Television

Mission UnBearable #3

LN Lupa

17 Jul 2025 — 3 min read

evil_ween_inkitchen

Season 4 Episode 3: “Scallop”

Television giveth, and mercilessly television taketh away. This episode opened with an extended montage of Syd cooking and plating a scallop under soft bisexual lighting while an irritating licensed song played. It continued, ad infinitum, until Carmy tasted the scallop and declared it perfect. This should be interesting, but it isn’t, because it didn’t tell us anything other than that Syd is a good chef and likes cooking. I HAVE SEEN ALL THE PREVIOUS EPISODES OF THE SHOW. Montage is a tool, much like parsley is most often a garnish. I like tabbouleh, but I don’t want it for every meal. In fact, I would suffer terrible digestive consequences from having tabbouleh for every meal.

Every time Ebon Moss-Bachrach says “Chicawhgo”, though, I am moved. That’s devotion to the craft. I had to listen to WBEZ every Friday night from 10pm to midnight for nine straight months to understand how to say it like that.

However, Richie’s plot this episode is also a bit stupid. Continuing his quest to provide a standard of service which is actively unhealthy and impossible to achieve, he conspires with the Faks (my least favorite characters; they aren’t funny) to fake snow outside the restaurant for a family visiting from LA, whose cancer survivor daughter always wanted to see snow in Chicago. Dial it down, Richie--you’re a dining room manager, not the COO of Make-a-Wish. The episode wants you to be ensorcelled by this, as it shows you all the employees ensorcelled by this, but it’s a deranged standard for a restaurant, any restaurant, fine dining or otherwise. You’re there to at best have a nice time and eat good food with people you care about. Shit doesn’t have to change your life, even if you are a heroic juvenile cancer survivor. Better: shit should change your life by being a pleasurable experience that offers you relief from the dullness of daily labor, like making food. Shit should change your life by getting you a free slice of cake if you come in on your birthday. There doesn’t need to be more than that. That’s already a lot.

Inexplicably, the Chicago Michelin critic is there and he observes all this and it makes him think that this is a good restaurant. He gets into his Uber like it is Cinderella’s carriage and speeds away, leaving us with the absurd pastabillity that The Bear, an inconsistent, urgently collapsing fine dining restaurant in River North, a neighborhood lousy with fine dining, will achieve a Michelin star rating, and not on the strength of its food or indeed the actually reasonable parts of its service.

Then Carmy finishes service and suddenly decides he needs to reconcile with his ex, Claire, at 2am or whatever time. He runs off the Chicago Brown Line platform and over to her house, which is apparently nearby? Last season I thought she lived over on the West Side, but I guess she lives at the Moody Bible Institute…

I’m not going to litigate the Claire thing. Everyone’s been litigating the Claire thing. It’s not interesting and I have nothing to add, save an affirmation of others’ statements that it is shit like this that makes Carmy a very unconvincing and uncharismatic 30-something. This dingus is 22 at best.

However, the scene where Carmy and Claire are whinging at each other is a multi-minute scene with no licensed music, indeed no music of any kind, behind it. So that’s a big win for my “try making a scene without music telling us how to feel” platform.

Dismay is what I’m feeling. They’re yankin’ my chain here. Last episode I thought maybe we were getting back to a show about stuff, and this week we were back to the ineffable mysteries of an over-curated soundtrack.

This episode was perhaps 38 minutes long. There were at least 3 separate montages.