windjamm | The Bear Season 3 - Entire Show Spoilers (Reply)

I didn't have many major thoughts about The Bear seasons 1 and 2. I came to it in a space where I deeply wanted to see what it had to offer mechanically; a restaurant grown from the ground up over the course of a show.

This aspect was the major thing compelling me, so much so that I skipped season 1 because the second season is where a lot of the major changes hit (mechanically). Eventually, once I hit the end, I went back and watched the first season. However, this experience more or less broke my holistic understanding of the show.

Season 3 repaired it and also gave me an understanding of what the show wanted.

It's always been a show about the weight of a dream and how much you can counterbalance the economic realities of the world and your own personal traumas by leveraging your diligence like some sort of gameshow where, if you just manage to hold still in the right position long enough, you'll win the grand prize.

In this season the realities of that diligence began to become clear. We open with Carmy's determination in the past to get through a truly traumatic, abusive superior to earn the skills we see him exhibit. In present day, he creates a list of non-negotiables that he believes are necessities to get the restaurant a Michelin Star.

To follow the arc of the previous seasons, this would end with the restaurant getting a star. Instead, what follows is a very close study of what feels like a single week in real-time. (In actuality, it's maybe a month or two.) Everything is closely knit together, episodes often beginning where the last one ended. And instead of seeing the forward progress of The Bear, we see everyone spinning their wheels against demands that seem impossible to meet.

The season culminates in the closing of an iconic restaurant that the main cast is tied to one way or another. They host a funeral dinner, invite only, showcasing many series favorites, all of them in the industry. Several peers at Syd and Carmy's table discuss their inspirations and the things that drive them forward. Their horror stories are intercut with prior scenes from the show and some great facial acting for Syd and Carmy as Carmy also looks at the abusive chef, seated one table over.

This moment illuminates several things, the primary of which being community. Carmy was brought up in a kitchen where he was isolated by this larger than life superior chef and his constant torment. Because of this, he was unable to make meaningful connections to the people around him as he was pushed to grow from "good" to "excellent" as his old teacher eventually puts it during a confrontation.

This underscores the world sketched by the others at the table who speak of having each other's backs, of being cultivated by their mentors, of having their passions nurtured and their general welfare cared for by the world around them.

Meanwhile, Syd's flashbacks speak to a world where she was brought up by a flawed man she deeply admired who could only teach her the world he knew. His teachings were about diligence and perfection and, while he never intended to be rude or cruel, of course an uninvestigated cycle of isolation will perpetuate itself. Throughout the season, Syd is being poached by a chef trying to start his own restaurant while simultaneously dealing with Carmy trying to give her partial ownership of the Bear.

The first episode ends by showing us that Carmy's act of rebellion, sending out a dish he designed as an allergy substitute in the past, landed directly on Syd's table on the day she came to eat at the restaurant. She stares at it longingly and takes a photo of it as a literal tree stands behind her as if growing out of her, a seed planted.

And the passing of mechanical skill is not enough. Syd spends the season starving for recognition and care, burdened by a head chef whose relentless pursuit of perfection shuts her out. She doesn't receive the same malice he did, but the indifference hits all the same.

Meanwhile, the season and final episode are also cut together with Tina and Marcus showing remarkable growth. They are not under the full tutelage and responsibility of Carmy, in his kitchen but not his proteges. And so they get to exist inspired and pushed, but grasped by a peerage that Syd does not have access to (her position and responsibilities isolating her further).

The management and mismanagement of dreams is the focal point of this entire season. And, as many post-covid shows seem to have realized, people cannot exist in vacuums. They require community. A dream is not something that is kept aloft by one person. That person will eventually break under the strain of it. And try as they might to chase before time runs out, time passes anyway, indifferent.

There's an interview with Brennan Lee Mulligan by Hank Green where Brennan says that college isn't intended to function the same way that all the compulsory education functions; getting excellent grades only gets you in the door and very rarely do people want his GPA. Instead, he posited that college is about making connections to people, about meeting people in your field and impressing them so that one day they might look to you when they start something.

This is a very narrow perspective, considering he's describing what led to a career in comedy. However, I do think that something similar could be applied to work in general. The connections you make to people who are also passionate about your passions in your career choice are vital.

People need one another. No one survives for very long in a vacuum. This has always been a show about needing people, about connection, about the families both found and blood, complicated and easygoing, nourishing and harmful.

I discussed this all with song and initially that was enough. I felt like I had satisfied my desire to think and talk about this season. But since then I've seen a lot of people disparaging season 3, calling it boring and pointless, dull and plotless. And I get that on some level. It's an entire season about interiority. It's a season about spinning your wheels. About how you can only push so far on your own before you run out of road.

But it's so necessary to any greater success. To see the characters not accomplish their goals, to doubt each other, to have no space to talk, to fail to investigate how they feel because they were always so busy with what they thought was important that they never addressed what actually was. If they had just succeeded or they hadn't faced an utter sludge of several weeks trying to execute on an impossible set of plans it would have felt cheap.

I, for one, am very excited to see what happens next.