This message contains spoilers for the sixth episode of The bear Season 3The full 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.”
That was Tina and Carmy talking about Carmy’s late brother – and Tina’s former employer – Mikey, in the season 1 finale of The bearAlthough Carmy was Tina’s blood relative, Mikey was practically a member of her family, and she defended his memory accordingly. When Carmy and Sydney began to institute changes at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, everyone in the kitchen objected, but Tina most of all. She pretended not to speak English to avoid following Sydney’s instructions, and often glared at her young new co-workers. Her journey to 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 she must be every bit the genius the show made it out to be.
Yet, when it comes to Mikey Berzatto, 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 him so much, 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 installment, “Napkins,” not only gives Colón-Zayas her first solo spotlight, it finally fills that emotional void. And in doing so, it gives 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 Season 1. Tina is 46, married to David (played by Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband, David Zayas), and has had a steady job for 15 years at a candy company. But their rent has just skyrocketed, the promotion David was hoping for at his doorman job seems like it’s never coming, and Tina is losing her job in a series of layoffs. Workers aren’t particularly interested in an older woman, even after she figures out how to use LinkedIn, and much of “Napkins” turns into a Sisyphean tale of Tina building her resume every day, getting ignored, and having to start over the next day.
Then luck strikes her, but not in the way she thinks it will. She finally gets word that a job interview is open, only to find out when she arrives that the position is already filled. At her wit’s end, convinced she’s no longer useful, and seeing that her bus home is late, she heads to the nearest coffee spot: Beef. It’s the version of Beef that Richie described so wistfully in Season 1: unpretentious, cheerful, and a bit of a dork. (Completely in his element, this is the happiest we’ve ever seen Richie outside of blasting Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” in his car at the end of Season 2.) Tina gets her coffee and a bonus: a free Italian beef sandwich that someone else forgot to pick up. She takes it into the dining room, and there’s Mikey Berzatto himself, playing Ballbreaker, the arcade game that caused so much trouble in the early episodes of the series, against Neil Fak.
Ayo Edebiri, making her directorial debut, introduces the first part of this scene with Tina in the foreground and Mikey, Richie, and Neil goofing around the edges of the frame. They’re the ones talking, but this is her story, and she’s oblivious to anything except the despair she feels at her own obsolescence. She starts crying, and the guys eventually notice something going on in the room that they should be paying attention to. Since this is Richie and Neil before they started wearing suits, they have no idea what they’re supposed to do here, so of course it falls to Mikey—the guy everyone at Beef admires—to step in and 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 television scene. But Edebiri, Colón-Zayas, Bernthal, and screenwriter Catherine Schetina are more than worth the extra time.
Special effects
In the past, The bear The film has been judicious in its use of Mikey. Jon Bernthal is one of the busiest actors alive. But, just as importantly, Mikey is presented as such a larger-than-life character to Carmy, Richie, Natalie, Tina, and everyone else 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 is. It’s not that he comes across as superhumanly wise. It’s just how comfortable he seems with himself—an impressive facade, given what we know of the demons that eventually consumed him—and how he manages to snap Tina out of her spiral by simply paying attention to her and trying to interact with her on a human level. He’s smart enough to recognize, for example, that the best approach is to open up about his bad day first, rather than having her start talking 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 provides some unwitting 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 over what it is, but it also gives Mikey something new to talk about, at a time when he knows he has to keep talking long enough to pull this stranger back from the abyss. We know Carmy idolized his brother, but here Mikey portrays Carmy as the aspirational figure: someone living the dream of not only knowing exactly what he wants to do with his life, but 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 luckily, 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 will 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 heading back to work and Tina finally taking a bite of the free sandwich. It tastes incredible, both for what it represents and for the quality of the meat itself. When she goes home to David that night, 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 about to get, and how much better the food she’s going to be able to make, 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 she’s quickly coming to love and whose legacy she’ll defend as fiercely as anyone in this place. And now we understand exactly why.