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The final season of The Bear is now streaming on Hulu. If you haven't watched, or finished, the season yet, you can read my spoiler-free review of the first seven episodes. If you've made it all the way through, I have many thoughts — with spoilers for the whole season — coming up just as soon as I qualify as an international businessman...
Alan Sepinwall
Had I not known that FX was holding the series finale back for critics to see at the same time as everyone else, I might have assumed that this season was only seven episodes. Though "Caramel" didn't tie up every single plot thread, it felt like a perfect summation of everything The Bear was about: amid one stressful circumstance after another, Syd, Carmy, and the rest of the team are able to consistently make magic, and to deliver arguably their best service ever, under their worst-ever conditions. Richie asking Syd what they'll do tomorrow, and Syd replying that they'll just do the same thing again, would have absolutely worked as the concluding note to a series finale. I didn't feel like I needed to know about the Michelin star, Jimmy's decision regarding franchising the Beef, Carmy's new career plan, etc.
The actual series finale, "The Original Beef of Chicago," mostly devotes itself to that stuff, and in a way that feels more padded than anything else in this mostly efficient concluding season. Scenes run long because they can, and also because you get the sense that Christopher Storer and company are having a hard time saying goodbye to the Faks, to Chuckie and Chi-Chi and Ebra, to Natalie and Tina and everyone else. It's not so much a finale as an epilogue — Storer's version of the home stretch of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — and I have enough affection for these characters that I was okay with nearly all of it, even if little seemed essential. And there are some utterly lovely moments in the episode, even if the most powerful of them had much less to do with the show than the way it dealt with the tragic loss of Rob Reiner. (More on that in a bit.)
Alan Sepinwall