Review: The Bear, "Soda" | Season 5, Episode 1

Welcome back to Episodic Medium's coverage of The Bear, which concludes its run on Hulu/FX. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews (posted over the coming days) will be exclusive to our paid subscribers. For a limited time, you can get 15% off our already-discounted yearly subscription rate—see our full Summer schedule here.

"It's not over yet"

On the one hand, you could argue that writing about “Soda” and “Soda” alone is silly.

Since its first season, The Bear has been a binge release, born out of the “FX on Hulu” branding that Disney chose to signal the channel’s place as a prime provider of adult-focused television to their streaming platforms. Despite its breakout success which would have likely supported interest across a weekly run, FX stuck to this binge schedule, and as I argued back in season two the show has supported this decision creatively. The show is written with a binge in mind, knowing that audiences can dig into the season at whatever pace they choose.

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As a result, it was already very unlikely in the abstract that any of you reading this were going to just watch “Soda” as you start your journey into The Bear’s final season. In practice, though, “Soda” is consciously unsubstantial, covering a very short period of time in a runtime close to the shortest in the show’s history. There are barely 20 minutes of episode before the credits roll, and while the short runtime for season one’s “Review” felt like a necessary choice to keep our nervous systems from shutting down from the stress, this just seems like Christopher Storer and the writers choosing to begin the season with an amuse-bouche: a taste of what’s to come, orienting you to the courses to follow.

As such, I actually think it’s worth exploring what these twenty minutes of television are signaling for a show coming to its conclusion. What I was thinking about before starting my screeners—these reviews will come a bit faster, thank you cheFX—was how the last three seasons of the show have repeated the same stakes. “Will they open the restaurant” became “Will the restaurant be successful” became “Will the restaurant survive,” all variations on the same theme with the characters and their relationships layered over them. There was never any lack of clarity over what you’d get when you tuned into a new season, which I think contributed to the critical fatigue the show has experienced over that period. I’m not convinced the show has gotten dramatically different or even worse over that period; it’s just the law of diminishing returns, exacerbated by the pretension that signaled the show’s initial ambition.

The end of the fourth season, however, suggested massive change. Carmy was leaving the restaurant business, giving Sydney and Richie control over The Bear and its future. There’s still continuity in that, of course, but the idea of a character charting a path independent of the all-encompassing goal of the past three seasons is a meaningful divergence. It’s a look into The Bear without Bear, which will dramatically reshape the character dynamics operating over top of the existentialism of the restaurant business.

Of course, nothing changes if no one knows that there’s been a change, and this is the choice “Soda” makes in its short running time. Carmy himself doesn’t even appear for the first ten minutes, and when he does it’s to inform Sydney that he doesn’t want the rest of the restaurant to know about his departure. Sydney and Richie are both already making moves to assert their control: Sydney has printed out some inspirational Ratatouille content, and Richie is eager to account for every paper clip to balance the books. But Carmy doesn’t want to have to face the rest of his staff, which the episode justifies by how devastated Marcus is when he learns his McGriddle buddy Luca is going back to Copenhagen. The episode also opens on Tina in full insomnia cooking mode, anxious because the countdown clock has run down with no idea that the future won’t involve Bear himself.

For the record, I’m choosing to continue to take that at face value. You could argue that Carmy choosing to hide the truth leaves the door open for him to change his mind, but I don’t think that would be honest to how season four ended. I am presuming the narrative goal here is to spread out the revelation to create moments for each of his connections, while also giving them time to outline how each character’s own story intersects with the news. The liminality of the season’s premise—continuing to run the restaurant as money runs out, with no idea when the lights will go out—seems very purposeful, promising an epilogical dynamic even as forces work away from the main characters to create hope for the future.

Ending the episode on the burst pipe in the basement is a comic one (I hope the next episode didn’t autoplay before the dialogue over the credits), but it also works to justify the short running time. Ebraheim is about to approach Carmy with Albert’s franchising plan that could solve their financial problems; Uncle Jimmy and the Computer are about to bring the hammer down, albeit with enough caveats from the latter to leave the door open for the restaurant to continue. All of that feels like it’s about to go down right when the pipe bursts. I hope this crisis doesn’t delay all of that too much, but I feel like this is going to be a pattern for the season. Much as Carmy’s exit from the restaurant business won’t happen overnight, I don’t think The Bear has any interest in exploring life beyond the restaurant and its arc. There’s still unfinished business, and they’ll need to wade through a lot of stormwater to deal with it.

Stray observations

• The choice to end “Gary” with the car crash seems even sillier now that Richie is perfectly fine. I do think that it makes sense to have released it before the season, though: it would have been weird to start the season with it, and I do think it helps shape where Richie’s head is at as he takes on a bigger role.
• So, to summarize the Computer although they’re speaking in code: nobody wants to buy a restaurant, and so while they could sell the building outright, that’s a longer process that can’t happen overnight, which is why closing them immediately doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense.
• On that note: Uncle Jimmy’s financial crisis feels new to me? Did we need him to have lost ⅔ of this money and selling all his watched for financial pressure to exist? Or did I forget that from last season? Entirely possible.
• Setting up that Donna is babysitting seems like a way to give us more Jamie Lee Curtis, but I suppose that depends on how long this “day” extends into the season. Spending the entire season in the day seems…exhausting, but it’s possible!
• Our mystery of the moment: the unknown caller on Bear’s phone. He doesn’t take the call, but seems like that has something to do with whatever he’s thinking of doing next?
• Welcome back to our coverage of The Bear, the binge show so load-bearing to the cultural conversation that I break my own rules against binge shows to cover it. So as I’m writing this, I don’t know what I intend to do moving forward in terms of review cadence. My plan without screeners was to do two episodes at a time after this, but if I have them I could just as easily do each episode individually. I’ll play it by ear, and you’ll know by the time I’m editing this. (Update: I’m going to do two at a time, you’ll see why.)