It’s Easy to Get Lost in The Bear

This story contains light spoilers for Season 3 of The Bear .

When The Bear ’s latest season begins, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (played by Jeremy Allen White) is considering how to move forward by thinking about his past. The FX dramedy’s protagonist had, at great risk, transformed his family’s beloved Italian-beef-sandwich shop into an upscale Chicago restaurant. But The Bear’s opening night went horribly wrong at the end of Season 2 when Carmy accidentally locked himself inside the kitchen fridge, leaving his staff scrambling to make up for his absence.

This season, we meet Carmy on a rainy morning; he’s running a finger over a burn scar on his palm. Montages of his years spent training in award-winning establishments fill his mind. Many memories are remarkably peaceful, reminders of why he became obsessed with his line of work. In one, he’s listening attentively to Daniel Boulud, the real-life renowned chef and restaurateur. “You want music,” Boulud advises the young Carmy as they work on a dish, urging him to observe the way it sizzles. “Do you hear the music here?” Carmy nods and smiles.

The Bear makes its own kind of music in Season 3. Episodes play like symphonies of images rather than conventional, plot-driven television. Flashbacks crescendo into present-day revelations, intrusive thoughts crash like cymbals into scenes, and the camera frequently frames characters’ faces tightly, holding the shots in extended fermatas. At one point, a heartbeat serves as a metronome for a conversation, dictating its tempo.

After two seasons plunging into the chaos of kitchen life , The Bear has developed a reputation as a stressful show to watch. But although the series remains a sharp, anxiety-inducing study of the way work can consume a person, Season 3 is more contemplative than propulsive, advancing its story only incrementally while diving deeply into its characters’ thoughts. The kitchen is where Carmy, as he once put it, grew so busy and so exhausted that he “ lost track of time .” These 10 new episodes try to grasp the very concept of time itself—to shape it and control it, moving fluidly from the present into the past and back again to consider the nature of memory and legacy. Who are Carmy and his staff now, after trying so hard for so long to achieve just a modicum of success? Who were they before, and who can they become?

[ Read: The radical reinvention of The Bear ]

The result is an unusually meditative season of The Bear . Over and over, the show underlines how a person’s lowest moments can become the stickiest in their memories, and how difficult it can be to find anything good in seemingly endless hardship. Carmy channels his opening-night humiliation into an intense defensiveness, drawing up a list of so-called nonnegotiables for the staff to follow that include platitudes about effort, overlooking their evident worry for him. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the restaurant’s front-of-house manager and Carmy’s foil, can’t shake a comment from his daughter about how he’s “alone,” causing him to suspect that she doesn’t want him around even though she clearly does. The show’s nonlinear approach—using out-of-order flashbacks, revisiting some of the same scenes and shots throughout the season to place them in new contexts—emphasizes the mental gymnastics of self-doubt. Shame clings to a person, motivating and haunting them in equal measure.

Such interiority drives the season’s standout episodes, which join greatest hits such as the one-take “Review” from Season 1 and the hour-long Season 2 flashback to a particularly memorable Christmas for Carmy and his siblings. The sixth episode of Season 3, “Napkins,” follows Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) in the weeks before she landed in the Berzatto family’s orbit, illustrating how her need for a routine is an asset but also a hindrance to her happiness. The eighth episode, “Ice Chips,” is a half-whispered two-hander between characters having an overdue conversation about how they perceive each other—and, perhaps more important, themselves.

At times, Season 3 can offer narratives that feel so tidy (of course a restaurant critic visited when the staff least expected it) and dialogue so direct (“There’s nobility in this,” a chef says of restaurant work) that it veers perilously close to being saccharine. But The Bear never comes off as contrived, because it considers its characters with total empathy. It refuses to exploit their flaws for pure dramatic effect; instead, it investigates where those flaws come from, juxtaposing a character’s memories with their present-day behavior, imploring the viewer to see them as more than who they are at their worst.

Even amid the madness of the kitchen, The Bear illustrates how its characters nurture one another—how a faint melody of love emerges from the dissonance of the f-bombs and screaming matches. In an episode called “Doors,” which speeds through a month in the restaurant’s operations, the time jumps seem to show endless conflict: Dishes are dropped; blood is spilled; voices are raised. Yet there is also, in tiny glimmers, care: Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Carmy’s sous chef, repeatedly checks in on Tina, whose cooking still isn’t always up to Carmy’s standards. Richie swoops in to cover up a mistake that Neil (Matty Matheson), the resident comic relief and the restaurant’s handyman, makes on a night when The Bear is short-staffed and he tries serving a complicated dish. And Marcus (Lionel Boyce) separates Carmy and Richie when the pair begin to tussle for what seems like the umpteenth time, tossing himself into the ruckus just to ensure that no one gets harmed. One evening, late in the episode, the group cleans the kitchen, moving around the space like dancers in a ballet, circling one another and never colliding, as if they know exactly where every single person will step.

To some, the season’s glacial plot momentum and unresolved stories may feel frustrating to endure. Carmy’s breakup with Claire (Molly Gordon) lingers in his mind, but he does little to assuage his guilt. Richie and Carmy clash again and again, with no end in sight. Sydney spends most of the season debating whether to accept Carmy’s proposal for her to be his business partner. And yet, the show can be a comfort, simply for capturing its characters’ humanity and finding what’s lovely in the mess of daily life—a quality that feels rare in today’s true-crime- and spectacle-laden television landscape. Marcus says it best when he delivers a eulogy for his mother, who died at the end of Season 2. He lists what he noticed about her growing up: She loved flowers. She sewed a lot. She let him watch RoboCop . More than anything, though, she made him feel loved. “I knew she was listening, and she knew I was listening too … We really had to pay attention to each other and look closely at each other,” he says. “I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, but I know what it’s like to be a kid, and having someone actually, really pay attention to you.”

The Bear approaches every character with that kindness. It’s a show that insists that we should all pay a little more attention to one another and ourselves, if we want to hear the music.