Summary
- Season 3 of
The Bear
has received a mixed reception. Individual parts are still excellent but not as strong as in previous seasons. - Carmy’s personal and professional life reaches a breaking point, setting up potential paths for Season 4.
- The finale leaves Carmy facing the consequences of his obsession with work, hinting at a possible change in direction for the character.
Spoiler alert: Spoilers for season 3 of The Bear followAfter a wait that felt like an eternity, Season 3 of The Bear finally released on FX and Hulu. The consensus seems to be fairly universal — while the individual parts are still excellent, as a whole, the show’s third season isn’t quite as good as what came before. The ensemble cast is as reliably excellent as ever, but this year admittedly lacked a clear overarching conflict. When things finally seem to be heating up, the finale ends on a cliffhanger, setting up several lingering plot points to be resolved next year.
Yet even if the overall journey was a bit more of a mixed bag this time around, the destination seems to promise a clear and exciting path for Season 4 to take. And in a weird way, Season 3 almost felt designed to be a season of crossroads, as Carmy’s personal trauma seems to reach a breaking point while his professional success arrives at a make-or-break moment. The season premiere actually clearly foreshadowed this, juxtaposing the beginning of Carmy’s career with his possible end.
Is Carmy’s Professional Success Worth the Cost?
The Bear’s Season 3 premiere, “Tomorrow,” takes a surprisingly experimental approach, constantly flashing back to Carmy’s earliest experiences in the fine dining industry, particularly his time working under the abusive David Fields (Joel McHale) in New York. While we saw glimpses of Fields throughout the show’s first season, he’s featured more prominently than ever this year. He functions as The Bear’s equivalent to Terrence Fletcher from Whiplash, unrepentant about bringing his workers to their absolute emotional limits in the name of pushing them to greatness.
For a character as deeply troubled as Carmy, who goes out of his way to reject personal happiness in order to become a great chef (as evidenced by his breakup with Claire in Season 2’s finale), it’s clear that his self-destructive tendencies are rooted in the trauma he faced working for Fields. “Tomorrow”’s flashback structure illustrates the total blur that Carmy’s life became working in fine dining, how he obsessed over perfecting the craft to the point where he lost sight of everything else, only snapping back to reality when his brother committed suicide.
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Season 3 sees Carmy pour himself into his craft more than ever. Possibly as a result of the guilt he feels over driving Claire away, he spends this year fully invested in his work and obsessing over getting the restaurant a good review. But as The Bear has illustrated before, this comes at the cost of alienating his loved ones even further, as seen when the restaurant’s staff is pushed to exhaustion because of his ambition to change the menu every day, and with Sydney’s season-long contemplation of quitting.
The sad fact is that Carmy seems as aware of how self-destructive his behavior is proving as anyone else. Thus, when he encounters David Fields in the season finale, “Forever,” his personal trauma reaches a breaking point, and he angrily confronts Fields over the emotional abuse he was put through. Yet Fields is unrepentant about his demanding leadership, claiming that he, in fact, pushed Carmy to greatness and made him a great leader, even though the show’s evidence suggests otherwise.
Is It Time for Carmy to Walk Away From The Bear?
The other plot point that Season 3’s premiere foreshadows heavily is Carmy’s relationship with Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman). Flashbacks show Carmy working at Terry’s restaurant, where she proves a significantly kinder mentor than Fields, and as evidenced by Season 2’s best episode, one who’s better-equipped at balancing personal happiness and professional success. Terry’s restaurant leadership is illustrated as a perfect balance that could bring Carmy a relatively emotionally stable life. Yet, the season finale suggests this ideal may not be sustainable in the long run.
“Forever” revolves around the closing of Terry’s restaurant, the Ever, which hosts a final dinner for professional chefs around the country to attend and celebrate. The episode’s best scene, centered around a conversation between Carmy and Terry, suggests that the reason for the restaurant’s closing has little to do, if anything, with its overall success. On the contrary, Terry admits to her protege that she grew tired of the constant pressure that came with the job and wanted to end her career on a note that she would feel satisfied with.
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While the season premiere showcased the beginning of Carmy’s professional career in relation to Terry, the finale illustrates that he might be better off following the same fateful decision as his mentor. After all the time and energy Carmy invested throughout the season to push The Bear to prestige status, at the expense of his staff’s happiness and his own, the final scene shows him reading the Chicago Tribune’s review, which turns out mixed-to-negative.
If this didn’t make the stakes for Season 4 clear enough, consider that Carmy’s uncle, Cicero, warned him throughout the year that he would be forced to pull funding if The Bear didn’t get a good review. As Carmy reads the Chicago Tribune’s review, we see that he’s missed several calls from Cicero, and the foreshadowing immediately becomes evident. Unlike Terry, it’s clear that Carmy’s obsession with his work has not paid off, and it’s easy to believe that he’d be better off moving on and working on fixing himself the way she decided to.
An Uneven but Promising Direction for The Bear Season 4
Even if this round of The Bear wasn’t quite at the same level as the incredible first two years, it’s likely meant to function as a sort of crossroads season that the already confirmed fourth season could pay off beautifully. By juxtaposing the beginning of Carmy’s professional career with the possible beginning of its end, as well as illustrating the source of his emotional trauma that’s cost him so much personal happiness, the bookends of Season 3 illustrate a likely breaking point. Going forward, we can expect Carmy to try and make peace with himself and the relationships he’s sacrificed to achieve success while weighing if it may finally be time to call it quits for his own sake. And we can’t wait to see how that journey unfolds. The Bear Season 3 is now streaming on Hulu.
