Let’s Unpack The Bear’s Emotional Baggage

As a series, The Bear is deeply invested in the idea of growth through change. In its first season, we watched wunderkind chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) return home to Chicago to take over his brother Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) failing sandwich shop The Beef. With no small amount of conflict, Carmy and sous-chef Sydney “Syd” Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) transform The Beef’s chaotic staff, led by Mikey’s loud, sarcastic, belligerent best friend, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), into a tightly focused crew intent on doing their best every day. They got better at their jobs, and they became, The Bear argued, better people — better coworkers, better friends, and better family members.

But the restaurant business is fickle, a reality that Christopher Storer’s series built into its season-two story line as it wondered if that same group could pull off opening a fine-dining restaurant. Could they train hard enough, communicate well enough, and work together effectively enough to make their new venture, also named The Bear, a must-visit destination? Or would all the emotional baggage between these characters be too much to overcome? Maybe you’ve forgotten all the details of these characters’ overlapping personal and professional bonds and complications. So like Richie remembering that the restaurant’s alarm-code password is gofastboatsmojito, all one word, we’re here to remind you of the kinfolk, culinary, competitive, and collaborative relationships to have in mind before The Bear’s third season starts streaming on Hulu.

Carmy and Richie’s fraught cousinhood

When people complained about The Bear being too frantic, too loud, or too yell-y in its first season, they really were talking about Carmy and Richie’s “cousin” dynamic, which is a lot. When Carmy takes over The Beef, he’s walking into a hostile environment where Richie calls him “pompous and delusional” and his mentors “fuckwads,” deems everything he does wrong or unreasonable, and complains to anyone with ears about Carmy leaving home in the first place. Richie is initially an ass to Syd, too — so much so that after they get into it during penultimate episode “Review,” she accidentally stabs him — but his beef (sorry) with Carmy goes way deeper. On Carmy’s end, Richie represents everything he hated about his brother, Mikey: his brashness, his insistence on his own rightness, his refusal to learn or appreciate new things. The two are simply too entrenched in their own perspectives to really understand each other or let each other in, even after Richie undergoes a massive amount of growth in “Forks” and Carmy seemingly gets what he wants professionally with The Bear’s heralded friends-and-family night. The shouting match the two of them have while Carmy is locked in the walk-in is devastating — with Carmy rejecting Richie’s declarations of love and calling him a “loser” and Richie bringing up Carmy’s no-show status at Mikey’s funeral and all the emotional and physical labor Richie did to keep The Beef running while Carmy was gone — and it will surely have repercussions as they keep trying to work together at The Bear.

Mikey’s tragic shadow

Bernthal’s casting as Carmy’s older brother, Mikey, whose death by suicide inspires Carmy to come back to Chicago, started out as a secret; he wasn’t an announced member of the cast when the series premiered, and his presence in the first season is primarily limited to the episode “Ceres.” Yet Mikey’s influence is huge. The devastated Richie resents that Mikey left The Beef to Carmy instead of him, and he holds back on giving Carmy a final message from Mikey because of that frustration. Tina and the other Beef staff members don’t want too much to change at the restaurant because they think it would dishonor Mikey’s memory. Carmy’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), or “Sugar,” feels like she’s grieving Mikey alone because Carmy is so caught up in work. When the staff discovered that Mikey was hiding cash in tomato-sauce cans, it felt like a gift from the beyond, especially when the first season ended with an image of Mikey’s smiling face and his directive to “Let it rip.” But season two counteracted that benevolent image with “Fishes,” in which Bernthal gives the character a manic, violent edge that unnerves everyone — in particular Carmy and Richie, who knew Mikey best. Mikey was a complicated guy, and the tragedy of his death looms over everyone he knew.

Syd and Tina’s enmity-turned-alliance

Copy Carmy and Richie’s relationship when the former took over The Beef, and you get the beginning of Syd and Tina’s (Liza Colón-Zayas) relationship, too. The two women initially had some elitism and ageism between them when Syd got hired with Tina treating Syd like an interloper, refusing to follow her instructions, and bristling at her speaking in Spanish and Syd slipping every so often into condescension with Tina, who didn’t have the same professional training as Syd and Carmy. But as the first season went on, the two grew to respect each other, and they’re fully aligned in season two, with Syd asking Tina if she’ll be her sous-chef at The Bear and supporting Tina as she attends culinary school. The pair never really talks about what it is like to be the only two women working in the kitchen together at The Beef, but they’re united by a shared resilience. It’s a nice life-imitating-art touch that in season three, Edebiri directs the Tina-focused episode “Napkins.”

