#David Fielding

[jolteonmchale]

The Bear 3.10 "Forever"

[expelliarmus]

[raggedy-spaceman]

s02e05 The Ball

I'm so happy season 2 ended here and nothing else happened whatsoever!

[kaphzzz]

kisses under the shade

[amtrak-official]

When I say gay people in my phone, I am not referring to tumblr, I am referring to these guys

[penelopepitstopp]

Had a go at some Taskmaster x The Onion headlines, inspired by these posts 1, 2, from the original mastermind @pandaroboto

[suzypfonne]

Identifying Ethereal, Occult, and Celestial Beings - Field Notes:

Name: [redacted], Crawley, Crowley

Alias(es): Bildad the Shuite, Anthony J Crowley, Nanny Ashtoreth, David Tennant

Species: Angel Serpent of Eden Demon

Date of Creation: Before the Beginning

Date of Destruction: 2019 cancelled

Occupation: tempter temptress retired

Height: 6' 1" unless snake

Hair color: autumn-leaf-red, cherry-cordial-red unless snake

Eye color: pretty

Physical Description: angel snake humanoid flexible

Identifying Features: sunglasses; black exterior, with red accents; freckles, unless snake; refuses to obey gravity mavity

Relationship Status: single smitten divorced it's complicated

Diet: espresso and quite extraordinary amounts of alcohol

Gender: whatever is most inconvenient for the greatest number of people

Pronouns: any

Sexuality: Azisexual

Religion: Aziraphalean he doesn't have faith in much, but he has faith in his angel

[whenmemorydies]

This needs to get good or go away.

Having watched all of season 3 of The Bear, Carmy's epic spiral in 1x07 The Review makes so much more sense now. Let's take a look.

Recall Sydney's Cola-Braised Short Rib & Risotto dish from 1x06 Ceres, which she asks Carm to try:

Carmy tells Syd the dish, while tremendous, is not ready to be rolled out as part of The Beef's menu:

Now at Eleven Madison Park, where Carmy was CDC before returning back to Chicago to take over The Beef, when Carmy produced a dish that his EC (Joel McHale as psychopath, Chef David Fields) didn't think was ready, he was berated and abused for it:

Carmy would then be made to THROW AWAY the food he had made:

This is because in Chef Field's kitchen, the food needs to get good or go away:

Note: This particular brand of abuse by Chef Fields almost certainly set the stage for the COLOSSAL waste of food we kept seeing in season 3 as Carmy chucked "not perfect" dish after dish into the trash. He was reverting to learned patterns of behaviour picked up under Fields at EMP in his feral pursuit of a star at The Bear.

Alright, so I think we can establish that in Carmy's experience, there's no serving food to patrons where the EC doesn't think that food is ready to go out. Even if this means huge amounts of perfectly edible and probably delicious food gets chucked in the bin.

But what does Sydney do in 1x06 with her tremendous but "not ready" dish of Cola-braised short ribs with risotto, of which she has an extra plate? She sends it out to a patron. Because Sydney Adamu Does. Not. Waste. Food! (a woman after my mother's heart):

She even tells Carmy that she didn't want to waste the food in the next episode, 1x07 The Review, when we find out (along with Sydney) that the patron she gave her dish to was a food critic who wrote a glowing review about The Beef, and made special mention of Syd's dish in particular (note: this is the same review that Syd has stuck to her fridge door in 3x10 Forever):

Now Carmy plays the review and the fact that Sydney's dish made it out of the kitchen off here. He insists "its all good" but this lasts for about a second before he drops this petty, passive-aggressive barb:

And then as most people know by now, the kitchen rapidly descends into chaos when we come to realise that Sydney accidentally left The Beef's online pre-order option open, resulting in a huge number of orders that the crew could not reasonably be expected to fill. While this is happening, Carmy begins to spiral. He starts berating Sydney:

And then we get it, the moment Carmy snaps to EMP, Chef Fields and Michelin Mode:

Of course, Sydney asks the question that we're all thinking:

Because really, the short rib and risotto dish has nothing to do with the pre-order fiasco...but Carm is in the middle of a spiral here.

He is off kilter, triggered by Sydney sending out a dish he deemed was "not ready" and a new system they've tried to implement now blowing up in their faces. When Sydney asks Carmen what her Cola-braised short rib and risotto dish has to do with the pre-order issue, Carm yells at her:

Chef, stop!

Then Sydney does her best to try and manage expo but at this point, Carmy is taking anyone speaking to him as an act of insubordination. His need to regain control is so great at this point in the episode that he blows up at Sydney in a moment that is still hard for me to watch:

As I said at the start of this post, seeing the windows into Carmy's culinary (and familial) ancestry across all 3 seasons of The Bear has contextualised Carmy's breakdown in 1x07 that much better for me. Key to this context is control and agency.

@chaoswillcalmusdown and I talked here about how important a lack of control is in driving much of Carmy's actions, particularly in the context of being locked in the walk-in at the end of season 2. I think this obviously holds for season 1 as well.

