The too-short season of FX’s The Bear, which is not streaming on Hulu, is the story of Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, a fine dining chef whose brother Mikey (played in flashbacks by Jon Bernthal) killed himself and left his struggling Chicago sandwich shop to Carmy. Mikey’s addiction to painkillers and his shocking suicide looms over the entire eight-episode season, informing everything that Carmen does.
What is The Bear About?
Each episode of The Bear provides small clues that ultimately lead the viewers to the big solve of a big, emotional mystery. Carmen left his entire life as a high-profile young chef behind when Mikey died, and only wants to honor his brother’s legacy and their dreams of owning a restaurant together by taking over Mikey’s joint, The Original Beef of Chicagoland. The staff at the restaurant is set in their ways, Mikey and his best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) ran the place with no discipline or structure, and when Carmy and his newly hired sous chef, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), come in and try to make things more organized and change the menu up, no one takes kindly to it at first. Worst of all, Carmy doesn’t want them to serve Mikey’s old red sauce spaghetti for the staff meal, a beloved staple of the place. And then there’s the fact that Mikey also racked up $300,000 in debt to the brothers’ uncle, Cicero (Oliver Platt), and Carmy is drowning in unpaid bills and a ledger that shows mysterious monthly payments that Mikey had been making to a place called KBL Electronics, a business that doesn’t seem to exist. Part of Mikey’s problem was that he clearly couldn’t budget. At one point, he wonders why Mikey only ever bought 28 ounce cans of tomatoes rather than the bigger, cheaper cans. Is this detail insignificant? At first, yes! In the end, no!
Add to that an envelope that Richie finds buried behind a locker, addressed to Carmy from Mikey, that he doesn’t tell Carmy about. Is it a suicide note? Why did Mikey, who distanced himself from Carmy before he died, leave his brother a letter, and why is Richie so stubborn and vindictive that he wouldn’t tell Carmy it was there? Well, because if he did, it wouldn’t give us the satisfying ending the show provides.
The Bear Ending, Explained
Episode 7 of The Bear, an episode that was shot to look as though it one one high-intensity real-time take, The Original Beef prepares itself to open for lunch service, but unlike other days, they’ve implemented a new computerized pre-order take-out system that Sydney forgets to turn off, and the restaurant is jammed with orders, hundreds of orders. Carmy knows they need the business but they don’t have the man-power to make all that food, and he loses his shit on everyone, including Sydney, who quits and walks out, but not before she kind-of-accidentally-but-not stabs Richie in the butt with her chef’s knife. All of this to say that Carmen is at the height of his mental anguish here, and it seems like The staff at Original Beef might not recover from this day.
So in episode 8, everyone’s forced to reckon with their behavior. Richie, a semi-lovable jerk, realizes that Carmy is the only friend he’s got, and he finally gives him the letter from Mikey. When Mikey opens it, an index card inside has the handwritten recipe for Mikey’s spaghetti sauce, which specifically calls for the smaller cans of tomato (“they taste better”), putting to bed Carmen’s criticism of his brother’s budgeting.
So Carmen decides that he’s going to offer an olive branch to everyone in the form of making Mikey’s spaghetti for the staff’s family meal that day. And as he follows his brother’s sauce recipe, he grabs the tomatoes which have an interesting imprint on the can, “KBL,” and when he dumps them into his pan, a wad of bills falls out.
Carmy starts screaming for Richie and the rest of the staff to come help him open all of the cans of tomatoes, where they find, let’s assume, $300,000 worth of cash that Mikey had been hoarding, tracking his monthly investments as KBL Electronics in his ledger, just so Carmy could one day find it and he could fulfill their shared dream of opening his own restaurant. Carmy and his staff joyously celebrate the discovery: they’re rich! Mikey was looking out for them after all! There’s always money in the banana stand tomato cans!
In the last moments of the season, Carmy puts a sign in the window notifying customers that The Beef is closing, and in its place will stand a new venture, known as The Bear. I mean, on the one hand, it’s a devastating thought, realizing Mikey was saving all of this money knowing that one day he wouldn’t be there to share in the dream he had with his brother, but on the other, it’s a supremely satisfying way for a beautifully written and acted season to sign off.