The Family Recipe: How “Fishes” Defines “The Bear”
Spoilers beware.
I was going to originally continue on with The Bear Season 2 like regular: watch an episode, move onto the next one, rinse and repeat until the season is over. In this specific case, however, I don’t think I can relegate this masterpiece of an episode to a couple of sentences. “Fishes,” the sixth episode of The Bear’s second season, is perfect in ways that, even as someone who has heard about this show and watched countless clips of it in recent weeks, I couldn’t have fully expected. “Fishes” does what the rest of this season has done so brilliantly by examining the people around Carmy Berzatto — the main character of the show — and how they impact, or inform an aspect of, him. An hour long — the longest episode of the show thus far by a wide margin — “Fishes” is a masterclass.
Let’s break it down.
For starters, the opening scene sets the tone in such an effective way. Natalie smokes a cigarette (much like how Donna does later on) outside of the Berzatto home, and as Mikey steps out of a Christmas-adorned home, we realize that this whole episode is a flashback piece to when the Berzatto family were all together, even just for an occasion like Christmas. Before we even see the festivities inside the house, the Berzatto children — Carmy, Natalie, and Mikey — are barely able to compose…
