The Bear's Ending Works Because Of One Secret Ingredient

Don't fire any courses, call for "hands," or bellow "yes, Chef!" if you haven't watched the entirety of Season 5 of "The Bear," including the series finale. Full series spoilers ahead!

As of 9 p.m. EST on Thursday, June 25, "The Bear" has concluded its dinner service. Christopher Storer's high-octane series set in a restaurant — which is either a comedy or drama, depending on who you ask — wrapped up its run after dropping its entire fifth season on Hulu. I won't say that the final season, which earned a middle-of-the-road review from /Film's chief film critic Chris Evangelista, was perfect; not by any measure. The show's very last episode, "The Original Beef of Chicagoland," is also relatively uneven, save for one thing: Ebon Moss-Bacharach's Richie Jerimovich.

From the very beginning, Richie has been an indispensable part of "The Bear." As the best friend of the late Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal), the man whose death results in his younger brother Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) moving home to Chicago to help run Mikey's failing sandwich shop, Moss-Bacharach is electric as the volatile, wild-eyed, and hilarious Richie. As Carmy struggles under the weight of his own trauma and expectations as a chef and human being, Richie's trajectory is almost entirely positive. By the end of "The Bear," he grows into a better human being who's achieving dreams he never previously thought were possible.

By the time Season 5 of "The Bear" draws to a close, Carmy makes good on the promise that ended Season 4 and leaves not just the titular restaurant behind, but the entire restaurant industry. Richie, though? He's thriving. Richie was the secret ingredient to the success of "The Bear" all along, and the fact that the series ends on his face confirms that.

If you've been watching "The Bear" since it first premiered in 2022, you've known for years now that Richie — and, by extension, Ebon Moss-Bacharach's two-time Emmy-winning performance — is the beating heart of the entire series. If you're not on board the Richie train yet, allow me to welcome you on this journey by way of the show's all-time best episode: "Forks." This Season 2 standout is one of my favorite episodes of television of all time, and that's not just because it features an unbelievably well-deployed Taylor Swift needle drop. It's because "Forks" is a beautiful, tightly contained story that explains exactly how we get to Richie's ending.

Throughout Season 1 and most of Season 2 of "The Bear," it's fair to say that Richie's attitude straight-up stinks; he resents Carmy for coming in to "save" the sandwich shop known as The Beef, and he thinks fine dining is for snobs. Despite the fact that I do think Richie has a point about turning a really solid sandwich joint into a place vying for a Michelin star, I can't help but love "Forks," where he does a stage, or training period, at the fictional fine dining haven, Ever.

"Forks" is triumphant, victorious, and perfectly done, giving Richie the opportunity to see the true joy that an amazing dining experience can provide — and letting the audience experience it all through his evolution. If you go back and look at "Forks," you can pretty easily see how Richie, not Carmy, is the true center of "The Bear." That's because Richie's affection for his job grows as Carmy realizes he might no longer be in love with his career.

Throughout the final season of "The Bear," as the entire staff spends one harrowing and rainy day trying to keep the restaurant running — they're almost completely out of money, which results in a lack of literal resources and ingredients throughout Season 5 — Richie feels like a North Star for everyone else, which is wild when you consider that he was such a loose cannon during the famous one-take episode in Season 1 that Ayo Edebiri's Sydney Adamu lost her mind and stabbed him in the side. Richie keeps service running smoothly, even as he refuses to cancel reservations at Sydney's request — again, because they don't have enough food and endures setback after setback before learning, from Carmy's sister Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott), that he's been invited to attend a hospitality conference in Japan to learn even more about his craft.

In the very last moments of the very last episode of "The Bear," we see Carmy embark on a potential new career path, Sydney bask in the glow of not one but two Michelin stars awarded to the restaurant, and finally, Richie, nervous about his first-ever experience on an airplane. That's when we see a hand grab his, and it's Jess (Sarah Ramos), a colleague at Ever and The Bear who, clearly, becomes his girlfriend. (It's especially nice to see Richie lucky in love again after his clearly heartbreaking split from Gillian Jacobs' Tiffany, the mother of his child.) "The Bear" shrewdly decides that Richie, the character who grew the most without question, should be the focus of the final shot, because he was the umami that held this entire series together for its entire run.

"The Bear" is streaming on Hulu now.