#watching carmy yearn for and/or frantically try to fix a shallow relationship for multiple episodes will be both grueling and boring

[unlikelyjapan]

Finales for Michael + Claire

Yo - someone has already broken down that the last/second-last images in each season finale were basically the same, right?

At any rate, I'm going do it again, because my tiny brain only mashed these two things together today. Apologies for the lack of stills.

We have flashback Mikey looking at Carmen reverently in sunlight-sepia hues at the close of season 1, then a big smile, hot on the heels of Carmy genuinely connecting with everyone at family meal - it lets Mikey's belief in his brother linger over the finale, a sense of continuation and partial closure.

The quixotic part of Radiohead's Letdown blasts us off to the credits. IMO, it was one of the most hopeful and tenderhearted moments in TV history.

In the season 2 finale we have flashback Claire, sepia-hued with her coy smile immediately cutting to a dejected Carmy in the walk-in as the welder creates "fireworks" akin to what we see behind them in Pop. There's a sense of continuation, but no closure - it just tells the audience to settle in for more regression in S3, just as we thought we were out of the woods with that experiment.

Michael Stipe walks us out with "Go it alone and haul it along" before it cuts to Syd, proud and abandoned, the song progressing into the credits.

I always felt like that last, longing look from Claire was the biggest crotch-kick from the Storer universe - it felt like an erasure of all the progress and connecting-of-dots that Carmy was working out throughout the latter half of the season, and I guess that's the material point of it all.

Maybe we have to watch this man chase familial myths and phantoms for another season, to the detriment of The Bear, his happiness, his earnest relationship with Syd, and everyone else around him. I'm not sure if he'll actually try to repair things with Claire in a fit of desperation/self-doubt, but it seems like she'll haunt him through his inevitable breakdown at a minimum.

I'm curious about how the writers engineer this without the audience feeling perpetually flogged. I also wonder how they will manage to empower Syd until Carmy starts putting shit together again.

I wish I had more endearing sydcarmy parallels to offer here tonight, but this was eating at me and now someone in the fandom needs to talk me off a ledge.