‘The Bear’ Cracks Open Tina’s Emotional Origin Story

This post contains spoilers for the sixth episode of The Bear Season Three. The entire season is now streaming on Hulu.

“You know how much I loved him, right?”

“How much?”

“A lot. I loved him a lot”

This was Tina and Carmy talking about Carmy’s late brother — and Tina’s former employer — Mikey, in the Season One finale of The Bear. Though Carmy was the blood relation, Mikey was practically family to Tina, and she defended his memory accordingly. When Carmy and Sydney began instituting changes at The Original Beef of Chicagoland, everyone in the kitchen pushed back, but Tina most of all. She pretended she couldn’t speak English to avoid following Sydney’s instructions, and often stared daggers at her young new colleagues. Her journey towards accepting the new way of doing things was in many ways the first season’s most necessary character arc, because if Carmy’s food could win over even Tina, then he had to be every bit the genius that the show claimed.

Still, when it came to Mikey Berzatto, the first two Bear seasons focused more on the feelings of the people who knew him the longest: Carmy, their sister Natalie, other members of the family like their mother Didi, and best friend Richie. We know why they loved him a lot, but with Tina we mostly had to take it on her word, and on Liza Colón-Zayas’ steely performance in the role.

This year’s sixth episode, “Napkins,” not only gives Colón-Zayas her first solo spotlight, but finally fills in this emotional blank. And in the process, it gives us the single best Bear scene of Season Three.

Mikey (Jon Bernthal) doesn’t appear at all until relatively late in the episode, a flashback set several years before the events of Season One. Tina is 46 years old, happily married to David (played by Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband, David Zayas), and 15 years into a steady job working in payroll for a candy company. But their rent has just skyrocketed, the promotion David’s been waiting on in his job as a doorman seems like it will never come, and Tina loses her job in a round of layoffs. The workforce has little interest in a woman of a certain age, even after she figures out how to use LinkedIn, and much of “Napkins” turns into the tale of Sisyphus, with Tina rolling her resumes uphill every day, getting ignored, and having to start from the bottom again the next day.

Then good fortune strikes — just not in the way she thinks it has. She finally learns about an open interview opportunity, only to arrive to find the position has already filled. At wit’s end, convinced she has outlived her usefulness, and seeing that her bus home is running late, she wanders into the nearest place she can find to get a cup of coffee: the Beef. This is the version of the Beef that Richie so wistfully described in Season One: unpretentious, filled with good humor and more than a little knuckleheaded behavior. (Completely in his original element, it is the happiest we’ve ever seen Richie outside of when he blasted Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” in his car late in Season Two.) Tina gets her coffee and a bonus: a free Italian beef sandwich that someone else forgot to pick up. She carries it into the dining room, and there is Mikey Berzatto himself, playing Ballbreaker, the arcade game that caused so many problems in the series’ early episodes, against Neil Fak. 

Ayo Edebiri, in her directorial debut, presents the early part this scene with Tina in focus and Mikey, Richie, and Neil goofing around on the edge of the frame. They’re the ones talking, but this is her story, and she’s oblivious to everything but despair over her own perceived obsolescence. She begins to cry, and the guys eventually notice the thing happening in the room that they should actually be paying attention to. Because this is Richie and Neil before they began wearing suits, they have no idea what to do here, so it’s of course left to Mikey — the guy everyone connected with the Beef admires — to step in to help this diner in distress.

What follows is a conversation that lasts for roughly 10 minutes, which even in the streaming era is an eternity for a TV scene. But Edebiri, Colón-Zayas, Bernthal, and writer Catherine Schetina more than earn the expanded time.

In the past, The Bear has been judicious in its use of Mikey. Jon Bernthal is among the busiest actors alive. But just as importantly, Mikey is presented as such a larger-than-life figure for Carmy, Richie, Natalie, Tina, and everyone who knew him that the more we see of him, the greater the risk that he won’t live up to the legend. Here, he does. It’s not that he comes across as some superhumanly wise figure. It’s just how at ease he seems with himself — an impressive front, given what we know of the demons that ultimately consumed him — and how he manages to pull Tina out of her spiral by simply paying attention to her and trying to engage with her on a human level. He’s smart enough to recognize, for instance, that the best approach is to open up first about his lousy day, rather than making her start talking about her own. By the time he’s done describing the Beef’s latest plumbing disaster, she’s incredibly charmed — Bernthal would have chemistry with a deli slicer — and can for a moment relate to someone else’s misery instead of wallowing in hers.

There’s no grand plan here — just a guy reaching out and talking, making a human connection by any means necessary. Though Carmy’s half a world away in Copenhagen, he provides an inadvertent assist by texting Mikey a picture from René Redzepi’s idea board at Noma (as seen in the season premiere). The photo allows these two strangers to bond over their utter confusion over what it is, but it also gives Mikey a new subject to discuss, at a moment when he knows that he has to keep talking long enough to pull this stranger back from the abyss. We know that Carmy idolized his brother, but here, Mikey describes Carmy as the aspirational figure: someone living the dream of not only knowing exactly what he wants to do with his life, but being great at it. Mikey doesn’t have that. He runs the Beef just because somebody had to when their father skipped town. There’s satisfaction in it some of the time, particularly as he’s come to realize that special moments in life, “they always happen around food,” but it’s not a passion of his. Dreams are for other people, he realized at a young age, in a story that’s extra heartbreaking because we can wonder whether getting to live his own dream might have eased the burden that eventually caused Mikey to take his own life. But that’s in his too-short future. In the moment, he doesn’t have a dream; he has a job, and he seems O.K. with it.

And conveniently, a job is exactly what Tina needs in this moment. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing someone else might dream about. A job. “I don’t need to be inspired,” she tells this kind stranger. “I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world. I just need to feed my kids.” The wonderful thing, of course, is that we know that Tina eventually did get inspired — that working with Carmy and Sydney kindled a flame she wasn’t aware existed inside her. But here, now, she just needs the money, and to feel useful, and Mikey gives her an opportunity for that.

Throughout the earlier parts of “Napkins,” we see Tina proudly talking about her resume, only to be dismissed by all the young gatekeepers who consider the idea of a paper resume to be something from the Dark Ages. (Her resentment and envy of these people also informs her early interactions with Sydney in Season One.) After Mikey talks about her working at the Beef, she offers to give him a copy of that resume, and is once again rebuffed. But this is very different than the other times, because Mikey is engaging with Tina as a person, rather than seeing her as a pushy inconvenience to his day. He likes her, feels sympathetic towards her, and he needs the help anyway. The others don’t care about Tina’s resume because they don’t care about her, and view her insistence on mentioning it as yet another reason to condescend to her. Mikey doesn’t care because he already wants her to take the job, and the document is besides the point. Where previous responses to the resume made Tina shrink into herself, Mikey’s rejection of it instead becomes a joke between two people who are clearly going to be great, great friends.

The scene ends with Mikey getting back to work, and Tina finally taking a bite of the free sandwich. It tastes incredible, as much for what it represents as for the quality of the meat itself. When she goes home to David that night, she has an Original Beef T-shirt tucked into her purse, a new uniform for an exciting new life. She just has no idea how much more exciting that life will get, and how much better the food she’ll get to make will be when she finally meets the guy who texted that confusing photo to Mikey. For now, though, she has employment, and purpose, and a new boss whom she’ll quickly grow to love, and whose legacy she’ll defend as fiercely as anyone at that place. And now we understand exactly why.