This article contains spoilers for the sixth episode of The bear Season 3The entire season is now streaming on Hulu.
“You know how much I loved him, don’t you?”
“How much?”
“A lot. I loved him a lot.”
It was Tina and Carmy talking about Carmy’s late brother – and Tina’s former employer – Mikey, in the first season finale of The bearAlthough Carmy was Tina’s blood relative, Mikey was practically a member of her family, and so she defended his memory accordingly. When Carmy and Sydney began instituting changes at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, everyone in the kitchen objected, but Tina of all people. She pretended not to speak English to avoid following Sydney’s instructions, and often stared pointedly at her young new colleagues. His journey toward accepting the new way of doing things was in many ways the most necessary character arc of the first season, because if Carmy’s food could convince even Tina, then he must be quite the genius that the series pretended to be.
However, as far as Mikey Berzatto is concerned, the first two Bear The seasons focused more on the feelings of the people who had known him the longest: Carmy, their sister Natalie, other family members like their mother Didi, and their best friend Richie. We know why they loved her, but with Tina we mostly had to take her word for it and Liza Colón-Zayas’ unwavering performance in the role.
This year’s sixth episode, “Napkins,” not only gives Colón-Zayas her first solo spotlight, but finally fills that emotional void. And in doing so, he offers us the best Bear scene from season three.
Mikey (Jon Bernthal) doesn’t appear until relatively late in the episode, a flashback set several years before the events of the first season. Tina is 46, married to David (played by Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband, David Zayas) and has had a steady job for 15 years doing payroll for a candy company. But their rent has just skyrocketed, the promotion David was hoping for at his doorman job seems never to come, and Tina loses her job in a series of layoffs. The staff has little interest in a woman of a certain age, even after she figures out how to use LinkedIn, and much of “Napkins” turns into a Sisyphean tale, with Tina moving her resume up each day, being ignored, and having to start over the next day.
Then luck strikes – but not in the way she thinks. She finally learns of an open interview opportunity, only to discover that the position is already filled. Out of breath, convinced she has outlived her usefulness and seeing that her bus home is late, she heads to the nearest place she can find for a cup of coffee: Beef. It’s the version of the beef that Richie so nostalgically described in season one: unpretentious, full of good humor and more than a little silly behavior. (Completely in his original element, this is the happiest we’ve ever seen Richie outside when he blasted Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” in his car at the end of season two.) Tina gets his coffee and a bonus: a free Italian beef sandwich. that someone else forgot to collect. She carries him into the dining room, and there is Mikey Berzatto himself, playing Ballbreaker, the arcade game that caused so much trouble in the show’s early episodes, against Neil Fak.
Ayo Edebiri, making her directorial debut, presents the first part of this scene with Tina in the foreground and Mikey, Richie and Neil fooling around at the edge of the frame. They’re the ones talking, but it’s her story, and she doesn’t realize anything except the despair she feels because of her own obsolescence. She starts crying, and the guys eventually notice what’s going on in the room that they should pay attention to. Since this is Richie and Neil before they started wearing costumes, they have no idea what they’re supposed to do here, so it’s of course up to Mikey – the guy that everyone admires the Beef – to intervene to help this diner in distress.
What follows is a conversation that lasts about 10 minutes, which, even in the age of streaming, is an eternity for a TV scene. But Edebiri, Colón-Zayas, Bernthal and writer Catherine Schetina more than earn that extra time.
Effects
In the past, The bear has been judicious in its use of Mikey. Jon Bernthal is among the busiest actors alive. But just as importantly, Mikey is presented as such a larger-than-life figure to Carmy, Richie, Natalie, Tina, and everyone who knew him that the more we see of him, the greater the risk that he won’t live up to the legend. Here, he does. It’s not that he comes across as a character of superhuman wisdom. It’s how comfortable he seems with himself—an impressive front, given what we know of the demons that ultimately consumed him—and how he manages to snap Tina out of her spiral by simply paying attention to her and trying to engage with her on a human level. He’s smart enough to recognize, for example, that the best approach is to talk about his bad day first, rather than have her talk about hers. By the time he finishes describing the Beef’s latest plumbing disaster, she’s incredibly charmed—Bernthal reportedly has chemistry with a deli slicer—and can for a moment identify with someone else’s misery instead of wallowing in her own.
There’s no grand plan here — just a guy reaching out and talking, making a human connection by any means necessary. Though Carmy is halfway around the world in Copenhagen, he inadvertently provides assistance by sending Mikey a photo of Rene Redzepi’s idea board at Noma (as seen in the season premiere). The photo allows these two strangers to bond over their utter confusion about what it’s all about, but it also gives Mikey a new topic to talk about, at a time when he knows he has to keep talking long enough to pull this stranger back from the brink. We know Carmy idolized his brother, but here Mikey portrays Carmy as an aspirational figure: someone who lives the dream of not only knowing exactly what he wants to do with his life, but also being good at it. Mikey doesn’t have that. He runs the Beef just because someone He had to do it when his father left town. He sometimes gets a certain satisfaction from it, especially because he has come to understand that life’s special moments “always happen around food,” but it is not one of his passions. Dreams are for other people, he realized at a young age, in a story that is all the more heartbreaking because one wonders if being able to live his own dream would not have eased the burden that ultimately drove Mikey to suicide. But that is in his all-too-near future. For now, he has no dream; he has a job and he seems to be fine with it.
And as luck would have it, a job is exactly what Tina needs right now. Nothing fancy. Nothing anyone else could dream of. A job. “I don’t need to be inspired,” she tells this kind stranger. “I don’t need to do magic. I don’t need to save the world. I just need to feed my kids.” The wonderful thing, of course, is that we know Tina eventually did She felt inspired—working with Carmy and Sydney lit a fire she didn’t know existed inside her. But right now, she just needs money and a sense of purpose, and Mikey gives her that opportunity.
Throughout the early parts of Napkins, we see Tina proudly talking about her resume, only to be dismissed by all the young guards who view the idea of a paper resume as something out of the Middle Ages. (Her resentment and envy of these people also informs her early interactions with Sydney in Season 1.) After Mikey tells her about her job at the Beef, she offers to give him a copy of that resume, and is once again rebuffed. But this is very different from the other times, because Mikey engages with Tina as a person, rather than seeing her as an intrusive inconvenience in his day. He likes her, feels sympathetic toward her, and needs help anyway. The others don’t care about Tina’s resume because they don’t care about her, and see her insistence on mentioning it as yet another reason to condescend to her. Mikey doesn’t care because he already wants her to take the job, and the document isn’t the point. While previous responses to the resume have made Tina withdraw into herself, Mikey’s rejection becomes more of a joke between two people who are clearly going to be very good friends.
The scene ends with Mikey returning to work and Tina finally biting into the free sandwich. It tastes incredible, both for what it represents and for the quality of the meat itself. When she returns home to David that evening, she has an Original Beef t-shirt tucked into her purse, a new uniform for an exciting new life. She has no idea how much more exciting this life is going to get and how much better the food she’s going to be able to make will be when she finally meets the guy who sent Mikey that confusing photo. For now, though, she has a job, a purpose, and a new boss who she will quickly learn to love and whose legacy she will defend as fiercely as anyone in this place. And now we understand exactly why.