This article discusses, in depth, the events of The Bear’s Season 4 finale.
You’ve got to feel for Sydney Adamu. Played by Ayo Edebiri, whose understated performance is a highlight of The Bear’s fourth season, Syd has spent months agonizing over whether to leave The Bear—the restaurant of her dreams and also a chaotic nightmare—for a more stable, less stressful job in another chef’s kitchen. Amid this deliberation, her father is hospitalized for a heart attack. And just when she’s finally decided to sign her partnership agreement and stay at The Bear, Syd is hit with another bombshell: Carmy has updated the contract to list only Uncle Jimmy, Sugar, and Syd as co-owners. In other words, he’s making plans to leave the restaurant.
The details of this choice, which is certainly shocking but perhaps not so surprising given the many hints we’ve gotten that Carmy has lost his passion for work that was once his whole life, are hashed out in a finale that is among the best episodes of an otherwise mostly stagnant season. Set entirely in the alley outside The Bear, it consists of a long-awaited confrontation between Carmy and Syd, with Richie joining the fray midway through. Though he promises to stay until the restaurant is out of financial trouble, it seems that Carmy does indeed intend to leave. If The Bear creator Christopher Storer actually goes through with this shake-up, it could be exactly what the show needs to get out of the rut it’s been in for two seasons.
The finale opens on a close-up of Syd, her head pressed to the fence outside the kitchen door in a gesture of utter exhaustion. Carmy appears in the doorway: “You didn’t talk to me all service.” The reason for her coldness is, of course, that she had to find out about his plan to extricate himself from The Bear through a lawyer (who also happens to be Sugar’s husband and Carmy’s brother-in-law). “It’s the best thing for the restaurant,” he says, after denying that “quitting” is what he’s doing. “We have to put the restaurant first.” Syd sees this for the non-explanation it is. From her perspective, he’s abandoning a fragile business whose money problems he caused (sourcing ingredients for a new menu every day is expensive); he believes that he’s chosen the right moment to exit, now that a proper team is in place. Then Carmy explains why he feels he must leave: “I did this so I didn’t have to do other things.” Which is to say, he threw himself into cooking because he couldn’t deal with the burden of being a person with a life and relationships outside work. Syd, who doesn’t smoke, needs a cigarette.
She has a betrayal of her own to confess. We’ve known since Adam Shapiro’s name lit up Carmy’s phone that he knows she almost jumped ship. Now he calls her on it, and she apologizes—sort of: “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you, but you were being a f-cking maniac.” Extremely fair! In the season’s most cathartic moment, she finally unloads on Carmy after quietly absorbing so much of his destructive behavior: “I’m sorry it even f-cking got to this. And I’m sorry for everything that you’ve been through… I’m so sorry that your family has had to go through this sh-t, and the fact that you and Nat and Richie have to come to work every day and f-cking work your way through this sh-t… But when you take it out on the restaurant and the people who work here and the f-cking business and on me, it’s beyond the f-cking…”
It’s a glorious monologue, in part because the things that frustrate Syd about Carmy—his self-absorption, his misery, his tendency to suck up all the oxygen in the kitchen—are also things that have made the show’s fixation on his character frustrating for viewers. To follow Carmen Berzatto through the stages of grief over his brother Mikey’s suicide, as we have now been doing for four seasons, is to feel stuck in a morass, repeating the same limited motions in a futile attempt to generate forward momentum. A far more dynamic protagonist would be Syd. Carmy says as much. “You’re everything I’m never gonna be,” he tells her. “You are considerate. You allow yourself to feel things, right? You allow yourself to care. You are a natural leader and teacher. And you’re doing all this stuff for every right f-cking reason… Any chance of any good in this building—it started when you walked in, and any possibility of it surviving, it’s with you… You’re The Bear.” She doesn’t seem ready to hear this yet. To my ears, though, it sounds exactly right. Carmy may be brilliant, but she’s the hero, the chef capable of greatness.
This is when Richie makes his entrance and Syd gives him the news of Carmy’s departure. (“I’m retiring,” insists a man who won’t be eligible to collect social security for at least three decades.) “I’m putting the restaurant first,” Carmy explains. Richie isn’t hearing it, either. “Just like you put your family first,” is his cutting reply. When Richie curses him out, Carmy finally confesses that he did show up to Mikey’s funeral and left without speaking to anyone. It’s then that Syd tries to remove herself from this personal conversation, and they urge her to stay; the implication is that she’s now as much a part of the extended Berzatto clan as “Cousin” Richie. She’s around to hear Carmy give Richie a very overdue apology: “I didn’t realize how you lost somebody, too.”
Carmy’s moment of self-awareness takes Richie off the offensive. They share their regrets about Mikey. And the two men admit to resenting one another. Carmy envies the connection Richie has with his family; Richie hates that he’ll never be a real blood relative and recalls fantasizing about having a calling like Carmy’s. (“I bought a f-cking cookbook.”) Which is why he can’t wrap his mind around Carmy’s premature retirement. Carmy tries to explain: “I don’t know what I’m like… outside of the kitchen.” He is, after all, a man so emotionally stunted, he ignores his would-be girlfriend, Claire, for months, then shows up at her door on a late-night whim.
Syd has silently observed most of this tentative reconciliation, but now she speaks up with an idea for how The Bear might proceed in Carmy’s absence. She wants to make Richie a partner, too. This feels right. He’s put as much sweat equity into the restaurant as anyone—and, watching him charm diners and obsessively hunt for the right quote to inspire his front-of-house team, it’s safe to say he’s found his own calling in hospitality. Richie tries to demur at first but soon heartily embraces the idea: “F-ck yes, Chef Sydney, it is a f-cking honor.” I love this for Richie, who has worked hard to dig himself out of the depths of divorce, grief, and self-loathing, and to become the kind of guy who can sincerely wish his ex and her new husband well.
Sugar’s arrival in the episode’s final minutes seals the deal, just before the season ends on the image of Uncle Jimmy’s two-month timer counting down to zero. There are still plenty of challenges ahead for The Bear, which has averted disaster but has yet to achieve sustainability—and for The Bear, which struggled to build a plot around this season’s scramble to stop hemorrhaging money. What’s promising, though, is Storer’s apparent realization that with Carmy at its center, the show is doomed to keep spinning its wheels.
That doesn’t necessarily mean wholly robbing the “Yes, chef!” contingent of their brooding short king, Jeremy Allen White, who has done a laudable job with an increasingly irritating character. But it’s hard to imagine the show thriving again without a massive vibe shift. As Carmy phases out his presence at the restaurant, I hope we’ll see Syd claim not just the menu, but also the spotlight. Along with Richie’s ownership stake—and, fingers crossed, a recommitment in Season 5 to the stories of kitchen personnel like Marcus and Tina—her ascendance would prove something The Bear has been trying to say, with varying degrees of success, all along: A great restaurant is not the achievement of one superstar chef who terrorizes his employees into submission. It can only be the result of a talented team working in harmony.