After watching the season finale of The Bear Season 3, it left me with a lot of questions about self-accountability, influence, perspectives and narratives.

The Bear is a comedy-drama series about a young chef from the fine dining world who returns to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop.

The scenes are shot to allow the viewers into the hectic haze of a kitchen and to feel the anxiety alongside the characters.

It is centered on Carmy, the young chef whose fine dining training has trained him well but also left him with mental scars in the form of nightmares, flashbacks that have seeped into the way he communicates with his colleagues. 

Carmy has unwittingly become the person he detests by osmosis and by exposure to repetitive abuse in an intense environment under one particular senior Chef David played by Joel McHale. 

As the show progresses, he struggles with suppressing his demons… whilst also letting some light in as he tries to establish a new culinary concept.

In the last episode, Carmy meets his tormenter in Chef Terry’s restaurant where notable chefs gather for a “funeral”, to have their last meal before the restaurant’s closure. 

While biding his time at the table and not engaging his table mates, Carmy converts his stares at Chef David to an emotionally charged stalk when Chef David heads to the loo. 

Carmy went into a tirade about how Chef David made his life hell. 

When the usual comedic Jole McHale as Chef David (definitely not typecast) coolly takes in the speech, he responds with:

“Hey, man, what are you so worried about? Unclutch your pearls. You shouldn’t be so upset about all this stuff. You did it. You got there”

To his credit, Chef David didn’t deny his actions. What he did instead was to use them as the reason for Carmy’s success.

Carmy looks at him in disbelief while Chef David takes credit for his success. 

As Chef David walks away, Carmy finally lets that welled up tear fall, not sure if he should feel relieved for having said his peace or confused by Chef David’s gas-lighting.

Whilst I’m happy for Carmy to face his worst enemy, given his fragile emotional state, I’m not sure if this encounter would be cathartic to him.

Without Carmy knowing, he has taken on the bad traits from Chef David whom he detests, in the pursuit of excellence and the guise of perfection. 

His non-negotiables make the work culture in the kitchen confusing, dispiriting and discouraging. His rude working manner makes him a real arsehole.

Unknowingly, he takes on a Jekyll and Hyde persona.

In his working relationship with Sydney, he clearly appreciates her and wants her to be part owner of the Bear. However, that gesture might be too little too late as Sydney has seen how Carmy isn’t the best communicator in the kitchen and not a nice human most of the time. 

This brings me back to Season 1 when Sydney prepared a new dish for Carmy and the staff to try. It was a beautiful looking dish that won the taste buds of the Bear’s colleagues. Carmy tasted it and wasn’t as enthused and said it was fine. 

He was stingy with his words and didn’t seek to give Sydney the feedback on whether this dish could be a new entry onto their menu.

When Sydney pushed for an answer, instead of just giving her constructive feedback on the dish, Carmy simply repeatedly shouted “it’s not ready”.

Even for a Chef with tougher than average skin, that exchange probably stung Sydney’s pride and ego. It is probably the start of the erosion of her goodwill towards Carmy and the chipping away of the pedestal she puts him on. 

From Carmy’s point of view, he probably thought he was doing the right thing – adopting a harsh and strict persona in his kitchen to tell his staff what works and what doesn’t. He is giving to people what he had received when he was in training. Even though it hurt him to be spoken to that way, somehow it has become his modus operandi on what a proper kitchen should function as. 

In contrast, I really enjoyed Ritchie’s episode in Season 2, episode Forks. Ritchie started out as a rather annoying but lovable character. This episode really explored the reason for his being the way he is. All it took was being surrounded by genuinely nice people who were passionate about their work to elevate his own work ethnic. 

I don’t blame Ritchie for wanting to stay on beyond his five days in Chef Terry’s Ever restaurant. The kitchen is calm and efficient. People communicate in level tones and are encouraging. People can communicate their reasons for loving their work and those factors travel to fuel Ritchie’s zest for aspiring to do better in his life. 

This is also a form of osmosis by exposure but of the positive kind and it’s wonderful that the screenwriters thought to show that Carmy’s hectic world isn’t the only world.

Would you like every message spoken and written by you to be effective but still reflect your personality? If you would like to learn to be a more effective communicator at work, let’s chat more. You can read about what I do here.

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