The Final Message of ‘The Bear’

All things end, we know, and TV series are no exception. As viewers, we have to do the best we can with the time we get, and no show has been more compulsively, maddeningly obsessed with time than The Bear. EVERY SECOND COUNTS hangs on the wall of Chef Carmen (played by Jeremy Allen White) and Chef Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) restaurant kitchen, inscribed on a plaque rescued from a different restaurant whose own time ran out.Clocks and timers recur visually on the show like intrusive thoughts, ticking menacingly over workstations and running down, stopwatch-style, under frantic synth scores. (Dedicated fans of the show have kept track of how clocks, watches, and timers pop up as visual motifs.) In the first season, when Carm attended an Al-Anon meeting and gave an extraordinary seven-minute monologue about how he ended up working as a chef in part to get back at his infuriating older brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal), he got to the crux of things this way: “The routine of the kitchen was so consistent and exacting and busy and hard and alive, and I lost track of time and he died.”I love The Bear, and have loved it through highs (Season 2’s ebullient, affirming “Forks”) and lows (Season 3’s gnarly descent into Carm’s psyche), all the way through its final episodes, which arrive this week. But for a show so preoccupied with the brevity of our shared human existence, the FX series has often felt, well, baggy. I recently rewatched the first season, which introduced Carm as he tried to save his brother’s sandwich shop, and felt steamrolled by its unfamiliar pace—rapid cuts between shots of frying pans and disconcerting dream sequences. Almost immediately, we converge with the characters: Sydney, who’s trying to learn from a chef she considers one of the best in the world; Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Michael’s chaotic and stunted best friend; Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), a line cook who resents Carm’s attempts to improve the restaurant; Marcus (Lionel Boyce), a creative but unfocus