Carmy's Drastic Job Change In The Bear's Series Finale Has Fans Divided

Spoiler alert: This post discusses plot points in The Bear’s series finale.

All five seasons of The Bear had been building to one massive decision about Carmy Berzatto’s career, and the last few moments of the series revealed his surprising life pivot. Throughout the culinary drama, Carmy struggled between his masterful talent at cooking and the intense stress and anxiety that running a restaurant gave him. In Season 4’s finale, Carmy concluded that restaurant life had taken too much of a toll on his mental health, and quit his job running The Bear. And at the end of the show’s fifth and final season, he seems to have found a new profession that will foster his creative expression without making him reach a boiling point.

In one of the show’s last scenes, Carmy interviews for an internship at an architectural firm, highlighting his love for art and drawing that he also found so useful in his culinary career. This job choice had been hinted at throughout the series, most notably in a Season 4 episode where Carmy visited legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio for inspiration.

However, some fans took issue with Carmy’s career pivot, not only because he so clearly grew to genuinely love working alongside The Bear’s crew, but also due to the show’s running joke that he’s terrible at math. Although, his mathematic ineptitude didn’t seem to hinder his chef career too much, and that involves a lot of arithmetic, too.

Notably, the finale did not confirm whether Carmy landed the internship or not. In the job interview, the former chef waxed poetic about how he’d only recently come to realize he could really love cooking by focusing on the communal aspect rather than individual striving. And in one last scene, Carmy gets misty-eyed looking at pages of his recipes in The Bear. Jeremy Allen White revealed he wanted to be intentionally vague about whether Carmy goes into architecture or comes back to the kitchen.

“I tried to play that scene in a way where I didn’t want it to be entirely clear [what happens next],” White told The Los Angeles Times on June 26. “I wanted the question to be like, ‘Is this guy still so f*cked up in the head that he’s trapped regardless of his place in this world, or place of work? Is it a romance that he’s saying goodbye to? Is it a love that he still has, and he’s not quite over yet?’ Then I was like, ‘Do we snap out of that scene and we’re back on the clock?’ What is this? I think the goal of the scene is it shouldn’t be all too clear and wrapped up.”