A mediocre season shakes off the flashback doldrums with a white-knuckle episode centered on Sugar, Donna and childbirth
It’s been almost a year to the day since we learned Natalie Berzatto was pregnant, but you could be forgiven for thinking it’s been even longer. Since this revelation The bearIn season two of Sugar, as it’s more commonly known, she endured fatigue, insomnia, and what’s known as “lightning crotch.” She also managed to keep her mercurial chef brother and the band of merry misfits who made up the kitchen of the Berzatto family sandwich shop together through the restaurant’s reinvention as a Michelin-star gourmet aspirant, all while navigating a pregnancy that lasted as long as a giraffe’s.
The bearSeason three of , which dropped in its entirety last week, is by far the show’s weakest, bogged down by an overreliance on flashbacks and flimsy character development. Still, there were bright spots that felt like vintage entries in the Emmy-winning series’ history.
“Ice Chips,” the eighth of the final season’s 10 episodes, might just be the strongest of the bunch. It stars Sugar, played by Abby Elliott, who finally goes into labor while shopping for supplies for the restaurant on her own. She gets stuck in traffic on the highway as she tries and fails to contact her husband, Pete, her brother Carmy, and even the manic ex-girlfriend from Carmy’s dream, Claire (both of whom contribute this season include her confession that – gasp – she loves Monday). In desperation, Sugar calls her mother, Donna, announcing the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as Berzatto’s erratic matriarch.
We first saw Donna in the famous Season 2 episode “Pisces,” during which a boozy holiday dinner with extended family devolved into screaming, sobbing, and, finally, a hysterical Donna who crashed his car into the Berzattos’ living room. Donna, we learn, is responsible for much of the baggage that her three children carried into adulthood, and Sugar responded by largely excluding her from his life: in season 2 , we learned several months into Sugar’s pregnancy that she hadn’t even told her mother she was expecting.
All of this makes her an unlikely choice for a birth partner, and she roars through “Ice Chips” with guns blazing. She meets Sugar in the hospital parking lot, immediately unleashing a frenzy of pet names and botched instructions: “You have to breathe!” she exhorts her daughter again and again, mimicking a breathing pattern that is more hyperventilation than divination – and within seconds, an already stressed Sugar is desperately begging her to stop talking. Which, of course, is not the case.
With Pete located but still on his way to the hospital, the bulk of “Ice Chips” takes place with Sugar and Donna alone in the delivery room. Between their struggles, Sugar’s screams of pain, and the rush of time in the rush to the hospital and a delivery that decidedly doesn’t go as planned, the episode packs all the punch of the show’s best. The bearSeason 1’s fast-paced, high-stress chapters range from online orders gone wrong to a broken freezer door in Season 2. Like all those scenes where big personalities clash in a small kitchen, here we have the same thing in another sort of prep room. Every second counts, or at least every centimeter of expansion.
Sugar alone seems to have survived the family tensions on display in “Pisces” in one piece. She shares none of her brothers’ self-destructive tendencies, for example, and is the only one of the siblings with a stable romantic relationship. Aside from her impending diaper expertise, she’s pretty much the only character on the show you could imagine asking to babysit a child in the hopes that the child would come back with the same number of fingers and toes.
But while Elliott finally gets some screen time without Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie and Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney chewing up all the scenery, we get a much-needed moment with a character who, as the perpetual straight man, is generally resigned to letting others do their thing. “Ice Chips” establishes that Sugar’s taking charge of her life is her own response to a difficult childhood: She began her mission by acting out a self-help program for the children of alcoholics, which she apparently had already memorized. Over the course of the episode, Sugar speaks candidly to Donna about her role in the still-resonant chaos of raising the Berzatto children. “You scared us all,” she tells Donna. “Oh, that’s terrible,” Donna replies; Curtis’s face crumples as she finally seems to realize the damage she’s done.
That same old Donna is still there, and Curtis’ restless, frenetic performance is enough to make anyone who’s ever said, “Mom, stop” squirms. When Sugar tells a nurse about her plans to give birth (no epidural, thanks!), Donna laughs in her face. “I’m just telling you as someone who’s had similar experiences before,” says – she to her daughter, “this particular block hurts like hell.” A few contractions later, Sugar changed her mind that pain relief isn’t always (or even usually) a source of relief. well-founded wisdom, but there at least she is right.
Birth sequences on TV and in movies tend to adhere to a few basic conventions: the dramatic breaking of the water, the screaming pain on the way to the hospital, and, always, the smashing cut to the finish line, with the new parents cleaned up and beaming at their little bundle of joy. It’s nice that a show like The bear, with its almost religious dedication to avoiding happy endings, refuses to conclude the episode with a bow. We never see the baby or the new mother; the only confirmation that the little girl has arrived safely is given when Ted Fak teases Donna in the hospital waiting room in the final moments of the episode by saying that she is now a grandmother. In fact, we don’t even know if Sugar had that epidural.
Since it is The bearwe can probably assume she didn’t.