The Bear is officially over—and viewers are still processing their emotions now that another one of TV’s most popular shows has come to an end. As has so often been the case with the drama, fans of the series remain divided over what the ending actually means for our head chef, Carmy Berzatto. Our senior entertainment editor Brady Langmann highlighted a moment audiences might have missed in the finale that we think ties everything together perfectly. Check it out below. —Josh Rosenberg, editor, news & entertainment
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There’s a different way to interpret the series finale, if you still believe in Carmy’s culinary dreams.
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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!'"
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.
The Book of Carmy is closed and shut, right? Well, some fans aren't convinced. And neither am I.
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So, somehow, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States narrowly decided that the 14th Amendment says what it clearly says and that the current president of the United States cannot executive-order a change in what words mean. The decision should have been 9–0. Hell, the case never should have landed in front of the Nine Wise Souls at all.
It struck me only last week that my father had become a citizen through the clear promise of the 14th. If his parents had stayed in north Kerry, he would have been a neutral in 1942 and not dodged U-boats in the north Atlantic. But his parents came here because they wanted their children to be Americans. When my father drew his first breath in 1919, he became an American. This should have been 9–0.
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The bells atop the Mission of Our Seraphic Father San Francisco de Asís, better known as Mission Dolores, have names. From north to south, they are San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin.
“These are the original bells,” Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan told a group of Catholic school fourth graders in smart tartan uniforms on a Friday morning in April. Galvan is an elfin man with a preference for Johnny Cash–black outfits who, after suffering a stroke last year, often uses a wheelchair. Seated beneath the bells, he flashed a mercurial grin: “They are old and tired. Just like me.”
The students were neither old nor tired, and they clearly anticipated ringing those bells. They were here because fourth graders in California study state history, and the missions, erected by forced Indian labor under Spanish friars before the state was a state, are a keystone of the curriculum. Field trips to missions are a part of most every California childhood.
San Jose, San Francisco, and San Martin crown the oldest surviving structure in the city that grew around it. Newer buildings crumbled in the 1989 quake, and much of the city crashed and burned in the Big One in 1906. The adobe walls of Mission Dolores—which are four feet thick except along the section beneath these three bells, where they reach a full ten feet thick—stood firm. It’s cool and dark in here, even on this unseasonably sunny and glorious San Francisco morning.
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