I Want To Eat The Scallop

thoughts on season four of The Bear

Jul 01, 2025

The Bear is a show about family, both family related by blood and family created by other non-organic material. It’s a show about how sometimes the bonds developed by that second category can become stronger than the ones in the first, and how that’s okay, and how important it is to keep the people you care about close, even when it’s hard. It is also, in a way that ties all of that together, a show about food. The food often looks very good. Chef Syd, played by Ayo Edebiri, made a scallop at the beginning of one episode in the recently released fourth season that I’ve been thinking about for days now.

But the food is not the point, really. The food serves as a vessel to explore the relationships and how they build, crumble, and rebuild throughout the show. The fourth season did a better job at depicting this, which was nice after a third scallop that kind of meandered a bit. There was an hour-long, cameo-laden episode at a wedding that was just one profound conversation after another, sometimes under a table that was apparently the size of a circus tent, with Richie and Carmy and Sugar all coming to realizations about how to move on or move through after things got weird. It was an excellent use of a wedding episode. It forced everyone together to deal with their stuff. Weddings can be good for that.

Wait. Hold on. Did I say “third scallop” in that paragraph instead of “third season”? Okay, wow. Yeah, that’s my bad. I guess I’m still thinking about that scallop Syd made. It just looked so perfect, both in the formal display up there at the top of this article and in this screencap from the little montage where she was cooking it.

What a good locking scallop. Anyway, sorry. I’ll try to focus now.

These kinds of conversations are the ones The Bear prides itself on, the deep ones that start slow and take a turn midway where things get much better or much, much worse. Richie is my favorite at these moments. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays him with such a raw intensity — charisma and fire, for better and worse, the most charming man alive who can’t help but sabotage himself sometimes — that it makes the character deeply captivating, whether he’s tearing himself apart over his daughter’s new stepdad or giving sweet little pep talks to the people around him. He, like everyone on the show, is trying to have his heart in the right place even as his brain tries to okay, look, I’m gonna be honest with you… I’m still thinking about the scallop.

I just want to pop the whole thing into my mouth. One bite. GOMPH. Right in there. I know that’s not how you’re supposed to eat a fancy scallop. I know you’re supposed to cut it and take little bites and savor all the delicate and layered flavors the chef painstakingly added through the cooking process, but I can’t help it. I want to pick it up with my hand and shove it into my big dumb face and then sit there with both cheeks full of hot scallop and pink foam dripping off my chin and fingers as I mumble “oh my gah guysh isso goot” as the people around look on in horror at what a barbarian I am. Kind of the way Carmy reacted, but with like 200 percent more Labrador Retriever.

Speaking of Carmy, without spoiling the final episode too much for people who haven’t gotten there yet, I’m… wondering where he goes from here. That last episode was a ride, all tension and naked emotion and cigarettes — it’s still insane that this show is categorized as a comedy, but Ayo Edebiri trying and failing to smoke a cigarette was hilarious and something the scene needed desperately to cut through the intensity — that culminated in a moment that could change everything going forw-… nope, still thinking about the scallop.

Let me have it.

Let me have the scallop.

Not “a scallop like the one Syd made.”

Not “the recipe for the scallop Syd made.”

That scallop.

The one on the screen.

Invent a technology that allows me to reach into the screen and pull the scallop out and put it into my mouth.

It’s the only way I will be able to focus.

If I’ve already eaten the scallop.

Please.

I’m supposed to be writing about the show.

I need to do my job.

But the scallop.

I want it.

I want to eat the scallop.

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— speaking of The Bear, Vulture put together this useful guide to the sprawling and tangled family tree on the show

— good blog with a good headline, from Defector: “Simply Don’t Be A Shithead”

— another good blog with a good headline, also from Defector: "Just Give Me Some Normal Damn Dinosaurs”

— Jack McCallum wrote about the legacy of Gregg Popovich

— the NYT revealed its list of the best movies of the 21st century (so far) (obviously), which is great and all, but my favorite part was how they let everyone submit their own ballot, which led to a bunch of people I follow on social media posting screenshots of their picks and reminding me how much I liked a lot of movies I forgot about, and then led to existential panic as I made my list (posted below) and considered things like “do I pick ‘best’ like technical and artistic achievements or ‘best’ like my personal favorites?” and “how do I rate a movie that came out recently if I don’t know how it will hold up to time and rewatches?” and “HOW DID OUT OF SIGHT COME OUT IN 1998?????”

— Vin Diesel wants to bring back Paul Walker’s character for the final Fast & Furious movie, which seems like a terrible idea unless they do it the way Seinfeld did appearances by George Steinbrenner

— Doctor Odyssey is somehow both canceled and not canceled right now

— I appreciate that Matt Reeves writes as slowly as I do

— Always Sunny has been around so long that its creators originally sold the show with a VHS, according to this book excerpt at The AV Club

— absolutely brutal Pitchfork review of Benson Boone’s new album

— Vinny’s not gonna do the movie (timely Entourage joke)

— learned about pink cocaine

— learned more about Lafufus

— koi heist

— $100,000 bull semen heist

— please televise the competitive eating contest for goats

— hell yeah, Philly is getting a WNBA team

— yes, I will watch the silly apocalypse movie from Lord and Miller that stars Ryan Gosling as a scruffy and confused amateur spaceman