If ‘The Bear’ Season 3 Is Haunted, the Finale Is an Exorcism
Welcome to the season 3 finale of The Bear, also known as The Haunting of Carmen Berzatto. That’s actually where we’re going to begin: this paranormal business. It started as a joke in episode 5: Sammy Fak (John Cena!) haunts people, which turns out to be a doofy way of saying that he trolls them into submission. But The Bear didn’t leave it alone. In episode 9, Neil and Ted Fak (Matty Matheson and Ricky Staffieri) tell Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) that Claire (Molly Gordon) is “haunting your ass, dude.” In retrospect, it explains the vibe of the barely lit, ghostly-looking Claire flashbacks.
Clearly, Sammy’s (man)childish bit was meant as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for how Carmy deals with pain. He has no real coping mechanism aside from work, so his problems never really go away. They stay. Linger. Follow him around. And you know what thwarts a haunting, right?
An exorcism. That’s obviously the moment The Bear was leading us to all along. As in a good horror flick, the monster shows up in the final act and the protagonist must face their greatest fear if they want to live. In The Bear’s season finale, the big bad is Chef David Fields (Joel McHale)—the anti-mentor who has tormented Carmy in flashbacks for three seasons now. He shows up at Ever’s funeral dinner and wastes no time in glaring at his former student. After an entire season of Carmy in a fit of especially dissociated rage, the finale makes it plain that confronting Fields is the one thing that can set him free.
Carmy Loses His Shit (but in a Relatively Productive Way This Time)
Welcome back to Ever, chefs. Whereas season 2’s “Forks” episode positioned the real-life Chicago restaurant as Richie’s glow-up dojo, Ever serves a different purpose this time around. In short: Its staff is everything that The Bear’s pained heroes are not. For one, they don’t argue! They clearly treasure each other as chefs and humans. And they look like they sleep at least six hours a night. The contrast isn’t lost on the struggling crew. Richie uses the time to reacquaint himself with people who don’t make his blood boil, while Sydney and Carmy sit with a legion of real-life chefs who basically tell them: We came, we saw, we struggled, and now we’re okay!
Sydney seems especially disturbed. Keep in mind that she’s been in Carmy’s orbit for a decent chunk of time and doesn’t have the same network as him. Ever so slowly in the finale—meeting a handful of nice-seeming chefs who very much don’t have the same glazed look of terror as Carmy—she’s realizing the weight of her time at The Beef and The Bear. Still, Sydney tells Adam Shapiro that she doesn’t have an answer for him yet. She can’t bring herself to leave The Bear. Yet.
Meanwhile, her chronically avoidant boss actually tackles a problem head-on. Fields leaves his table, Carmy chases after him, and the showdown begins. “After ‘fuck you,’ I don’t have much,” Carmy says. Fields tries to exit the chat before Carmy blurts, “I think about you too much!” Oof. Meanie Chef quips that he doesn’t think about Carmy, who should really express some gratitude. “You were an okay chef when you started with me,” Fields says. “Now you’re an excellent chef.”
This stupefies Carmy, who seems...relieved? Maybe even happy? Even if Carmy sought his mentor’s approval all along, I’ll take it if it gives the man some peace. Consider the exorcism a success. More of this for Carmy, please.
Party at Sydney’s!
First of all: It’s a hell of a power move for The Bear to needle-drop the American Pie song. “Laid,” by James—remember it? Either way, prepare to have EEEEEE-EEEEEEEEE! stuck in your head for a month.
Anyway, there’s an after-party at Sydney’s new apartment. Here, Olivia Colman’s Chef Andrea Terry finally becomes an Olivia Colman Character. She whirls around the apartment, sprinkling coffee grounds on burned waffles. Side note: Colman is downright incredible in this entire episode, making Chef Terry a damn convincing case for life beyond The Bear for Carmy and Sydney. Arguably, the episode’s best moment is Carmy and Chef Terry’s not-smoke break outside Ever. (“You have no idea what you’re doing and are therefore invincible.”)
At the after-party, Sydney walks to her fridge and notices a newspaper clipping that highlights her time at The Beef. You can almost see whatever haunted Carmy enter Sydney—she sees flashes of her best and worst moments there. She runs outside and suffers a panic attack. It’s brutal. The Bear is telling us that just as Fields hurt Carmy, Carmy hurt Sydney, and the cycle of pain continues to damage yet another chef.
Now You Look at Your Phone, Carmy?
At the end of the finale, we see Carmy walking the streets of Chicago, finally looking like the somewhat upbeat dude who used to sell denim from his oven again. Of course, it’s a perfect time for that Chicago Tribune review to drop. Carmy pulls out his phone and opens it, but his anxiety takes over—he starts plucking individual words from the piece. Some are good. Some are bad. My colleague Josh Rosenberg pointed out that Carmy had a ton of missed calls from Computer (Brian Koppelman) and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), who were both waiting on the review, good or bad. Plus, when Carmy’s anxiety montages pop up, we’re meant to understand that he’s become an unreliable narrator. The review could’ve said anything—let’s just hope it’s not negative enough to make Uncle Jimmy pull his funding entirely.
Then...TO BE CONTINUED. Damn! We knew that The Bear would return for season 4, but the series really hit us with the Marvel-esque title stinger, à la THOR WILL RETURN. Let’s hope that we only have to wait another year for season 4—Chris Storer, we can’t wait any longer than that.
The Leftovers
I have a few more thoughts about the finale, so I must turn to a familiar vehicle for the extremely minuscule cross-section of my True Detective and The Bear readers: the emoji bullet point.
🐻 Carmy doesn’t call Claire after all. The constant—and I mean constant—nagging of Carmy by just about every character in the show actually did lead me to believe he’d smash that call button. Maybe that’s what our shoulders-relaxed chef would’ve done had he not pulled up the Chicago Tribune review. Really, I’m just bummed that Molly Gordon didn’t get the chance to fully reprise her delightful season 2 turn.
🐻 The Bear was such a flirt this season! While everyone was out and about ’shipping Carmy and Sydney, it feels like we left season 3 with two could-be-somethings: the first being Sydney and Luca. They share a late-party glass of wine and a friendly chat about only-childhood that you could read however you’d like. Richie and Jessica (Sarah Ramos)? Yeah, she’s his date to Tiffany’s (Gillian Jacobs) wedding.
🐻 Who do I have to call to get John Mulaney’s Stevie a bottle episode next season? We can’t relegate this man to Carmy odor-control duties!
🐻 I’m willing to put a Ted Fak–style parlay on at least two of Ever’s former chefs finding work at The Bear.
🐻 The focus of this episode—exorcising demons at Ever’s funeral—means that we don’t get one last check-in with a few of The Bear’s main players. We’ll have to wait until season 4 to see Sugar (Abby Elliot) and Baby Berzatto, Sweeps (Corey Hendrix) continue to level up his sommelier game, Tina’s (Liza Colón-Zayas) next chapter, Marcus’s (Lionel Boyce) masterpiece in the making, and how Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) is holding up at the sandwich outpost.
🐻 Honestly, it was a delight to see EVERY SECOND COUNTS morph from a hustle mantra to a message of appreciating the people you love.
That’s a wrap on season 3, folks. Thank you, as always, for reading Esquire—and order yourself an Italian beef for lunch today. You deserve it.
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