The Bear nails a lot of things—the feeling of losing a loved one, fucked-up workplace dynamics, the beauty of a perfectly plated meal—but for my money, it has one true knockout move. Better than any other show, The Bear knows exactly how to incite immediate, debilitating heartburn. On the spot.
And I have to say, kudos to The Bear creator Chris Storer and his talented crew, because season 3, episode 3, “Doors,” brings out the big guns. Choose your OCD-triggering fighter in this episode: Sink packed with dirty dishes? Shoes on a glob of fallen ravioli? Someone slicing their hand on a shard of broken glass?
If episode 1 was Carmy’s fridge-enclosed vision quest and episode 2 was our reintroduction to the restaurant’s crew, episode 3 is a reminder of why The Bear captivated us in the first place: the shock-horror-can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash feeling of watching shit go very, very wrong. With that in mind, “Doors”—as in what Carmy & Co. scream when service begins each evening—is a vintage episode of The Bear. It’s the first time we see the kitchen truly in full swing since the restaurant’s disastrous opening in the season 2 finale.
And let me tell you! Cousin, things aren’t looking great.
Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is buying so much “dystopian butter” that The Bear’s financials are in the gutter. Fak (Matty Matheson) is in such piss-my-pants-in-fear mode that he forgets that his main job as a server is to serve food. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), also terrified of fucking up, suffers such terrible ravioli-boiling yips that Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) has to supervise her. Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) is single-handedly keeping The Bear's Italian-beef-bred beginnings alive. And Carmy’s rules are such bullshit that I’m legitimately starting to think that Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) should run The Bear outright. His proposed rules sound pretty nice! (See: “Joy, just in general.”)
Meanwhile, through a flurry of Carmified magazine and newspaper clippings, we’re meant to infer that The Bear is slowly garnering local acclaim—even while the kitchen is secretly a shitshow. As we brought up in our episode 2 recap, the series is slowly but surely legitimizing Carmy’s deepest, darkest belief: He needs to become the worst version of himself in order to make The Bear a Michelin-starred restaurant.
So is there any hope for it to succeed in, you know, a non-trauma-inducing way? Yes. Just revisit Marcus’s (Lionel Boyce) earnest, understated eulogy at his mother’s funeral. At one point, he mentions that communication with his mom improved when she lost her ability to speak. It was when words were no longer an option that they started really listening to each other. Somehow their relationship was better this way.
It’s a clever bit of foreshadowing. At this point in season 3, The Bear’s kitchen is all words. Shouting matches, physical altercations (!), and unwanted piñatas. Just as Sydney’s binge-read of Coach K’s Leading with the Heart signaled her evolution into a quiet, determined leader, maybe Marcus’s eulogy tells us that The Bear must find some sort of unspoken trust to become a great kitchen. Hell, if Richie is out and about buying Super Soakers*, then this group requires some sort of divine intervention, too.
In the meantime, here’s an Amazon link to a 100-count pack of Zantac. We’re all going to need it this season.
*Please join me in thanking Richie’s Super Soakers shopping spree for the best line delivery of the episode, courtesy of Carmy: “IDIOT! IDIOT! RICHIE!”
Want to keep reading, chef? Here’s our season 3, episode 4 recap.
