How do you move forward after you hit rock bottom?
This is the question haunting Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto after the second season of “The Bear” pushes him off the emotional tightrope he had been walking since the show began and leaves him at an all-time low.
Season 2 of “The Bear” ends with “Family & Friends Night” at Carmy’s brand-new restaurant. The finale reaches a chaotic climax when Carmy accidently locks himself in the kitchen’s walk-in-freezer and yells through the door in an emotional fit. Overwhelmed and frustrated, he lashes out at both his new girlfriend Claire and his lifelong friend Richie. A stressful situation and a few targeted insults are all it takes for Carmy to damage two of the most important relationships in his life.
While fans of “The Bear” have grown fond of the show’s commitment to complicated characters, it is gut-wrenching to watch Carmy’s self-sabotage and then his immediate remorse. The promise of redemption for Carmy and reconciliation between the show’s beloved characters is the force that keeps viewers coming back for more.
Carmy and all of the other raw and complex characters on “The Bear” have garnered both popular attention and critical acclaim since the show’s debut in June 2022. The second season followed up on its initial success, receiving an impressive 22 Emmy nominations and walking away with a record-breaking 11 awards on Sunday night at the 2024 Emmy Awards.
In a prior review of the show, I described how the Berzatto family’s Catholic faith is evident in the imagery that appears throughout the show, particularly in the image of the “Good Shepherd” on the prayer card meant to commemorate the death of Michael Berzatto, Carmy’s older brother who, we find out, had committed suicide. In Season 3, released to Hulu in June 2024, the Good Shepherd remains present—in the repeated image of the prayer card, which continues to sporadically pop up throughout the show—but also through the emphasis placed on forgiveness.
The need to forgive and be forgiven is a thread that runs through all the most compelling relationships in the third season of “The Bear,” as the characters struggle with the anger they feel towards others and the shame they project back towards themselves.
Carmy’s battle with remorse throughout Season 3 mirrors the characterization of his mother, Donna Berzatto, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (who picked up an Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy Award for the role). We discover through flashbacks that the relationship between Donna and her children—both Carmy and his sister, Natalie—is fraught, wounded by her emotional instability. In the Season 2 finale, Donna accepts Natalie’s invitation to attend “Family & Friends night” but remains outside in the cold, watching the restaurant from afar. After being spotted by Pete, Natalie’s husband, Donna outright refuses to come inside. “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry,” Donna tells Pete, followed by “I don’t deserve to see how good this is.”
At the end of Season 2, both Donna and Carmy are left without meaningful reconciliation between themselves and the loved ones they hurt. The suffering this causes is palpable to the audience and continues to inform the tone of the show’s melancholic third season.
The relationship between Donna and Natalie is one of the most evocative parts of “The Bear,” given that Natalie spends much of the third season angry at her mother while simultaneously pregnant with her own baby girl. Donna and Natalie are forced together in the eighth episode, “Ice Chips,” after Natalie goes into labor and is unable to reach anyone else for assistance getting to the hospital.
The tense dynamic between the two women shifts once they begin talking about Donna’s memory of Natalie’s own birth. “You’re beautiful,” Donna tells her daughter, with tears in her eyes. Donna then turns on the song that played while she was in labor with Natalie: “Baby I Love You,” by The Ronettes. The mother strokes her daughter’s hair as the two look at each other and weep.
There is no grandiose apology, no detailed confession or moment of explicit absolution: just a profound reconciliation between mother and daughter. A relationship that might have initially seemed fragile is proven to be bonded by love that is nowhere close to broken.
Donna giving herself permission to “see how good this is” signals her desire for mercy. And Natalie, seeing the imperfect humanity of her mother, offers her forgiveness in the form of the emotional vulnerability she has been trying to avoid for fear of getting hurt again.
Just as with the Catholic imagery present in the show, “The Bear” favors the subtle and the unspoken instead of the explicit or obvious. This moment may not resemble the Catholic sacramental act of confession, but it is unmistakingly a moment of forgiveness, and it sends a clear message: the ability to offer and receive mercy is the key to moving forward in peace.
Season 3 features a number of other notable moments of emotional reckoning, most of which occur in the ninth episode, aptly titled “Apologies.” One of the most interesting examples is a conversation between Carmy and “Uncle Jimmy,” a family friend helping to financially support the new restaurant. After discussing the restaurant and its uncertain future, Jimmy transitions to a more personal topic. He tells Carmy, “Sometimes I wish I had done more…with your mom and Mikey…I could have tried.” In response, Carmy confesses “I also…I wasn’t really there. Sometimes I think…I could have tried.” The two express their shared remorse and guilt for their inability to prevent the tragedy of Carmy’s brother’s suicide.
As telling as these moments of genuine reconciliation are, there are unresolved tensions that still haunt Carmy. He has a brief interaction in the 10th episode, “Forever,” with a chef whose demeaning and demanding supervision in a past position traumatized Carmy. He confronts his former boss and urges him to apologize and accept responsibility for the pain he caused Carmy. Receiving no indication of remorse or regret, Carmy seems completely bewildered and hurt, forced to reckon with a question he is not prepared to answer: How do you forgive someone who does not think they need forgiveness?
Carmy is similarly held back by his inability to meaningfully apologize to his girlfriend Claire. Like his mother, Carmy does not know how to say he is sorry. It seems even more likely that Carmy, like Donna, does not feel as though he deserves the good things Claire offers him.
In the moment where Carmy comes closest to calling Claire before ultimately choosing not to, the audience is greeted with another glimpse of the Good Shepherd prayer card, sitting untouched on the table. Its presence in the scene hints again at the deeper wound preventing Carmy from asking for forgiveness from Claire: his guilt over Mikey’s suicide. Carmy’s nagging regret about his choice to leave Mikey and Donna behind seems to inform a belief that he does not deserve happiness. As a result, he is unable to let go of his grief for Mikey, but also unable to enjoy any new opportunities in his life.
In the face of Carmy’s great emotional suffering and continued mistakes, the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd reminds us that God is always there at our lowest points, prepared to give all of us the mercy we need to move forward from our shame and our anger. While we patiently wait for Carmy to accept this grace, “The Bear” remains “to be continued.”
