Review: The Bear, "Goodbye" | Season 4, Episode 10

Ending The Bear’s fourth season with a bottle episode—a single scene set in the alley behind the restaurant—is not an inherently bad choice, but it’s one that seemed to dictate the season’s most frustrating quality.

As the season progressed, it was clear that things were changing: the red line was turning to black, and the tension Carmy created in his relationships with both Sydney and Richie was starting to dissipate. But there was a striking absence of any actual conversations between those characters about what was going on, their progress achieved without any clarity. It’s not “unrealistic” that this group of characters would struggle to communicate, but there is a point where it becomes absurd: Sydney had the offer from Shapiro, Carmy knew she had the offer from Shapiro, and it never once came up? We got exactly one near-miss conversation about the contract, but it took weeks to follow up on it?

In this way, there is something unquestionably cathartic about the season ending with the air finally being cleared between the three of them. Edebiri, White, and Moss-Bachrach are all up to the task in front of them, creating an episode that very consciously strips away the show’s stylistic flair (and thus becomes stylistic, funny how that works). But it’s a conversation that should have happened long before now, and I’m not sure the show was able to offer enough justification for why it didn’t. And in the end, I’m not convinced there’s enough catharsis here to justify the frustration it created within the season itself.