The Bear’s Suitcases

Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photos: FX

“Honeydew,” the fourth episode of The Bear’s second season, diverges from restaurant-renovation chaos to follow budding pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) to Copenhagen as he studies under Carmy’s former colleague Luca (Will Poulter). The half-hour sees Marcus brainstorm recipes on a houseboat, practice the precise plating of fancy pudding dishes in a gleaming kitchen, and experience a new culture that fires the creative synapses in his brain.

It’s tempting to witness the single focus of “Honeydew” and deem it a bottle episode. One might be inclined to use the same term to describe “Forks,” a later episode centered on Richie’s experience staging at Chicago’s most celebrated restaurant, overseen by Carmy’s mentor, Chef Terry (Olivia Colman). But these episodes are not bottle episodes; they fall into a category previously defined by Vulture as “departure episodes” — “self-contained installments of a TV series that depart from the established norms of how that TV series operates.” That’s a broad umbrella that includes flashback episodes (The Bear’s “Fishes” fits into this category), musical episodes, and, yes, bottle episodes, a form originally created to save money by stripping a narrative down to its essential (and least expensive) elements.

According to its most traditional definition, a bottle episode unfolds on a preexisting set and zeroes in on only one or two principal characters. “Honeydew” and “Forks” may appear to be bottle episodes because they are (a) contained to mostly one overall setting and (b) primarily concerned with one of the show’s main characters, respectively. But neither “Honeydew” nor “Forks” unfolds on a single set or, more importantly, comes across as a less expensively produced piece of television. (Filming on location in Copenhagen: not exactly a cost-cutting measure!) These wonderfully observant half-hours of television fit perfectly into another subgenre of the departure episode. We’re calling it the suitcase episode.

The name comes from Mad Men’s “The Suitcase,” a season-four classic that bonds Don and Peggy while they work on the Samsonite luggage account through the night. The episode is contained from a time perspective, but, unlike a bottle episode, not by setting — there are scenes between Don and Peggy at the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office as well as a restaurant and a bar, and ancillary scenes involving other characters appear, though they directly relate back to Peggy and Don. The focus remains primarily on the two most pivotal figures in the Mad Men universe as they learn things about each other’s personal lives that illuminate their understanding of the other person and themselves.

This is crucial to the suitcase episode: It dives deeply into the internal psychology of one or two characters in ways that illuminate the broader themes of the series, even though format-wise, it feels separate from the rest of the season. “The Panic in Central Park,” a season-five Girls episode that follows Marnie during a spontaneous day-long hangout with ex-boyfriend Charlie, is a suitcase since both characters reacquaint themselves with each other and the experience clarifies Marnie’s desire to end her marriage. The Masters of None season-one episode “Nashville,” in which Dev and Rachel spend their first date on a weekend trip to the Tennessee city, is a suitcase, too, because it’s invested in revelations about these two characters and how they fall in love, a central interest of the series.

Like any great suitcase episode, “Honeydew” and “Forks” are deliberately structured to mirror the mindsets and experiences of Marcus and Richie at this moment. Just like Peggy and Don, these guys are feeling boxed in: Marcus by the pressures of caring for his ailing mother, Richie by his lack of purpose and the perception that Carmy and his colleagues don’t respect him. Those feelings are reflected in the sense of confinement that permeates these episodes, capturing the characters’ isolation and the attention these men, one young and just beginning his career, the other older and seeking reinvention, bring to their assignments. Each of these chapters slows down The Bear’s sometimes frantic pace and uses hyperspecific detail — the precision required to place an almond inside the ridges of a custardy pudding, explanation of a color-coded chart used to keep track of the many needs of customers in a busy dining room — in concert with close-ups of Marcus and Richie processing what they’re learning. These episodes do for The Bear’s audience what they do for Marcus and Richie: take us out of our usual element and immerse us in environments that make us see trees but also whole forests. They go smaller in form and specific in detail, but bigger in emotional impact.

While they weigh and knead dough, Marcus and Luca open up about their backgrounds, and Luca notes that he’s learned that being a good chef is “less about skill and more about being open.” That’s what Marcus and, really, everyone on The Bear is aiming to do in season two, whether it’s Carmy embracing a relationship with Claire or Sydney adopting the advice offered by Coach K. That seemingly tiny comment carries weight precisely because it’s tucked into a scene that does not seem weighty.

And Terry and Richie learn more about each other while engaging in the professional task at hand — in their case, peeling a pile of mushrooms in an extended two-shot. Like Luca, Terry drops truth bombs that change Richie’s perspective; she tells him about an old journal of her father’s she discovered after his death: “The way he wrote everything, it was like a reminder, like a ‘Don’t forget this moment’ or ‘Don’t forget this interesting, strange detail.’” She says her dad signed off each entry the same way, but she’s called to another part of the kitchen before she can tell Richie what it said. He figures it out, though, when he looks at the sign in Terry’s kitchen, similar to the one in Luca’s as well as Carmy’s still under-construction kitchen at the Bear: “Every second counts.”

Until this moment, those three words evoked the urgency that comes with working in a restaurant, the sense that everything must happen in a hurry. But through Richie’s experience, they say something else entirely: Appreciate the beauty of your work. Be grateful that you, too, can make someone else’s day every night. At its best, that’s what working in a restaurant can be. That’s what everyone on The Bear is working toward. The fact that both Carmy and Luca adopt this mantra and pass it on to their staffs underscores the idea that the relationships forged within kitchens can become like extended families, a central theme of the whole series. It’s a lovely emphasis on the subtext of the second season that could’ve been overlooked if The Bear hadn’t taken the time to put Richie in the position to discover it. This is the kind of subtle elegance a suitcase episode can achieve because it takes the time to study characters and situations more closely. If I may co-opt and twist the wise, Van Halen–related words of one Richard Lawrence Jerimovich: These episodes are like this because they are in The Bear, and they are in The Bear because they’re like this. The overall story couldn’t be told as effectively without them, designed exactly as they are.

A suitcase holds everything you need and nothing more. It’s also something that, airline efficiency willing, stays with you on the rest of your journey. A suitcase episode functions in the same way. It deepens its protagonists’ sense of their own identities, and as a result, the viewer’s understanding of show’s broader arc going forward. That’s precisely what Marcus and Richie gain in “Honeydew” and “Forks”: assurances and insights they can pack up and take to the next place they go so they don’t forget who they really are.