the first. Carmy freaks out, breaks a lot of stuff, screams, and scares off pretty much everyone. But the final episode has brought them all back together, stronger than ever. Carmy is what George Costanza would describe as a “subtle genius,” immensely gifted but intense and unpredictable. Working with him means warming yourself by the blazing fire of his mind while avoiding getting burned by the constant sparks and flares that erupt from it.

The show has elegantly punctuated Carmy’s asshole behavior with revelations about his past personal and professional life. He grew up in a single-parent household with an alcoholic, mentally ill mother prone to tantrums and depression. During his career, he worked under an immensely critical chef who criticized and undermined everything he did. These revelations are intended for the audience, not necessarily the show’s other characters. So when Carmy collapses in a fit of panic and self-loathing on opening night, we know it’s influenced by his hyper-tense childhood and abusive mentor. But the people working under him don’t. Some know parts, but no one knows everything. And it’s harder for them to understand.

Now we come to season three, and the perfectly reasonable expectation is that it will begin the way season one ended. Having learned a valuable lesson, Carmy will gather the crew back together, apologize, and everything will go back to normal in the kitchen. Oh, it might take a little longer for some of them to come to their senses than others, but everything will sort itself out. But it doesn’t. Because while the first two seasons were about birth and death, the third is much more about life. And the thing about life is that it’s its own thing, separate from birth and death. They’re obviously connected, but life is also its own thing, which birth and death are not.

Birth and death occur outside of time, giving you permission to ignore the responsibilities of life and focus on what’s ahead. They’re big, passionate, and exciting for all those reasons, but also because they’re signs of significant change. Life, on the other hand, is about the maintenance of existence. It’s about the mundanity of getting up every day and dealing with all the upkeep and responsibility that comes with inhabiting a body and sharing space with other people. It’s about trying to pull yourself together while everything is changing around you.

That’s why a show about a restaurant is such a powerful metaphor for life, isn’t it? Because every day you have to stop what you’re doing for a moment and eat. You can’t live if you can’t eat. And food is where so many of our social and familial relationships take place. It’s an excuse to spend time together. Want a good example of how birth and death exist separate from life? You have a baby or lose a loved one, and what do people do? They bring you food and leave without eating it. You’re momentarily freed from the responsibilities of life. It’s like going to a restaurant.

For the first two seasons of The bearpretty much every character was focused on the restaurant. There were subplots, of course, Carmy and Claire. Richie copes with the separation from his wife and daughter. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) works her way from being a temporary worker for a day to Sous Chef and potential co-owner of The Bear, while grappling with whether she can work under the emotionally undisciplined and unreliable Carmy. Carmy’s older sister Nat (Abby Elliot) goes from an outsider in season one to a pregnant co-owner in season two. Baker Marcus (Lionel Boyce) travels to Copenhagen to learn how to make artisanal desserts and tries not to worry too much about his mother, who is dying back home in Chicago. And stubbornly independent Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) learns to let down her guard and try new things.

But none of these storylines are resolved in season two. Richie can’t get away from his wife; Syd is still unsure about working with Carmy at The Bear; Nat isn’t having her baby; Marcus gets a call about his mother, but we don’t know what he learns, making her a sort of Schrödinger’s mother, both alive and dead. And Carmy and Claire are in limbo.

Season two is about the birth of The bearand how to ignore everything else when something is born. But the bear is no longer born, and he doesn’t die like The Beef had to die. He’s just… alive. And that means it’s time to deal with alive stuff. And that doesn’t mean there aren’t births or deaths in season three; in fact, there are both. It just means the show isn’t fixated on that. Each event gets an episode to cover it, and then it moves on to other things. There are other metaphorical births and deaths, too. Richie lets go of his marriage and starts thinking about what’s next, and a flashback shows how Tina went from being an office worker to a kitchen worker. But they’re all part of the bigger picture, which is life. And that’s not to say that what these characters go through is any less significant than Mikey’s death or the birth of the bear. It’s just that this season is about life, and in life, you have to keep it moving.

And that’s a good thing. Because as devastated as Marcus is about his mother, he still has the work he enjoys and the friends he loves. He can put his mind and heart into a lot of things, and that helps him deal with the pain. Richie gets respite from his grief, too, for many of the same reasons. And for Richie, it’s hard to imagine that he could have accepted the end of his marriage without all the life he’s let in over the past two seasons. Carmy and Syd are the only two characters who don’t find closure, because all they have is the bear. All they really care about is the never-ending cycle of opening and closing, making food, sending food, cleaning up and starting again. All they have is work. They have no life.

The third season is bookended by two funerals: the first is for a person, the second for a restaurant. And they are very different kinds of funerals indeed. Marcus’s mother’s funeral is a sober, somber affair. Ever’s funeral, on the other hand, is a joyous celebration. Because the end of life is terrible, but the end of work is not. Chef Andrea (Olivia Coleman) isn’t shutting down Ever because it’s going bankrupt because of a scandal or because she’s sick. She’s doing it because she wants to. She wants to break out of the endless cycle of cooking for other people, as rewarding as that was, and try new things. There’s a moment near the end of Ever’s funeral when Andrea and Carmy are standing outside and Andrea tells Carmy she’s thinking about taking up smoking. This is hopefully a joke, but it’s also a hidden nod to the birth/death dyad that defined the first two seasons. Here she is, at the beginning of her new life, and Andrea is considering adopting a habit that could lead to her death.

The bear ends with Syd crouched in her new apartment before the wild party, paralyzed with panic about whether to stay at The Bear or move to a new, hopefully less stressful kitchen, and Carmy wandering the streets of Chicago alone. We don’t know where he’s going or why, maybe to try to work things out with Claire, see his sister and niece, or have the talk with his mom he’s been avoiding for three seasons. But he stops to look at his vibrating phone and sees that the critique they’ve been waiting for all season has finally appeared. And while it’s unclear how positive or negative it is, it’s clear that it’s knocked Carmy off his chosen path back to the workforce.

Jeremy Allen White will play Bruce Springsteen in a movie next year, and Springsteen once said the best days of his life were the day he picked up the guitar and the day he put it down. The day he discovered the passion and joy that comes with work and realized he needed more. Carmy and Syd still hold their guitars, but their grip is loosening, too. They’ve seen how letting go of work and getting to grips with life has enriched those around them, but they haven’t yet found the courage to try it themselves. Hopefully they’ll find out next season. Or maybe not. That’s life.

All episodes of The bear are currently streaming on Hulu.