The Bear Season 4 Finale Recap

This story contains spoilers for The Bear season 4.

When service begins on The Bear season 4, we finally learn what The Chicago Tribune food critic had to say about Carmy’s efforts at his new establishment. In short? Pretentious, chaotic, and messy, but… promising. In a cruel twist of fate, The Chicago Tribune piece (which we hear about, but never have the chance to read in full) sounds a lot like the reviews for The Bear season 4. The ten new episodes have hardly existed in the world for 48 hours and yet they are already on the other end of pieces either tearing this season apart, offering tepid praise, or outright calling for its end.

I get it. I defended the similarly criticized third season—which defiantly experimented with its storytelling and probed Carmy’s psyche from the very first episode—but The Bear season 4 watches like a greatest-hits album. Meaning: Faks fracas, “Save It for Later,” and maximum Berzatto infighting and making up. Relatively lost is the reinvention and surprise of the past three seasons. But it’s not as simple as what a lot of critics are saying, which is that The Bear overstayed its welcome, or just outright ran out of ideas.

What I really want to discuss, though, is where it all ends. While the season 3 conclusion was packed with celebrity cameos and an afterparty at Sydney’s apartment, the season 4 finale largely takes place in a single location: The alley behind The Bear. It’s a half hour of cotherapy between Carmy, Richie, and Sydney, where all matter of beef is spilled on the pavement. Carmy says he actually attended Mikey’s funeral, Sydney attempts to start smoking cigarettes, and Richie squishes his face onto Carmy’s mug in a fit of rage. The main course? Carmy updated The Bear’s ownership agreement to place Sugar, Richie, and Sydney in control of the restaurant—writing himself out in the process. He’s not shacking up at another restaurant or taking a break. Carmy is done cooking. The Bear belongs to Sydney and Richie now.

I’ll admit: I finished season 4 yesterday afternoon, then went to bed feeling a little shorted by the finale, which at times feels like an off-Broadway staging of The Bear. I woke up thinking that Carmy’s story couldn’t have ended any other way.

FX/HuluWho is Carmy without his life’s work?

Take away the Faks, Ebraheim’s delivery robot (maybe Chuckie can replace Carmy at The Bear), and Tina’s pursuit of plating a pasta dish in under three minutes. Aside from standing as TV’s most accurate depiction of the restaurant world—which is no small feat, of course—this is a show about trauma. About how pain warps how we see the world, how it snakes its way into and around our passions, and how most people would rather live with it than purge it from the darkest corners of their brain. Carmy grew up with chaos and hardly knew the love of a parent, so that’s exactly the life he sought out as an adult. Anyone who relates to Carmy, even in some small way, knows there’s a point where it becomes unlivable; you thrive on dysfunction until you can’t anymore, and that’s the day you have to decide whether or not you want to do anything about it.

Season 3 leaves Carmy at that exact moment. In the finale, he stares his abuser (Joel McHale’s Chef David Fields) in the face and it seems to give him some semblance of peace… until The Chicago Tribune hits the presses. In season 4, it turns out that the review—which effectively tells Carmy he’s not the generational chef he strived to be—is something like ego death. He suddenly doesn’t lord over every decision in the kitchen. But yeah, he has some awareness of his propensity for the sudden and uncontrollable panic attack, so he decides to do something about it. He finally visits his mother, sets a fixed menu at The Bear, and makes good with Claire.

Then, there’s Carmy’s final realization, the one that just might set him free: He wished upon a Michelin Star so that he’d never have to reckon with—or even think about—the household that normalized a car crashing through the wall. If series creator Chris Storer wanted to set Carmy free—to eventually give him something resembling a happy ending—it suddenly feels like this is the only way he could’ve done it. Carmy is correct in thinking that his pain and his craft are fully intertwined, and so stepping away is better than taking down (the relatively unburdened, as he points out) Sydney with him.

The Bear is at its best when it lasers into the ugliest parts of Carmy’s brain. (See: the season 3 premiere.) But for most of season 4, I felt like I was watching “Ebraheim Tries to Make The Beef Into the Next In-N-Out.” Or the wedding in episode 7, a.k.a. the