[Editor’s note: The recap of episode seven publishes July 5. This recap contains spoilers.]
Season two of The Bear gave us a pair of standout episodes that trained the spotlight on two of its best supporting characters: Marcus (in the carefully observed “Honeydew”) and Richie (in the transformative “Forks”). So I’ve been hungry for another solo episode to pop up; and the show delivers with “Napkins,” which tells the tale of how Tina Marrero went from mild-mannered office drone to shit-talking line-cook extraordinaire.
Not only is “Napkins” a much-deserved showcase for the fantastic Liza Colón-Zayas, it also marks the directorial debut of Ayo Edebiri, who began her screen career as a writer before stepping in front of the camera. Unsurprisingly, she’s just as adept in the director’s chair as she is everywhere else: As “Napkins” traces our heroine’s progress through a bleak Chicago winter, Edebiri paints a precisely observed portrait of a middle-aged woman of color fighting tooth and nail to be seen in a world that would just as soon look straight through her.
We’re introduced to a very different (but still recognizable) Tina in 2018—one who works behind a desk instead of a stove. Though she and her husband, David (David Zayas), are both steadily employed, they’re struggling to make ends meet. Their landlord has just raised the rent, and T is worried about what will happen if they have to move. She’s all realism and practicality, but David is unrelentingly positive; he just knows he’s gonna get that promotion any day now. (The irony of a doorman hoping to move up to the next proverbial floor is a clever bit of subtext.)
High off her husband’s optimism, Tina heads to her own job as a clerical worker for a candy manufacturing company. But she’s barely made it through the morning when she and a few of her coworkers are called upstairs for an unceremonious shitcanning. (I felt the beginnings of my own Carmy-esque panic attack when a pasty dude in a gray business suit announced blandly, “Trust me, no one wanted this to happen; but it’s the reality of the current climate.”)
T takes the bus home with a single cardboard box of personal items on her lap—all she has to show for 15 years at the company. She promises David she’ll find another job first thing tomorrow; it’s an impossibly high bar to set for herself (remind you of anyone?). But when you’re a working-class woman in America—especially one with a family to provide for—what other choice do you have?
In an extended sequence set to Kate Bush’s “The Morning Fog,” Tina begins her Sisyphean job hunt. But considering she last did this dance in 2003, she’s on the back foot. Gone are the days when she could walk in with a freshly printed résumé and expect to be taken seriously. As the cashier at a hipstery bakeshop tells her, everyone uses LinkedIn nowadays.
Undeterred, T does what she does best: She adapts. But every road leads to a dead end: The realty company isn’t hiring; the clerk at the trendy boutique looks down their nose at her; and the pyramid scheme is, well, a pyramid scheme. Something breaks inside her when a tortilla factory rep informs her that, even though the position she’s interested in is essentially the same one she had at the candy factory, she can’t apply unless she has a BA. (But hey, there’s always night school!)
Through it all, David is endlessly supportive. He refuses to participate in the story his wife is telling herself about how she’s a useless old lady who isn’t contributing shit. Despite his encouragement, the odds are stacked against her; it’s not for nothing that pretty much every person T meets with is a white 20-something who barely registers her presence in the room.
She gets her hopes up when she gets a LinkedIn message asking her to come in for an interview inside a skyscraper that’s all but designed to make outsiders feel small. At the front desk, the receptionist (a chillingly deadpan Eddie Heffernan) tells her that the position has already been filled. “There’s no job. Sorry,” he says flatly, eyes glued to his computer screen.
That’s when Tina’s finally, finally done taking this crap. Her despair atomizing into rage, and so she slams her fist on the desk and tells the receptionist to inform his faceless employers that they can go fuck themselves. To add insult to injury, the damn train is running a half hour late.
Just as we’re screaming at God herself to cut our girl a break, “Napkins” finally brings T to the place she was always destined to arrive at: The Original Beef of Chicagoland. The second she lays eyes on that rusted-out awning, the episode breaks wide open—the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” erupting onto the soundtrack like an exploding toilet, the cold, corporate silence we’ve been living in drowned out by the cacophony of the afternoon rush.
