Epidural, Please: ‘The Bear’ Zooms In on Trauma in “Ice Chips”

It’s been a year nearly to the day since we learned that Natalie Berzatto was pregnant, but you could be forgiven for thinking it’s been even longer. Since that reveal during The Bear’s second season, Sugar, as she’s better known, has endured fatigue, insomnia, and something called “lightning crotch.” She has also managed to keep her mercurial chef brother and the band of merry misfits who made up the kitchen at the Berzatto family’s sandwich shop together through that restaurant’s reinvention as a fine-dining Michelin-star aspirant—all while going through a pregnancy that has endured as long as a giraffe’s.

The Bear’s third season, which was released in full last week, is by far the series’ weakest, bogged down by an overreliance on flashbacks and flimsy character development. Still, there were bright spots that felt like vintage entries from the Emmy-bedecked show’s history.

“Ice Chips,” the eighth of the latest season’s 10 episodes, might just be the strongest of the bunch. It features Sugar, played by Abby Elliott, who goes into labor at long last while out buying supplies for the restaurant on her own. She gets stuck in traffic on the highway as she tries and fails to contact her husband, Pete, her brother Carmy, and even Carmy’s manic pixie dream ex-girlfriend, Claire (whose twee contributions this season include her confession that—gasp—she likes Mondays). In desperation, Sugar calls her mom, Donna, heralding the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as the erratic Berzatto matriarch.

We first saw Donna in Season 2’s celebrated episode “Fishes,” during which a drunken holiday dinner with extended family devolved into shouting matches, sobbing, and, finally, a hysterical Donna crashing her car into the Berzattos’ living room. Donna, we learn, is the source of much of the baggage that her three children carried into adulthood, and Sugar has responded by largely cutting her out of her life: In Season 2, we learned many months into Sugar’s pregnancy that she hadn’t even told her mother that she was expecting.

All of which makes her an unlikely choice for a birth partner, and she roars into “Ice Chips” with guns blazing. She meets Sugar in the hospital parking lot, immediately letting loose a frenzy of pet names and rat-a-tat instructions—“You must breathe!” she exhorts her daughter over and over, miming a breath pattern that is more hyperventilation than soothsaying—and within seconds, an already stressed-out Sugar is desperately begging her to stop talking. Which, of course, she doesn’t.

With Pete located but still en route to the hospital, the bulk of “Ice Chips” is spent with Sugar and Donna alone in the delivery room. Between their sparring, Sugar’s shrieks of pain, and the time-is-ticking feel of the rush to the hospital and a delivery that is decidedly not going to plan, the episode packs every bit of the punch of the best of The Bear’s fast-paced, high-stress chapters, from online ordering gone wild in Season 1 to a busted freezer door in Season 2. Like all those scenes with big personalities that clash in a tiny kitchen, here we have the same in a different sort of prep room. Every second counts, or at least every centimeter of dilation.

Sugar alone seems to have made it through the familial fractiousness on display in “Fishes” in one piece. She doesn’t share either of her brothers’ self-destructive tendencies, for example, and is the only one of the siblings to hold down a stable romantic relationship. Aside from her impending diaper expertise, she’s just about the only character on the show you could imagine asking to babysit a kid with the expectation that the child will return with the same number of fingers and toes.

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But as Elliott finally gets some screen time without Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, and Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney chewing up all the scenery, we get some much-deserved time with a character who, as the perpetual straight man, is usually resigned to letting the others do their thing. “Ice Chips” establishes that the fact that Sugar has her shit together is its own response to a difficult childhood: She began her errand by playing a self-help program for children of alcoholics, which she had seemingly already memorized. Over the course of the episode, Sugar levels with Donna about her role in the still-reverberating chaos of the Berzatto kids’ upbringing. “You scared all of us,” she tells Donna. “Oh, that’s terrible,” Donna replies; Curtis’s face crumples as she seems to, finally, reckon with how much damage she caused.

That same old Donna is still in there, and Curtis’s fussy, frantic performance is enough to make anyone who’s ever said, “Mom, stop” squirm. When Sugar announces her birth plan to a nurse—no epidural, thanks!—Donna laughs in her face. “I’m just telling you as someone who’s been around the block,” she tells her daughter, “this particular block hurts like a motherfucking son of a bitch.” A few contractions later, Sugar has changed her tune on the subject of pain relief. Donna isn’t always—or even usually—a source of well-founded wisdom, but here, at least, she gets it right.

Childbirth sequences in TV and film tend to hew to a few basic conventions: the dramatic water breaking, the howling pain en route to the hospital, and—always—the smash cut to the finish line, with the new parents cleaned up and beaming at their little bundle of joy. It feels right that a show like The Bear, with its almost religious dedication to the avoidance of happy endings, refuses to tie the episode up with a bow. We never see the baby or the new mom; the only confirmation that the little girl has arrived safely is delivered when Ted Fak teases Donna in the hospital waiting room in the episode’s closing moments that she’s a grandma now. Indeed, we don’t even learn whether Sugar got that epidural.

Given it’s The Bear, we can probably assume she didn’t.