Does Carmy Really Quit Cooking and Become an Architect in The Bear? Well, There’s a Bit More to It.

The following story contains spoilers for season 5 of The Bear.

THERE WERE A lot of moments in The Bear’s series finale that were relatively easy to predict: After exchanging little pointed looks over the course of three seasons, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Jess (Sarah Ramos) finally wound up together, and Richie’s arc—one of the most satisfying a TV character has had, period—wrapped with the guy who once considered the 40-minute drive from Chicago to Gary to be an exotic voyage (as depicted in the standout “Gary” flashback episode) headed across the world to Japan for a fancy hospitality conference. Despite its financial troubles, The Bear lived to see another day, and, of course, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) finally got the Michelin stars they’ve been dreaming of since they first got their sauce-covered hands on a large sum of cash and decided to flip the sandwich shop into a fine dining establishment at the end of the show’s first season.

There was one big question, however, that lingered over The Bear’s entire final season, and was a little trickier to resolve: Is Carmy really going to quit cooking, and if so, what the hell is he going to do for a living?

The show’s answer was…ambiguous. After he explains to Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) earlier in the final episode that he has to leave The Bear because “to break patterns, you have to break patterns,” we see Carmy in the Loop, clad in a suit and hustling to some mysterious appointment accompanied by his cousin-in-law Stevie (John Mulaney). (Did Stevie fly in from New York specifically to escort Carmy to a job interview? Did he just happen to be in town? We’ll never know.) Stevie coaches him by reminding him that “You have a strange job with a lot of strange, off-putting people. You’ve got loads of stories…You’ve gotta lean into it. You’ve got stories and trauma and darkness and food. People love it.”

The implication is that Carmy is going to wind up pitching a book, or maybe even a TV show called The Bear, and on a lesser show, that might actually happen. Instead, it’s a bait-and-switch, and after the woman interviewing him—played by Bonnie Hunt, one more Chicago native for the show to squeeze into a cameo under the wire—asks him what he hopes to accomplish next, Carmy delivers a long, affectionate monologue about his time in the kitchen. “I think what I meant when I asked was what are you hoping to achieve or explore here, as an intern at an architecture firm?” she responds after a beat. Wait, what?

Wait a minute. Is Carmy really going to become an architect?

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why it’s safe to assume Carmy is not going to become an architect: For one, he bombed the interview. (Don’t listen to Stevie; stories and trauma and darkness and food are not how you land an internship drawing up blueprints.) He has spent his entire adult life in restaurants, he has no college degree or other relevant experience, and, as the show established in a running gag, he is very bad at math. But most glaringly, he can’t articulate a single thing about the field that appeals to him, because his heart is still at The Bear.

Reflecting on the chaotic service from the previous episode, Carmy tells his patient interviewer, “I would have survived, but I would have made it unpleasant because that’s the way the job had made me feel—that’s the way I had made myself feel, because I think a lot of time there’s all this stuff going on internally, because a lot of the time it is a shitshow in my brain. And this service, everybody cared so much and everybody tried so hard and everybody loved so much, and it didn’t feel like one person trying to survive. It felt like a group of people supporting each other, trying to lift each other up. And as crazy as it got, and it did get crazy, and as out of control as it could have gotten, it never did. And just getting to watch everybody just like score, that was so great. Like, even though it sucked, it was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

The scene isn’t meant to be a glimpse of Carmy’s future—it’s meant to show him coming to terms with his past. We get to see the chef realize in real time what he loves about his craft, and White plays it brilliantly, tripping on the word “supporting” as if it’s a concept still relatively foreign to Carmy; his voice quivers, and one eyebrow inches up ever so slightly, as if the word and idea are both hitting him for the first time.

So, what does Carmy actually do next?

Are we really supposed to believe that after an epiphany like that he just…walks away? Our last peek at Carmy is in his office at The Bear; he assures his late brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) that he’s “all good” via text, admires all the photos of the meals he and his team created that adorn the walls, and nods to himself before closing his eyes, exhaling, and allowing the corners of his lips to creep up into a tiny, relieved smile.

In some ways, it felt similar to the smile we got from Don Draper at the end of Mad Men before the cut to the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” jingle from 1971. The implication there was that after shocking his colleagues by cold-quitting, taking a cross-country road trip and exorcising some of his demons in therapy at a spiritual retreat, Don eventually returns to McCann Erickson and uses his newfound peace and self-awareness to create one of the most iconic ads of all time. Depending on how you look at it, that may be a slightly more cynical ending than Carmy’s, but there’s something thrilling about the realization that Don Draper communing with hippies is just as outrageous as Michael Jordan playing baseball or Carmy Berzatto becoming an architect. Maybe, at the end of the day, they all just needed a bit of a breather to figure themselves out.

There’s beauty in watching someone be great at something, whether it’s Carmy making lamb tonnato or Jeremy Allen White making our hearts stop with the ways he contorts his face into panic as that dish tumbles to the floor. Our favorite anxiety-ridden chef has finally realized that he’s not cut out for the pressures of leadership, and now that his restaurant has earned its stars, he’s got nothing left to prove. But is there a world where he’s back at The Bear in a reduced capacity, chopping onions for the love of the game? We’ll never know for sure; White recently told the Los Angeles Times that he “tried to play that scene in a way where I didn’t want it to be entirely clear.” But whatever Carmy’s future holds, you can bet it doesn’t include a successful pivot to architecture.

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