Entertainment
‘The Bear’s Surprise Prequel Reframes the Entire Series in the Best Way Possible
Although The Bear is all about pressure, chaos, and avoiding emotions through various means, the portrayal of Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal) is surprisingly restrained. The series begins following Mikey’s death; however, his presence is felt throughout each season, like smoke trapped inside walls. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) spends years trying to outrun him, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) clings to him, and Sugar (Abby Elliott) seems exhausted by the sheer weight of remembering him, yet despite how central Mikey is to the emotional architecture of the show, The Bear has always kept viewers at a distance from the actual person underneath the mythology.
This disconnect is what makes “Gary” such a smart piece of storytelling. On the surface, the surprise prequel episode is deceptively simple: Richie and Mikey drive out to Gary, Indiana, for a delivery job years before the events of Season 1. They waste time, get drunk, do cocaine, wander into a bar, and slowly spiral into the kind of ugly emotional confrontation both men were probably always heading toward. Plot-wise, very little actually happens. Emotionally, though, “Gary” changes almost everything. Because for the first time, The Bear stops treating Mikey like a memory and starts treating him like a person.
‘Gary’ Changes How We Understand Richie’s Anger in ‘The Bear’
Richie has always been one of the show’s most emotionally revealing characters, even when he’s actively trying not to be. From the beginning, his hostility toward Carmy carried a strange intensity that went beyond simple resentment. Yes, Carmy left Chicago while Richie stayed behind to deal with the implosion of The Beef and Mikey’s decline, but The Bear often hinted that Richie’s anger came from somewhere deeper than abandonment. “Gary” finally clarifies what that deeper wound actually is.
The episode exposes that Richie understood Mikey’s deterioration far more clearly than the series initially let on. He notices the mood swings, the self-destructive behavior, the flashes of cruelty hidden inside the charisma. Richie spends most of “Gary” trying to keep Mikey stable and preserve the version of their friendship that still feels salvageable, even as Mikey repeatedly sabotages the day. That dynamic completely reframes Richie’s behavior in Seasons 1 and 2. His volatility no longer reads as simple immaturity or resistance to change, but as exhaustion. Richie was, in addition to doing so after Mikey’s death, also grieving him while he was still alive.
One of the cruelest realities of addiction and mental illness is that grief rarely begins at the moment of loss. Sometimes it begins years earlier, in small moments; people try to excuse it away or survive through it, and “Gary” plays into this idea. By the time Mikey humiliates Richie in the bar, mocking his future as a father and predicting he’ll fail his child, the scene lands like the inevitable collapse of a relationship Richie has been desperately trying to hold together alone, and yet Richie still leaves space for him. The episode makes it painfully clear why Richie struggled so deeply to let Mikey go, and why Carmy became such an easy target for the unresolved anger left behind.
Mikey Finally Feels Like More Than a Ghost
The Bear has always excelled at building characters through absence. Long before viewers properly met Mikey, they already understood his impact. The restaurant existed because of him, Carmy’s guilt revolved around him, Richie’s identity depended on him; even episodes like “Fishes” presented Mikey less as a stable person than as an emotional force capable of energizing or detonating an entire room. “Gary” is the first time the show really allows him to exist without the framing device of family chaos or collective memory.
Bernthal plays Mikey with an exhausting emotional unpredictability that explains why everyone around him loved him so fiercely, even as they struggled to survive him. He’s magnetic throughout the episode, especially in quieter moments where his warmth feels genuine rather than performative. His conversations drift between hilarious, intimate, cruel, vulnerable, and self-destructive, sometimes within the same scene.
The bathroom monologue about Donna Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis) is especially revealing, exposing the emotional contradiction at the center of Mikey’s entire personality. He remembers his mother comforting him as a child, scratching his back, and reassuring him about the next day, only to later erupt into anger without warning. Mikey describes the confusion of realizing both versions of her were real at the same time.
Carmy’s anxiety, Sugar’s hypervigilance, Mikey’s instability — all of it suddenly feels connected through the same inherited emotional volatility. The Bear has always explored generational trauma, but “Gary” sharpens the picture by showing how deeply that instability shaped Mikey long before the series began. In doing so, the episode transforms him from a symbolic tragedy into something far more difficult: a fully recognizable person.
‘Gary’ Makes ‘The Bear’ Ending Feel Much Sadder
The most interesting thing about “Gary” is that it changes the emotional framing of the series heading into what’s expected to be its final season. A lesser show would use a surprise prequel to explain plot mechanics or tease future twists, while The Bear used it to revisit emotional damage that never fully healed in the first place.
The reason it works so well at the end is that Richie is alone in his car when he is struck by an oncoming vehicle. This is a thematic representation of how no one in this story truly escapes the traumatic events of their lives. Although The Bear is known as a restaurant drama, it has never really been about food; it has always been more about how the kitchen is a pressure cooker for unresolved grief, guilt, shame, and resentment – all of which can no longer be ignored once the kitchen is no longer available. “Gary” supports this by showing that the emotional chaos in The Bear existed before Carmy came back.
More importantly, it reveals that the tragedy of Mikey Berzatto wasn’t confined to his death. The people around him had already been slowly breaking under the weight of loving him for years. “Gary” is an effective prequel in that it doesn’t overwrite The Bear or dramatically alter its story. Instead, it deepens the emotional logic underneath everything the series has already done. Scenes that once played as anger now feel like grief, moments that looked like resistance now read as fear. Richie’s inability to move forward becomes inseparable from the fact that part of him never really left that car ride with Mikey in the first place. And somehow, a show that was already devastating becomes even harder to shake afterward.
The Bear‘s final season will air on June 25.
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