What “The Bear” teaches us about human possibility

Many unique ingredients make “The Bear” unlike any other TV dramedy, but the ones I’ll miss the most reduce to a single concept: balance. Series creator Christopher Storer conveys this in the briefest, tightest shots of hands lovingly plating food, as well as in panoramic views of the series as a whole.

Balance guides the fifth and final season’s opening moments, featuring Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) perfecting her spin on a roasted Brussels sprout plate in the peace of her apartment kitchen at dawn. She uses tweezers to nestle the roasted halves on a swirl of verdant puree, then tops it off with crispy fried leaves. But the top note, the sauce, is the silence enveloping it all, peppered by the thunder of a squall just outside. And this tender, small bite sets the emotional tone for everything that comes after, connecting to all that’s gotten Tina, and viewers, to where and how the series leaves us.

Sometimes a storm is just a day of wet weather. But sometimes, those dark skies and unyielding downpour are a metaphor. Time has quite literally run out on our titular restaurant, which means the money is gone, too. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) clocks in on the day everyone on her crew assumes will be their last and is immediately confronted with a quagmire of crises. Flooded roads delay some deliveries. Others have been cancelled because the restaurant is out of credit. The kitchen sinks aren’t working, and the plumbing is simultaneously screeching and groaning. Tens of spoons have mysteriously vanished.

Oh, and Syd’s partner, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), has told her he’s finished, leaving the business to her and Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) just in time for the place to fall apart, figuratively and actually.

But when their eternally anxious line cook Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) points to the zeroed-out clock glaring at them from a corner and tells Syd that it says they’re out of time, she just picks up its remote, clicks a button so it starts adding seconds instead of subtracting, shrugs and says, “No, it doesn’t.” Ebra grins mischievously, almost defiantly, and they begin to prep for an unpredictable day of service that plays out over seven of the season’s eight episodes.

A world-cleansing storm has thundered ominously on the horizon ever since “The Bear” began. Now that it’s pounding on walls and windows of the place, Syd, Carmy, Richie and the rest can either let it shut them down permanently or bet on themselves and the family they’ve built around them.

It’s tempting to see their predicament as our own. At a moment when technology promises ever-greater efficiency, “The Bear” makes a quieter if tenacious case for the value of people: their improvisation, intuition and stubborn belief that something worth doing is worth doing well. As Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and The Computer (Brian Koppelman) keep reminding everyone, restaurants are a terrible business to invest in. Most fail in the best of times. The Bear, Jimmy’s money pit, might as well be housed within slabs of soggy, stale Saltines. But numbers can only measure so much. There is a magic here nobody can deny, and it resides not just in its people but in their talent, ingenuity and will. If The Bear is going to survive, it won’t be because the math suddenly works. It’ll be because the people do. 

The entire final season of “The Bear” is a harmonious response to the feral call of the first, when Carmy and Syd tried and failed to save The Original Beef, the Italian beef sandwich joint that his brother Mike (Jon Bernthal) ran into the ground. A solution ex machina prevented it from closing, but instead of maintaining the status quo, everybody committed to leveling it up to a Michelin star-worthy bistro.

Their journey from beginning to end has been a beautiful and often challenging exercise of building stability in chaos and out of disarray. That is the story of cuisine, too. Every meal prep begins with assembling what’s on hand. From there, a cook either proceeds with furious off-the-cuff improvisation or arranges their mise en place and serenely moves through each step as instructed or based on their knowledge.

 

 

For four seasons, we watched The Bear’s family of choice choose the second way, even as Carmy’s psyche remains mired in disorder. Tina attends a culinary school, and Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is sent to Copenhagen to stage with Luca (Will Poulter) and kick his natural baking talent to an accolade-earning level of excellence.

This last supper of a season is a culmination of all their training, formal and otherwise, blending into a stress test that amazingly feels less stressful than many of this show’s loudest cortisol-spiking installments. At every turn, it shows its people trusting each other, taking care of each other, and dealing with the unexpected wrenches and scripts that would break most devices. A demonstration of where personal touch meets sheer grit.

Along with the other confusion, the storm wreaks logistical havoc, too. Once their reservation app gets up and running, Richie and the joint’s precision mistress Jessica (Sarah Ramos) realize they somehow overbooked and are also understaffed, all when everything is in short supply or not there and never coming.

This, of course, is reminiscent of a similar glitch that nearly destroyed The Beef in “Review,” the critically acclaimed first-season oner that made the show a summertime must-watch. But as Tina’s husband, David (David Zayas), assures her before this challenging day begins, they are in a much better place than where they started. He’s talking about the two of them, but again, we’re meant to take the widest view: The defining lesson that “The Bear” has been steaming toward for all this time is the importance of consistency, and the only way that can be maintained in a kitchen is if everybody is working in concert toward achieving the same goal.

The team’s presumed final service takes place under what is, in many ways, the worst possible circumstances, which brings out their finest effort. It is a frenzied, organized dance with missed steps and dropped plates and canned tuna and mayonnaise gussied up into a fancy tonnato sauce that tastes upscale and flawless to the unsuspecting. A feat that only people who trust and love each other can pull off.

There is skill, and there is craft, and the difference between the two is contentment with proficiency versus an unsettled desire to create greatness out of nothing, to chase a dream. Peel away the psychological pearl dives through Carmy’s trauma – which the final season does, for the most part – and what this series leaves us with is an avouchment of human possibility, especially when that’s bolstered by people giving their best to ensure your best.

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Tina has attained skills that can take her anywhere, David reminds her.

“You know, with other things you can do for a living and all the people you can do it with . . . to get to do that something that you love, with people that you love?” she asks, and he answers her: “You won the lottery.” We did, too.

But when David suggests that it’s time to move on, Tina bluntly replies, “It’s not over yet.” Without spoiling the season’s outcome, I’ll just say that line is a guarantee of satisfaction even though we know this is the last serving we going to get.

All episodes of “The Bear” are streaming on Hulu, and air weekly at 9 p.m. Thursdays on FX through Aug. 6.