This post contains spoilers for the entire fourth season of The Bear, now streaming on Hulu.
The Bear Season Four finale is called “Goodbye.” This could be read a lot of different ways, given both its subject matter and its placement in the season. The episode — a single scene, shot on one location, largely just featuring Carmy and Sydney, with Richie and then Natalie joining later — is about Carmy’s decision to quit the restaurant and leave Syd in charge. So that could be the goodbye, even though he insists he will stick around long enough to get The Bear out of the financial hole he dug for it with his ridiculous behavior throughout the third season and the first part of this one. The goodbye could simply be that this is the last episode of the season, and we’ll have to wait another year to see all our cousins again. It could be that the series continues, but without Carmy as a regular presence, while Jeremy Allen White goes off to try to be a movie star.
Or it could be a goodbye from The Bear altogether.
The Bear creator Christopher Storer, who wrote and directed the finale, rarely does press. And I’m told FX has no immediate plans to announce anything about the show’s future — whether that would be a renewal for a fifth and final season, a more open-ended renewal, or the declaration that “Goodbye” is meant to be taken literally. All we can do for now is guess, stuck in the same kind of limbo in which Carmy is leaving Syd, Richie, Natalie, and the rest of the group with his plan to abandon the culinary arts and figure out who he actually is. And we can argue about how rewarding it would feel if this is a permanent goodbye from all involved.
Leaving all those questions aside for a moment, “Goodbye” is another remarkable chapter in a season that had several of those. It’s a pretty textbook example of a bottle episode — shot on a single preexisting set (or, in this case, in a single location that the production uses regularly), with no guest stars (and most of the regular cast missing, at that), to save money that can be spent elsewhere in the season (in this case, getting every famous person in Storer’s phone to guest star in the wedding episode). It’s all about the actors, whom Storer films in very tight shots, focusing on their expressive faces, and demonstrating how physical closeness and emotional closeness are wildly different things.
To Carmy, giving Syd the restaurant is a kindness — to her, to him, and to everyone who works there. He’s miserable and erratic, in part because, as he tells Richie later in the scene, “I don’t know what I’m like.” And he’s making them all miserable in the process.
To Syd, Carmy’s choice is one more betrayal by a mentor who’s been the scorpion to her proverbial frog. He keeps apologizing. He keeps promising to do better. And he keeps failing her. She turned down the offer to build a new restaurant with Adam Shapiro(*) because she wanted to work at this place — and to specifically work with Carmy, who made the best meal she’s ever eaten, and who inspired her to be her best chef self. She loves everyone at The Bear, but she came there for Carmy. On the occasions when he’s able to get his various neuroses under control, he’s an incredible partner who makes Syd feel better about herself than even her beloved father can. And when he’s failing at that, at least she can console herself with the understanding that the good version of Carmy will make an appearance sooner or later. But that can’t happen if all versions of Carmy quit.
(*) It was nice of Shapiro, however, to immediately confirm for Syd that she made the right call by petulantly accusing her of making “a truly idiotic decision.”
Carmy tries telling her that he has to get away from here in order to “make me not like this!” Syd’s reply is an entirely reasonable, “How?” He admits that he doesn’t know, then pivots the conversation to the more important idea: Carmy may have worked at the greatest restaurants in the world, and for the greatest chefs, and been celebrated for his own work, but Syd is simply better at all of this than he is. She’s a better manager of people, and has even turned out to be the better chef — it’s her scallop dish generating buzz this season, rather than one of his creations. She has her own anxieties, but most of them are triggered by him. He tells her he believes in her more than he’s ever believed in himself, and when she understandably asks him why, he says the only thing that makes sense to him: “Because you’re the Bear.” People call him that because of his last name, and even people who aren’t technically members of the family, like Claire, often get a nickname with “Bear” in it. Sydney has never felt like a part of that extended Berzatto clan, but she is. She’s an artist like Carmy. She’s an admirable leader like Mikey was. She’s empathetic and warm like Sugar. Carmy started this version of the restaurant, but it works because of her.
Still, this is a lot to spring on a person in one conversation, and before Syd can even fully absorb it, Richie steps out into the alley, and greets the news of Carmy’s planned departure with complete exasperation. These two have always been uneasy allies, each jealous of the other’s relationship with Mikey, each convinced the other is somehow more comfortable among all the biological and adopted Berzattos, each incapable of giving a proper apology to the other one. Richie hears that Carmy is leaving, and immediately his mind goes back to the period when Carmy was in New York while Richie was the one trying and failing to pull Mikey out of the spiral that ultimately killed him. Bringing Richie back to the present first requires Carmy to admit a shameful secret from the past, confessing that he went to Mikey’s funeral but left immediately because he couldn’t handle it. Hearing this, and hearing Carmy finally acknowledge that Richie lost a brother, too, is enough to snap Richie out of his anger. And witnessing this moment makes Syd realize the condition she’ll require in order to allow Carmy to leave: Richie has to be a partner, too, along with Syd, Sugar, and Uncle Jimmy. When Syd first showed up at The Original Beef of Chicagoland and started working with Carmy to turn a sandwich shop into a fine dining restaurant, Richie was at the front of the pack (alongside Tina) opposing what was being done to his beloved workplace. But they’ve long since moved past that — in part by bonding over their shared frustration with Carmy — and it feels like a fitting and poignant sign of how far they’ve come that Syd insists on giving Richie a financial stake in The Bear to go along with his emotional one.