Carmy's history of trauma, particularly as the child of an addict, means that he has grown up feeling powerless and fearful in the one place where he was meant to feel safe and secure: his home.

This fear was felt by all the Berzatto kids. In 3x08 Ice Chips, Carm's sister Natalie tells their mother, Donna, that the latter scared all of her children and that this is something Natalie doesn't want for her own unborn child.

In his Al-Anon monologue in 1x08 Braciole, Carm also discloses a number of other instances where he felt powerless, including as an adolescent at school and later in his relationship with his brother Mikey:

Carm wanted desperately for a relationship with his oldest brother but the latter's addiction and mental health issues meant that Carm was kept at a distance. Mikey's death by suicide would have been another foundational trauma for Carmy: an event he could not have controlled at all but, had he been able to, would have tried to change with everything in his power in order to avoid losing the only father figure he's ever really known.

Now, add to all of this: Carmy's experience at EMP working under an Executive Chef who seems to get off on inducing a perpetual state of fear and powerlessness in his staff. We see from Carmy's flashbacks throughout the series that at EMP, he never speaks back to Chef Fields despite the latter's incessant verbal and psychological abuse. The ONLY time we see Carmen challenge Fields is when he makes the decision to sub out his EC's choice of fennel soubise for blood orange in a hamachi dish - a dish that eventually will make its way to Sydney Adamu. But even this challenge by Carmy is oblique, one that doesn't involve direct confrontation of Fields himself. In fact, as far as we know, Fields never finds out about Carm's act of insubordination.

Where folks have experienced repeated or chronic trauma like Carmy has throughout his life, a common coping mechanism is to try and assert control wherever possible. This reflex is an attempt to claw back some of the powerlessness that traumatic incidents have taken away. We've seen Carmy do this most profoundly throughout season 3. But this is also what has been happening all along in the show, including in ep 1x07.

Here at The Beef where Carm was in effect EC, his sous, Sydney, challenged him by sending out a dish he said wasn't ready. She does what he did at EMP but the difference is, here Carmy finds out about it. And then, as the kitchen descends into chaos because of the pre-order fiasco, Carmy ROARS. He doesn't stop to think about how similar Sydney is to him in their rebellions. Or that it makes sense to not waste perfectly good food. Instead, he lets the bear out of its cage in an attempt to scare everyone in his vicinity into submission. He channels the most recent mentor he's had - the one whose abuse would have literally altered Carmy's brain chemistry and behavioural instincts (because thats what trauma does to us) - in order to assert control and avoid, at all costs, that familiar feeling of powerlessness.

All of the above is not to say that Carmy's behaviour in 1x07 (or 3x03 or 3x09 etc) was acceptable. It wasn't. Carmy even recognised this in 1x08 when he apologises to Syd via text:

Later in that same episode, Carmy offers to start The Bear with Sydney: a peace offering and a commitment to their relationship.

We got none of this remorse or show of contrition from Carmy in season 3, which I think has contributed to why the most recent season of The Bear has divided audiences. But given the events of 3x10, I suspect these things are going to come from Carmy in the next season. I also note this interview with co-show runner Joanna Calo where she says (about depicting trauma and recovery on the show):

[I]f you're going to change, its probably temporary [...] or if you do actually change, it takes a while.

[...]

[c]hange is gradual and you do, you go back and forth [...] You make gains in one way but then when its actually tested in another, you realise you actually aren't fixed at all [...] and that felt like a real thing that we knew we wanted to explore.

Watching this interview after season 3 was reassuring. It contextualised a lot of Carmy's behaviour as regression, given his past trauma. This leaves room for the next season of the show to explore what happens after Carmy realises the cost of his regression - on himself and his loved ones. And hopefully we then get more steps forward than backwards in his recovery. Hopefully, we get less perfection (which itself is an attempt at control) and more joyful, loving mess.

[jareckiworld]

Olaf Bisschoff — The Sea of Ice (Caspar David Friedrich, 1824) [oil on board, 2021]

[isagrimorie]

Criminal Minds Evolution 17x05 - Conspiracy vs Theory

"Ever since I was arrested, I have sold out every value I've held dear. And when you do that, it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between a 'conspiracy' and a conspiracy theory."

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Shax: Was it always this easy?

Crowley: Easy?

Shax: I keep planning complicated strategic strikes to spread misery and panic among the humans. And just as I'm about to put one into motion, they come up with something themselves, which is so much worse than anything I could've thought of.

Crowley: Yeah, always this easy.

[jolteonmchale]

The Bear 3.10 "Forever"

[panelshowsource]

if david and victoria told you to jump off a bridge would you— yes. next question.

[emotinalsupportturtle]

whenever I feel sad, overwhelmed, stressed or plain disgusted with life I watch some unhinged British TV (especially comedy panels and shows)

No cure like that

*warning - obsession with comedy shows has been revived

[ruinedholograms]

David Byrne & Brian Eno (1980)

[latenightsundayblues]

Give it up for adam faulkner everybody

He's been saving up money for the last two weeks so he could finally buy a cup of name-brand coffee that actually tastes good. It was supposed to be his lunch