The Most Intense Episode of The Bear Leaves The Restaurant Behind

This story contains spoilers for The Bear.

Midway through its new season, The Bear temporarily transforms into a show called The Berzattos for about an hour. This new show is star-studded, loud, and takes place over the course of one night, as Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and his family get ready for a fraught Christmas dinner. It’s as powerful and punishing as the show has ever been, and unlike last season’s panic-attack-inducing one-take episode, its drama unfolds far from the titular restaurant.

The first thing that overwhelms the senses in The Bear Episode 6, which is technically called “Fishes” despite ending with a title card reading “The Berzattos,” is the guest stars. They arrive in quick succession in a torrent of famous faces that goes from exciting to distracting to borderline comical. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Carmy and Natalie’s unstable and volatile mother, Donna, who holds cigarettes in a shaking hand as she chokes back tears over some imagined slight. Bob Odenkirk is their Uncle Lee, a man with a needling sense of superiority that boils over into fury late in the episode. Gillian Jacobs is Richie’s as-yet-unseen ex-wife Tiffany, who’s pregnant here. Finally, Sarah Paulson and John Mulaney play cousin Michelle and her boyfriend Steven, the kind of comparably mild and well-adjusted people who seem like they’d be black sheep in this family.

This is a distractingly star-studded group, sure, but it’s also a wildly talented one, and the push and pull between these forces – as well as those of a whole host of relatives we’ve already met, including Carmy and Natalie’s late brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) – ultimately creates a downright riveting hour of television. The sheer, borderline violent chaos in the Berzatto household might not be relatable to most audiences, but elements of the holiday dinner shuffle feel universal. As Donna stretches herself thin preparing dinner, she becomes plagued by bouts of insecurity and frustration, her mood swings untameable and fierce. Her kids know how to navigate her behavior, yet can’t stop themselves from frequently saying the wrong thing anyway. Carmy, home for the holidays after moving away, seems both unsurprised by the drama that surrounds him, and deeply miserable about it.

Donna, after being set off by Natalie’s hovering check-ins, drives her car through the wall of the house

When he’s not giving into his family’s antagonism, the chef sits in near-silence, taking in the constantly ratcheted-up tension like he’s mentally processing a batch of beef sandwich orders. When Mikey and Lee nearly come to blows over a flung fork and Mikey’s drug use, Carmy looks like he’s biting his tongue so hard it might bleed. When Donna, after being set off by Natalie’s hovering check-ins, drives her car through the wall of the house, our protagonist simply looks at a pile of cannoli on the table, then at his sister. He can’t stop this endless torrent of emotional turbulence, but he can use it someday. Forks come up twice more this season, and cannoli make another appearance, too. Carmy later describes telling his girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon) about the traumatic dinner, only to end up with the idea for a new, savory cannoli – a purposeful reclamation of a dish that reminds him of bad times.

That’s the beauty of “Fishes:” The episode doesn’t just give viewers misery for misery’s sake, or great acting for great acting’s sake. Instead, it brings us into Carmy’s world so that we can better understand the fire that forged him. In the next episode of the season, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) spends time at the award-winning restaurant where Carmy’s put-together cousin offered him a temporary escape over Christmas dinner. There, he’s tasked with washing fork after fork, and learns to see his dead cousin’s weapon of choice as a conduit for care and attention. In the eyes of this establishment, streaks on a fork, like a misspoken word at the Berzatto family dinner, could ruin a whole evening. By the finale, The Bear has a fork shortage, and the normally perfectionist team ends up requesting that one employee buy every fork he can find. At this moment, a fork is just a fork, and the Berzatto kids’ worst memories are just one piece of their relationship with food, which is healing and expanding in real time.

“Fishes” makes everything else about The Bear click into place, too. There’s a gulf between the high-anxiety kitchen Carmy started with, in which screaming was the norm and a non-zero number of coworkers got stabbed, and the vision he has for the place in Season 2. When we finally see that vision realized, it’s clear that it’s the antidote to the type of dysfunctional dinner Carmy grew up with. Research sheets on patrons’ allergies and preferences stand in stark contrast to so many unforgivable holiday season faux pas. Meals that arrive like clockwork counter a lifetime of dinners stretched out by spontaneous breakdowns. Every time we’ve seen Carmy at his most overwhelmed, it turns out he’s been struggling to make his own little corner of the world different from the one he grew up in. Eventually, he does, even if he can’t bring himself to enjoy it.

In lesser hands, it would be easy to dismiss “Fishes” as an indulgent acting showcase or a slice of prestigious misery porn, but The Bear’s writers clearly have much more in mind than that, and the performers carry the drama through to an elegant fever pitch. More importantly, it’s a showcase for the love Carmy, Richie, and Natalie want – and the love they’ll eventually have to build for themselves, one well-polished fork at a time. It’s the most jarringly intense episode of the series to date, but it’s also among the most heartfelt.