A premiere date for the fifth and final season of “The Bear” has not yet been announced, but a flashback standalone episode of the FX series premiered Tuesday on Hulu.
The episode features Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal), who are on a work trip to Gary, Indiana.
“Intimate and revealing, it illuminates the two friends’ complicated relationship, uncovering new layers of Mikey’s mental state while offering crucial insight into the man Richie is when audiences first meet him in Season 1 — adding emotional context that reframes their story from the very beginning,” according to FX’s press materials.
Moss-Bachrach and Bernthal are also the writers of the hour-long episode, which is directed by show creator Christopher Storer. Audiences can find the episode by searching for “Gary” on Hulu and Disney+.
The TV series has followed the ups and downs of a Chicago Italian beef sandwich shop that is eventually reimagined as a fine dining restaurant, led by Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy White), who is working through his grief in the wake of his brother Mikey’s suicide.
But this episode takes place a few years before that.
As a pair, Richie and Mikey are a couple of jabronis. Their juvenile banter is full of amiable bickering as they drive to Gary on a mission for the unseen Uncle Jimmy (played in the series by Oliver Platt); they are transporting a mysterious box on his behalf.
They arrive early and blow time first at a diner, then by joining a pickup basketball game, and finally settling in at a bar. Richie is a motormouth, but when asked what he does at the restaurant back in Chicago, he struggles for an answer: “I guess I’m a bit of a song-and-dance man. I don’t know, public relations, forward facing …”
He’s come so far in the years since and seeing this “before” version of the character just underscores that his evolution has been one of the more compelling transformations of the series overall.
Does the flashback fill in some of the blanks that have only been alluded so in the show’s previous four seasons? To be blunt, no. It’s not surprising that Richie and Mikey would have an easy, playful chemistry.
Mikey looms large over “The Bear” as someone whose life — and death — has such an outsized affect on the Berzatto family, as well as the denizens of that humble sandwich shop. But the Mikey we see here is just a guy. Occasionally funny and charming. Sometimes erratic and menacing. But never a fully-rounded character. What does he care about? What excites him? What scares him? He has one conversation with a stranger that feels vulnerable and gives just the tiniest bit of insight into his headspace. Hearing that Mikey is the boss, she says: “I bet a lot of people depend on you.” His response is soft and effortful: “I mean, I depend on a lot of people.”
Listening to Mikey describe the extreme highs and lows of his emotions, there’s the suggestion that he has an undiagnosed mental health disorder.
But if he has an inner monologue, we aren’t privy to what might be eating at him. He’s under a strain, that’s clear enough. The drugs don’t help.
But his loud antics with Richie keep some of that at bay. For a while, at least. We know how his story ends.