White and Moss-Bachrach facing the truth.
FX
Finally, a fourth member of the team joins them, as Sugar wonders what they’re all doing out here. Syd explains that Carmy is leaving. And where Syd and Richie both responded to this news by feeling shocked and betrayed, Natalie — who knows her brother in a way even his best friends never quite will — immediately understands why. She hugs him in support, but also weeps, not only because she’ll be losing a chance to work with him every day, but because she knows how much Carmy has suffered. And she knows that Mikey never gave himself the same kind of break.
Technically, the episode isn’t just that scene. After the hug, we get a glimpse of Chicago at night, and then go into the restaurant’s empty kitchen. It’s after 1 a.m. Everyone has gone home to sleep and prepare for the next day’s service. And the digital countdown clock, which Uncle Jimmy had his friend Computer install, finally reaches zero.
By then, we understand that zero hour doesn’t mean the restaurant immediately shuts down; just that Jimmy will stop devoting any money to it, and will begin at least exploring what he could get from selling the building. It’s an underwhelming, poorly-explained pivot, since the beginning of the season implied the more dire scenario(*). Still, it’s the end of the money, if not the end of The Bear. But is it the end of The Bear?
(*) It’s also something where the show cheated at least a little. Carmy and the others have to keep cutting back expenses just to keep the restaurant functional while Jimmy slowly shuts off the money tap. Yet Richie is able to hire Jessica, Garrett, and Rene from Ever — a.k.a. the best restaurant in the world, at least until its owner decided, like Carmy, to move on to something else — who surely don’t come that cheap, even for a friend. And when Marcus is in desperate need of help with the desserts, his former teacher Luca just so happens to be in town and willing to work for free for weeks on end. It’s great to have all these characters back — particularly in the chemistry between Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Sarah Ramos as Richie and Jessica got to know each other better — but it doesn’t feel right that a place running on a shoestring budget would be able to field such an all-star team.
On the one hand, Season Four addresses a lot of outstanding emotional issues. Carmy and Richie finally have it out about Mikey. Donna apologizes to Carmy for all the ways that she hurt him(*). Carmy and Claire make peace, whether or not they’re officially back together. Marcus is praised in a Food & Wine article about great young chefs, completing his arc that started with him as the guy who baked bread but dreamed of something bigger. Richie makes peace with his odd place in the center of their little world. Carmy recognizes that the restaurant isn’t healthy for him, and resolves to leave and find himself. In terms of character arcs, there’s not a lot that would be necessary to address in a fifth season, much less a sixth or seventh.
(*) It’s a scene with jaw-dropping performances from both Jamie Lee Curtis and Jeremy Allen White. At times during the conversation, Carmy looks like a cornered animal who would rather be anywhere else on the planet than listening to his mother talk about all the ways she hurt and failed him. At others, he looks like these are the words he’s been waiting his whole life to hear.
On the other hand, various plot threads are left dangling. We don’t know how or if Carmy will get the restaurant out of debt. We don’t know for sure if they earned the Michelin star, even if the patron who witnessed the fake snowfall stunt was sure presented as if he was the Michelin man. We don’t know if Ebraheim’s new mentor Albert will team up with Computer and Jimmy to turn the sandwich window into its own business — and, if so, whether this will be The Bear’s financial salvation, or if the money men intend to carve it off as a wholly separate business. And because the finale is focused entirely on the Carmy/Syd/Richie triumvirate, various members of the supporting cast get forgotten. We don’t know if Sweeps has yet mastered all the wines, or if Richie and Jessica might become more than friends. We don’t even know if Carmy will actually be able to quit, or if by the time he untangles the financial knot, he will come to realize that maybe he could just try seeing a therapist, rather than having to find a new career in his mid-thirties when he only knows how to do the one thing.
Some of these questions are obviously more interesting than others, with all due respect to Sweeps’ sommelier learning curve. There are versions of a fifth season that could be great (if nothing else, they might give Tina something more interesting to do than try to cook her pasta course more quickly), and versions that could drag the series back into some of the self-indulgent traps that befell it in Season Three. (And even that season gave us the Mikey and Tina conversation.)
Mainly, though, “Goodbye” feels more satisfying as an episode of television than it does as a series finale. It only features four characters (and one of those only briefly), when The Bear is about the larger community that those four have built in and around the restaurant. It offers a lot of catharsis but not much closure. I have no idea if there are enough narrative ingredients left to justify continuing the show, but if this is our last meal at this restaurant, it leaves a slightly unsatisfying taste.
