What's the Deal with the End of 'The Bear' Prequel, 'Gary'?

Yesterday, FX unexpectedly dropped a new episode of The Bear, which was not called The Bear, but Gary, owing to the setting. It’s a flashback episode, set a few years before the events of The Bear, centering on Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Mikey (Jon Bernthal) and a quick day-trip they took to Gary, Indiana to deliver a package for Uncle Jimmy.

What’s in the package is beside the point … really, genuinely, hilariously beside the point (it’s a ridiculously mundane MacGuffin). It’s all about the journey, and typical of Christopher Storer’s best and, uh, least best episodes of The Bear, it’s hypnotizing, entertaining, thoughtful, and indulgent. It’s a slice of Richie and Mikey’s life: They’re best friends. They shoot the sh**. They bro out. Hard. They play a pick-up game with some kids. They shoot the sh** some more. They do a line of coke. They go to a bar. They have too much to drink. The reminiscing and the good times takes an unexpectedly dark turn because Mikey has a mood swing. Mikey says some things that hit too close to home because he is trying to hurt Richie. It works. They drive home in tense silence.

It’s ultimately a melancholy flashback of a melancholy day in their lives, but it’s clearly a meaningful day that sticks in Richie’s mind because at the end of the episode — which, I presume is in the present day — Richie is driving his car in the rain and looking at an empty seat where Richie would be if he were alive and gets so lost in thought that an oncoming truck crashes into his car.

Is Richie hurt? Probably. Is Richie dead? Probably not (the truck hit the passenger’s side of the car). The point of the episode — I think — is that Richie, all these years later, is still so consumed by grief that he gets into a car accident that may or may not set the stage for the fifth (and supposedly final) season, which will probably kick off next month on FX.

There’s more subtext to the episode, too. On the day of the delivery, Richie’s now ex-wife, Tiff (Gillian Jacobs), is pregnant and may or may not be going into labor by the end of the day. She really wants him home by 5:15. He doesn’t make it because he’s Richie and kind of a screw-up. He spent the day doing coke and hanging out in a bar. It explains, at least partially, why their marriage didn’t work.

There’s also an intense conversation between Mikey and a woman he meets in the bar, Sherri (Marin Ireland), where an intoxicated Mikey shares with her his wild mood swings between long stretches of bliss and when he bottoms out, which also goes a long way to explain why Mikey took his own life. It’s noteworthy, too, that he’s only willing to open up with Sherri because she’s a stranger, and he’s clearly not comfortable opening up about his mental health issues with his best friend. That frustration ultimately boils over in the toxic monologue that leads to the uncomfortable ride home.

It’s an entertaining episode … until it’s not. And then it’s a heavy episode that gnaws at you the way that the best episodes of The Bear often can do. It actually works best as a stand-alone episode, too, by providing context to the final season of The Bear without necessarily wasting an episode on a flashback. It’s very good, but it hits hard.

It might also be worth noting that Moss-Bachrach and Bernthal — two lovably intense actors — are also starring together currently in the Broadway production of Dog Day Afternoon.