“BEFORE I came to Al-Anon, I was a cook. I mean, I’m still a cook, I’m just a different kind of cook, I guess.”

The key to understanding The Bear’s series finale, which aired last week, is the beginning of a seven-minute monologue from its season 1 bow, “Braciole.” It’s when Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), hair disheveled, stops and stutters his way through the scars he’s never dared to describe aloud. How he would cook with his brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), how they were best friends, and how that changed when Mikey started using drugs. Mikey had a restaurant, but he stopped letting Carmy inside. Cut him off cold. So the aching little brother, feeling rejected and lame and shitty, spends years leveling himself up into a world-class chef, even though it nearly kills him. But it’s Mikey who dies – he kills himself – sabotaging Carmy’s grand plan: “I just wanted him to be like, ‘Good job!'”

“He left me his restaurant,” Carmy says, wrapping up a scene that is so moving that it’s part of what launched White and The Bear to countless awards podiums. “And over the last couple months I’ve been trying to fix it ’cause it was in rough shape, and I think it’s very clear that me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother. And I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family because that restaurant, it has and it does mean a lot to people.”

Carmy adds: “It means a lot to me. I just don’t know if it ever meant anything to him.”

Since then, The Bear has fired its last order. The series finale, “The Original Beef of Chicagoland,” paid off on season 4’s controversial ending. If you’ll remember, Carmy decided that – in order to fully heal from Mikey’s death, his years suffering as an underling in the world’s greatest restaurants, and untold amounts of family trauma – he had to walk away from the industry entirely.

Season 5 picks up the very next day, its eight episodes dishing up The Pitt -style, hour-by-hour madness of what may or may not be The Bear’s final service. Instead of ghosting his poor crew (on the day of torrential weather, no less) Carmy sticks around for one more day as Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) pseudo-sous-chef. What ensues is a sports-movie style rally where the kitchen staff – despite inadvertently learning of Carmy’s plans to go on a smoke break and never come back – pulls off three miraculous turnarounds. Then, Carmy learns that the blocked number pinging him all day was a Michelin inspector. The big news? The Bear earned two stars, which damn near cements that Carmy and Sydney’s Coca-Cola-ribs creation will live to fight another day.

Here’s what a vast majority of critics believe happen next, because creator Chris Storer seemingly plays it pretty straight: Carmy leaves The Bear behind, interviews for an open internship at an architectural firm, and Sydney (with the help of Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie) has free rein to lead the now-acclaimed restaurant to its next chapter. The Book of Carmy is closed and shut, right?

Well, some fans aren’t convinced. And neither am I.

Right now, a Reddit thread titled “Clarity on Carmy’s ending?” has well over a hundred replies. It’s reminiscent of season 4’s aftermath, when The Bear’s loyalists were mystified as to how Carmy could possibly put his knife down. You can parse through it in full above, but here’s the gist: Some fans think that Carmy didn’t leave The Bear after all. They say the ending is intentionally up for interpretation, because the final moments of the episode place Carmy wearing an apron at The Bear. Not only that, but before his journey to become the next Frank Lloyd Wright even begins – by way of another sprawling monologue that’s eerily reminiscent of the season 1 finale—he realises what he would leave behind if he put down that apron.

So that’s why I keep thinking about the way Carmy introduced himself to a room full of near-strangers at the end of The Bear‘s buzzy debut in 2022 – because it feels more true to the Carmy we all said goodbye to in the series finale.

If you watch back Carmy’s “Braciole” outpour—and even a shorter, but just as heartfelt AA scene in the season 2 finale—it’s easier to view the job interview as Storer’s intended third act in Carmy’s AA discussions. It even begins with a sort of inverse to the very first time we saw Carmy open up in season 1; the interviewer (Bonnie Hunt) asks Carmy about his culinary past life and he quickly corrects her: “Was a chef, no—not anymore,” he says unconvincingly.

But what does Carmy proceed to do? Well, he talks almost exclusively about his days as a chef—especially his supposed final night on the job. “This service—everybody cared so much,” he remembers. “And everybody tried so hard. And everybody loved so much it didn’t feel like one person trying to survive. It felt like a group of people supporting each other, trying to lift each other up.”

Carmy finishes: “Just getting to watch everybody score—that was so great. Even though it sucked, it was the most fun I’ve ever had.” He smiles, lost in the moment all over again.

If it sounds like Carmy is talking himself back into the idea of a culinary life, it’s because he is. The Carmy we meet in season 5, even though he believes that leaving the site of his trauma is the only way to break his family’s cycle of pain, is someone who does find fulfilment in this work. Throughout the night, he slowly finds peace in the reality that he doesn’t have to be a war general. Instead, he can be the guy who makes brioche out of thin air, or the one who correctly realises that the family meal is the best bite in the team’s arsenal.

In “Braciole,” Carmy draws a picture of a shy, struggling little boy who found comfort in the kitchen with his older brother. Things only went south because of the latter. It’s not that Carmy’s love of cooking led to his pain; it’s that the hurt became intertwined with his life’s work through no fault of his own. But it was a love, first and foremost, built on the hours upon hours he spent in the Berzatto family kitchen – and, later, with Mikey at the restaurant. For five seasons, we’ve seen Carmy bravely rebuild himself into someone who can love the things he’s supposed to love again, free of the noise in his head, and absolved of the memories that drowned him in nearly every waking moment.

All these years later, we know that The Bear still means something to Carmy. He not only returns to the restaurant, big smile on his face, for Richie’s daughter’s birthday party, but he keeps an office there, too. Even though his journals are elsewhere now – you can read this as Carmy literally closing the book on his abuse-saddled cooking journey before he begins a new one – the space is adorned with photos of the greatest hits from his culinary career. And what is he wearing? That white t-shirt – and the blue apron. He relaxes, smiles, and sends a text to Mikey’s deactivated phone number: “All good.”

I mean, I’m still a cook, I’m just a different kind of cook, I guess.

This isn’t a man who was a cook. Now, he’s a different kind of cook than he was in season 1. The best days in and out of the kitchen are ahead of him. Whether it’s at The Bear or not, Carmen Berzatto isn’t done making art, creating, and giving back through food. By the end of The Bear, Carmy does exactly what he set out to do in “Braciole”: By way of fixing the restaurant, he saved his family—and himself. All good.

The difference is that when The Bear ends, Carmy knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this would’ve meant something to Mikey, too.

From Esquire US

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