Carmy and his demanding (and sometimes abusive) mentors

Carmy’s unrelenting ambition is the second-most important aspect of his personality (after all the family trauma), and even non-foodie fans of The Bear will understand that the places he worked at were really big deals. In season one, he’s an award-winning up-and-coming chef who has cooked or trained at Noma and Eleven Madison Park, two of the best restaurants in the world, and through flashbacks we see how the exacting demands and verbal abuse from an unnamed chef played by Joel McHale did a number on Carmy’s psyche. In season two, we meet another of Carmy’s mentors in chef Terry (Olivia Colman), who is also based in Chicago and who crosses paths with Richie (and gives him a lesson about hospitality and purpose) when he stages at her restaurant for a week. Chef Terry also has extremely high standards, but unlike McHale’s character, her approach isn’t abusive, and her mantra of “every second counts” becomes a motto for everyone in Carmy’s orbit.

Syd and Carmy’s partnership

They shouldn’t date. It’s really that simple.

Marcus’s workplace crushes

Marcus’s growth over the first two seasons of The Bear has been wonderful to watch because it so well captures this show’s insistence that creativity can be a confidence-building force and because Lionel Boyce is such a naturalistic delight onscreen. Whether glazing doughnuts in season one or learning of his mother’s death in season two, Boyce gives aspiring pastry chef Marcus a palpable inner life. But like so many people who spend way too much time at their jobs, Marcus’s work-life balance is all screwed up. He jeopardizes his friendship with Syd, who happens to be his boss, by asking her out in season two, and idolizes Carmy perhaps too much by mimicking his single-minded, obsessive approach to figuring out a dish that’s been floating around his brain. The fact that Marcus has complicated relationships with both mentors is very in line with The Bear’s whole deal, but it does make us worry about his season-three arc.

Donna’s chaotic presence

Is Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance as the Berzatto matriarch who chain smokes, berates Carmy and Sugar while exalting Mikey, and drives her car into the family home during Christmas good or distracting? Questionable. But the series puts a lot of narrative tension on her as the woman whose mental illness implicitly and explicitly traumatized her children. Mikey is suggested to have inherited a version of whatever personality disorder she may have, and Carmy and Sugar are both shaped by a desire to please and placate this woman whose narcissism is on such raging display in season two. Carmy’s decision to cook for a living is obviously influenced by Donna’s own elaborate meals; Sugar’s fierce insistence that she and Carmy stay close after Mikey’s death, and her disappointment that they haven’t, is her attempt to maintain some sort of family structure despite Donna’s penchant for chaos. In the second-season finale, Donna shows up at the restaurant to support Carmy and Sugar but is ultimately afraid to go inside, even with her dopey-but-good-hearted son-in-law Pete (Chris Witaske) encouraging her to do so. But that probably won’t be the last we’ll see of Donna, not when Pete let it slip to her that Sugar’s pregnant.

Carmy’s torpedoed romance with Claire

Here’s Carmy’s need to succeed ruining his personal life again. In season one, The Bear emphasized that Carmy’s relationship with his family suffered after Mikey banned him from working at the family restaurant (because he knew Carmy was too good for it) and he moved to New York to pursue a fine-dining career there. In season two, Carmy’s tendency to put his career first ends up sabotaging his relationship with former neighbor and high-school crush Claire (Molly Gordon), an ER doctor with whom he reconnects. The two share some soft-focus, seemingly idyllic time together before Carmy decides that their relationship is a distraction and, while locked in the restaurant’s walk-in during friends-and-family night, has a breakdown where he rants, “I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive any amusement or enjoyment. I’m completely fine with that. Because no amount of good is worth how terrible this feels. It’s just a complete waste of fuckin’ time.” Once Molly hears that and realizes how quickly Carmy would abandon their relationship for his own career, she walks away. It doesn’t feel like a forever breakup, though, because the second season of The Bear (sometimes unconvincingly) really hammers on the idea that Claire was Carmy’s original one who got away.

Richie’s exceptional taste

This man loves Blade Runner, Michael Mann, Haruki Murakami, and Ridley Scott. (And Taylor Swift, unexpectedly yet canonically.) Let him cook! Not literally, we know this man is a front-of-house savant. But figuratively!