Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for The Bear season 4Almost as quickly as it arrived,The Bear’s fourth season is already gone. On the whole, it was another solid round in the kitchen; while it still doesn’t live up to the gold standard set by the first two seasons, it was a marked improvement on the third, thanks to improved story momentum and greater character evolution. Alongside the typically excellent performances from Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, it was also maybe the show’s most introspective and cautiously hopeful batch of episodes to date.
That being said, it’s clear thatThe Beardoesn’t have much story left in its tank, and while it’syet to be renewedfor a fifth season (no thanks to the actors’ busy schedules), if it gets picked up, it should be the final go-around. And creator Christopher Storer seems aware of this, since much of the plot this year revolved around Carmy, Sydney, and Richie making long-overdue decisions about their futures. Everything comes to a head in the finale, “Goodbye,” which was an outstanding wrap-up and one of the season’s best installments.
‘The Bear’ Finale Was an All-Time Bottle Episode
ThroughoutThe Bear’s four-season run, Storer has never been shy about experimenting with form or taking structural risks with his episodes. Sometimes, as seen in Season 1’s astonishing “Review” (which largely played out as a single take), it works brilliantly, whereas in other instances, most notably when the season three premiere played out as a tone poem, the results are a bit more mixed.
“Goodbye” is yet another stylistic departure for the show, and thankfully, this one pays off beautifully. It’s a “bottle episode,” or an episode set in a single location with minimal cast and crew, and while the format is normally used to keep production costs down, it often proves a wonderful means to tell a more intimate, character-driven story. Classic examples of bottle episodes includeBreaking Bad’s “4 Days Out” and the misunderstood “Fly,” andMad Men’s finest hour, “The Suitcase.”
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The Bearuses this form to fantastic effect with “Goodbye,” which unfolds immediately after Sydney learns that Carmy plans on quitting the restaurant and passing ownership to her. While intending to stay long enough to get them out of debt, he also insists that he needs to find out who he is outside the kitchen.Sydney and Richie fear he’s abandoning them in a desperate time, and Storer entraps us with these characters as they try and work things through.
It’s made all the more effective because Storer keeps his stylistic tricks to a minimum:he films his characters in tight shots and prioritizes his actors over the camerawork. And White, Edebiri, and Moss-Bachrach do exemplary work,giving their best performancesof the entire season, expertly selling the dilemma the characters have found themselves in.
‘The Bear’ Finale Wrapped Up the Season — But Hopefully Not the Series
WhileThe Bearhad significantly more story momentum this season than last, thanks to the deadline the restaurant had to turn business around, the plot nonethelesstook a backseat to character workin the last few episodes. For some, this proved frustrating, but we were enthralled by the results, finally getting some genuine catharsis for the series leads.
After spending the last couple of seasons uncertain about her future at the restaurant, Sydney finally made the decision this year to stay with Carmy and company, having come to value loyalty to her friends over holding greater power in business decision-making. And Carmy, in particular, finally begins to move forward, as he makes amends with Claire, his mother, and his team, having seen that his self-destructive tendencies and refusal to let others in were only hurting him and everyone else. As such,his decision to quit is fully believable, as he’s come to learn that he was treating the job as a way to escape from his deep-seated issues.
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That being said, seeing asThe Bearhas yet to be renewed, we genuinely hope this isn’t theseriesfinale.While the character closure from this year was emotionally satisfying, there are still loose plot threads left hanging, specifically the restaurant’s fate; the episode’s final moments show Cicero’s clock running out, but we have no idea what will come next. And even though Jeremy Allen White’s Hollywood star power has exploded (including a possible Oscar run withSpringsteen - Deliver Me From Nowherethis year), that shouldn’t be an excuse to leave things hanging indefinitely.
Nonetheless, if we judge it as a season finale, “Goodbye” was a near-perfect episode of television, beautifully written and performed, and an effective tie-up to so many emotional loose threads from both this year and last. Even ifThe Bearisn’t as consistently great as it was in its first two seasons, this was an installment that proved it’s still capable of delivering absolute gems, and that it’s still one of the best shows on television.All four seasons ofThe Bearare streaming on Hulu.
