#you have to have carmy who communicates in short bursts or through nonverbal expressions -- you have to have him just talk

[blackjack-15]

kay right carmy al-anon speech let's go

"before i came to al-anon i was a cook. i'm still a cook i guess, just a different kind of cook" this for me is a really, really sad peek into how he thinks of himself. there are so many carmys, broken up by where he is and who he is and what's happened to him

also he says "cook" not "chef", probably feeling "chef" is pretentious -- probably due to his extended family's reactions to him being a chef

also he introduces himself as "Carmen" here, not Carmy, which is interesting. i'd love to know how he introduced himself in NYC, b/c in ep 1 we see him introduce himself to syd as "Carmy"

"let it rip" we've heard that so many times in the background as sort of an auditory hallucination from carmy that it makes sense that it was Mikey's phrase

the knowledge that carmy has a speech impediment is not even a little surprising -- he still has hesitation markers, especially when stressed, and it prolly reinforced the idea to richie et al that he was a baby

bad at school, bad at paying attention, bad with women, bad with humor -- he's hurling these one after another and, again with The Bear's excellence in hearing what characters don't say, you can get the sense that he thought Mikey was good at all of these things, and how could Carmy even begin to compare?

"I just wanted him to say good job!" oh honey

"and I think it's clear that me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying fix what was wrong with my brother" there's the thesis statement of s1, and Carmy coming to that conclusion makes so much sense -- out of his siblings (including Richie), he's the quiet, introspective, sensitive one -- an artist's temperament with a pugilist's temper. he knows what he's doing, he just can't express it, can't fix it

"that restaurant has, and does, mean a lot to people. it means a lot to me" -- it's why he reacts the way he does when sugar (and, implied there, his mother) blames the restaurant and says it makes people unhappy. to him, this restaurant isn't just an obligation, or a f//k-you from Mikey, or a distraction, or a place where he can cook -- it's something that Means something, it's a constant, it's an institution. i don't know how Mikey felt about it-- we may find that in S2, we might not -- but Richie and Carmy love the restaurant the same amount in different ways, and as long as that's true, some form of the Berzatto family restaurant will exist in Chicago

a final note for that speech -- it's an incredible performance, first of all, but that's obvious. it's also an incredibly risky scene, especially in a half-hour show (which The Bear is, despite the runtime of eps 7 and 8), to point the camera at an actor for seven minutes straight and say "go".

in any TV that's risky, in half hour tv it's riskier -- that's 1/3 of the show's runtime! -- and in a show that relies on movement, chaos (organized or otherwise) and quick cuts like The Bear does, it's incredibly risky. it pays off in full here, and i'm clapping it out. a+ for all involved