There’s Richie in a grease-stained baseball shirt, crowded in behind the counter with Chi Chi and their fellow sandwich slingers, shouting over the din that there’s no smoking allowed (the more things change…). Even amid the chaos, he spots Tina right away. In less than a minute, she’s holding a hot coffee and a fresh Italian beef sando, on the house.
She finds a spot near the back, unaware that she’s stumbled into the middle of a mini frat party. Neil is punching buttons on the Ballbreaker machine; he’s so close to defeating the wizard, you guys! And who’s there to fuck with his game but good ol’ Mikey Berzatto, followed in short order by Richie. High on their own supply, the cousins loom over him and declare, “Probability’s like gravity, Fak. And you cannot negotiate with gravity!”
This hits close enough to home for Tina to start weeping into her Italian beef. Mikey notices and kicks the other guys out—especially since Richie is loudly insisting that her crying will “scare the regulars.” This might be the first time we’ve gotten to spend time with Mikey outside of Carmy’s fraught memories, and this scene makes it clear why everyone in the Windy City loved this hot mess of a man so goddamn much.
Just as Carm and Sydney did in the early episodes of The Bear, Mikey immediately vibes with Tina. She’s the kind of person who insists she hasn’t been crying while tears cling to her eyelashes; who never loses faith in humanity, even when humanity loses faith in her; and who, above all else, wants to be of service. Colón-Zayas and Jon Bernthal spin this scene into gossamer as they discuss everything from rotten bathroom floors to rotten dads to what anyone can hope to get out of this rotten life.
Mikey tells a heartbreaking story about how a school field trip to a fancy office building made him realize, all too young, that he wasn’t destined for greatness. (“That dream shit? Wasn’t gonna happen to me.”) For her part, Tina tells him about all the Gen-Zers she talked to on her job search—how beautiful they were and how hungry. “I would give anything to be one of them motherfuckers,” she admits, easily sliding into the foul-mouthed vernacular of The Beef. “I’m jealous as fuck.”
Then she says something so heartbreaking that I started crying into a napkin myself: “I don’t need to be inspired. I don’t need to be impassioned. I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world, you know? I just wanna feed my kid.” Like Mikey, T grew up on unstable ground with nothing much to call her own and she learned to cut her ambitions to fit.
She doesn’t need to ask him for a job, and he barely needs to offer her one; these two were destined to be in each other’s lives the moment Mikey pulled up a chair. Later that night, when Tina tells David that the interview went great, then opens her purse to reveal an Original Beef T-shirt folded neatly inside, all the pieces fall into place.
Tina insists that she doesn’t have a passion and she doesn’t need one. But little does she know that four years from now, Mikey’s kid brother—a man who’s nothing but passion for his work—will ignite a fire in her to pursue a dream she’d never dreamed of. And though it won’t make her life any less hard, it will make it much more worthwhile.
Stray observations
- So far, most of this season’s episodes have opened on characters waking up in the dark as a digital alarm clock displays some ungodly hour. In fact, clocks are everywhere—particularly the one hanging over the kitchen of The Bear like the sword of Damocles. There’s never enough time, and it’s always running out.
- I love that Tina and David agree that their son is “kind of an asshole.” (Though Louie is an offscreen presence in “Napkins,” we did meet him back in season one when T brought him into work while he was suspended from school.)
- Even though Tina had yet to discover her love of cooking back in 2018, food is everywhere in “Napkins.” Just look at the stew she preps each morning before heading out. The first time she tossed all those fragrant herbs and veggies into the crockpot, it looked so tasty that I could practically smell it.
- Richie and Chi Chi’s digs at the customers on the other side of the counter are gold: “Oh, number seven? Number seven for this narc-looking-motherfucker over here!” “You want number seven, go to fucking McDonald’s, all right, guy? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
- When Mikey gets a text from Carmy with a photo of one of his Noma dishes, we realize that we already got a glimpse of this scene in “Tomorrow.” That it was a catalyst for Tina’s hiring makes her absorption into the Berzattoverse feel even more meant to be.
- Don’t get me wrong—I adore the beautiful butterfly that Richie has become thanks to that life-changing week at Ever. But seeing him roughhousing and talking shit with Mikey made me nostalgic for the grimy little caterpillar he used to be.
- In addition to playing the sweetest fictional husband ever, Dexter alum David Zayas is Liza Colón-Zayas real-life spouse. No wonder these two have such effortless chemistry.
