“The Bear,” now in the space between its fourth and fifth seasons, has released a surprise episode on Hulu, “Gary,” that functions as a prequel until, in its final seconds, it turns into something else. Exactly what, time will tell, but this final snippet comes after Season 4 and possibly before the start of Season 5. The full “Bear” cast is credited at the end, though none appear apart from Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who wrote the episode and star as best friends and “cousins” Mikey and Richie, and Gillian Jacobs as Richie’s then-wife, Tiffany. Call it Season 4.5.
It’s not uncommon in British television to post single episodes between seasons that may advance an ongoing story or just be something to run at Christmas. (“Doctor Who” has made a practice of it.) They also remind viewers, in the long wait between seasons, that a series is not over. Indeed, I had to go to the internet to find out whether a fifth season of “The Bear” was on the cards, that the end of Season 4 — as Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) left the restaurant to Sidney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie, much as Mikey, who died by suicide, had left it to him — was not the end of the series. (Some say the next season will be its last.)
We’re a few years before the start of the series proper. The Gary of the title is the distressed rust belt city of Gary, Ind., so near to and so far from Chicago, where Mikey and Richie are headed on an errand for cousin Jimmy (Oliver Platt), delivering a box whose contents neither knows. Richie, riding shotgun, is excited, referring to the trip as “a mission,” noting when they cross the state line, and reading “fun facts” about Gary from his phone. He’s burned a CD for the occasion. (As road trips go, it’s a short one, the trip from Chicago to Gary being about the same as from downtown L.A. to Long Beach, but the implication is that Richie has never traveled outside the city.) Richie is anxious to get back home by 5:15, because Tiffany, who is pregnant, has a superstitious notion that that’s the time she’ll go into labor. That he brings a gun is a worrisome start, per Chekhov.
With time to kill in Gary, they drag one another in and out of situations, visit at Koney King (a real-life Gary hot dog institution), insert themselves into a game of pick-up basketball, do drugs, show off half-understood martial arts moves, and finally come to rest among a group of day drinkers in a nameless bar, where facts and fictions are told for fun, allowing our heroes to unpack old traumas and make new ones. (Marin Ireland is invaluable as the ear into which Mikey pours his.) With the rising arc of a one-act play, things there will get out of hand.
As stand-alone episodes go, “Gary” is especially independent; no prior knowledge of the FX series is necessary. The hour plays as a kind of shaggy dog story, through lighter and darker territory on its way to a droll punchline involving the contents of the box, before it jumps forward into its brief present-day coda, a car crash. Directed by series creator Christopher Storer, it’s not so much a prequel as another of the show’s Mikey-centric flashback episodes; “Fishes” won Bernthal a 2024 guest actor Emmy. Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach have been friends since 2003, when they met performing off-Broadway in Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” and one senses that as writers, they’ve built themselves a playground to act in; both are phenomenal. “The Bear” always calls upon its cast to stretch, much as their self-improving characters are. Phoning it in is never an option.
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