Season 4 of the Emmy-winning FX series “The Bear” ended last summer with an episode called “Goodbye,” in which the Chicago fine-dining restaurant the Bear exhausted the last of the capital fronted by its primary investor, Jimmy Kalinowski (Oliver Platt). To make matters worse, the brilliant but anxiety-prone head chef, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), announced to his business partner Chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and their front-of-house manager, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), that he was quitting.
“Goodbye” could have been the series finale. But that would have been depressing and unsatisfying — and not in the overall spirit of “The Bear,” a show about broken people pulling together to create something amazing. So in the fifth and final season, the show’s creator, Christopher Storer, got back to basics, wrapping his series with a set of episodes full of delicious intensity, joyous release and some of the most beautiful-looking food ever plated.
Season 5 arrived in full last week on Hulu. If you’ve finished the series, let’s dig into what made this last season so effective.
It’s a heist movie
The first seven episodes of Season 5 take place the day after the Season 4 finale. Chicago is enduring a torrential downpour. The Bear is low on supplies. Some employees have quit. And the restaurant is overbooked. How are Carmy and company going to make it through another service?
Like a gang of master criminals in an “Ocean’s” movie, they plan meticulously and improvise when necessary. The menu is retooled to use fewer ingredients. When the freaky weather leads to guests arriving at odd times, the staff manages the overflow by throwing a party outside. With silent hand signals and maximum efficiency, they send out food and turn tables more quickly than ever.
“The Bear” replaces its usual 1990s alt-rock needle drops with a synthy original Hans Zimmer score, which adds to the overall feeling of watching a highly-skilled but overmatched team of misfits execute an impossible mission. Through the first half of the season, Storer and his writers establish everything that’s at stake and everything that can go wrong, setting up the thrilling and moving Episode 7, “Caramel,” in which all of the hours of preparation pay off magnificently.
It’s a clip show
“The Bear” often uses flashbacks and rapid-fire editing to express what is on the characters’ minds, whether it is Carmy remembering being bullied by a cruel boss or Syd stressing out over past panic attacks. Season 5 expands on that motif, occasionally inserting a flurry of images from past episodes, as a reminder of what these people have been through and how far they have come. These moments are like “Best of ‘The Bear’” clip show episodes, condensed into 10 seconds.
The result is a season that connects a lot of dots. Back in Season 2, the restaurant had to fix its fire-suppression system, which in “Caramel” kicks in at an inconvenient time, switching off the stove after a pot boils over. Other old problems resurface. The award-winning pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is in a foul mood because he has invited his estranged father to the Bear. The unpredictable Neil Fak (Matty Matheson) draws the assignment of waiting on a diner Richie calls “star man,” who might be with the Michelin guide. The sommelier, Sweeps (Corey Hendrix), faces his toughest test when flooding makes it hard to identify some of the wines by their labels.
All of these callbacks and montages add emotional oomph as the staff, one by one, overcomes these challenges. There’s real warmth to this season — a reminder of why fans care about this not-so-merry band of oafs and depressives.
The most affecting of the season’s clip show moments involves Carmy’s notebooks, which contain a record of his entire career in the restaurant business. As his mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), flips through them, she gets to see what her son has done — and so do we, through more flashback snippets. “The Bear” can make the life of a chef look dangerously unhealthy, but montages like these are a reminder of how the culinary arts can give people an opportunity to see the world and become inspired.
It’s the whole series in miniature
The overall story arc of “The Bear” is simple. Carmy elevates his family’s failing Italian beef sandwich shop by bringing in the discipline and standards of a gourmet kitchen; in the process, he gets old friends and new acquaintances to take pride in their work. But what he achieves is tenuous. The restaurant is perpetually on the brink of financial ruin, and Carmy’s erratic moods are disruptive. Was it foolish for Carmy to build his dreams atop the rotting foundation of the Original Beef of Chicagoland? Or was this location — with these “cousins” — the only place the Bear could exist?
That question looms ominously in Season 5, which begins with the restaurant’s being physically destroyed by the heavy rains. Pipes are backing up and bursting. The roof is falling in. And yet by the end of the night, the staff has made something magical happen in a space that the guests find lively and enchanting. The story that began in Season 1 is essentially repeated on a smaller, more concentrated scale.
There is a meta-textual element to Season 5 in that the cast of “The Bear” has gathered together one last time to tell the story about what could be the last night of the Bear. At one point, Richie invites a few diners to hang out in kitchen, where they — like us — watch the unfolding drama with fascination. (The guests even exclaim, “Yes, chef!,” just as fans of the show do.)
It begins questionably but ends beautifully
Two months before Season 5 debuted, FX released a bonus episode called “Gary,” set a few years before Season 1, following Richie and Mikey on an errand that devolves into an afternoon of insults and goofing around. There’s a sourness to “Gary” that doesn’t really fit with Season 5, which probably explains why it was released separately.
The final episode of “The Bear,” though, sends out the series on a sweet note. The finale answers most of the remaining big questions. Yes, the Bear will stay open. That one crazy night of service filled the coffers enough to pay the staff and buy more food. More important: Michelin awards the restaurant two stars, meaning it is likely to remain booked solid with big-spending foodies. (In a twist confirming some fan theories, the real Michelin assessor, played by Gary Janetti, ate at the Bear in Season 4.)
In other positive news, Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) is able to sell Uncle Jimmy on the idea of franchising the beef sandwich business, which should get some more money flowing. (Ebra’s mentor Albert was played in Season 4 by the late Rob Reiner, whose absence the series marks by having Ebra quote “The Princess Bride,” saying, “As you wish.”) Richie gets an opportunity to appear at a hospitality conference in Japan, to which he flies hand-in-hand with his colleague Jess (Sarah Ramos). The hard-working line cook Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) is named Syd’s chef de cuisine.
As for Carmy, he applies to be an intern at an architecture firm, though Syd lets him know he can return to work with her any time — and it’s not hard to imagine that he might, given how much he romanticizes the highs of a great restaurant service.
Rather than ending the series with his job interview, the finale closes with a birthday party for Richie’s daughter, attended by pretty much every “Bear” character (including Carmy’s love interest, Claire, played by Molly Gordon). It’s a reminder of the most touching scene in “Caramel,” when Syd walks into the dining room and is struck by how much the guests are enjoying themselves. One diner tries to pay the chef a compliment, and she replies, “It’s everyone, but thank you.” The only way to end this story wasn’t with Carmy alone but with everyone — all the “hands!”
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