'The Bear' season 4 review: The clock is ticking for Carmy's restaurant

WHAT IT'S ABOUT One fateful morning, the brigade of chefs at Chicago's buzziest new restaurant, The Bear — Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sidney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — wake up to a negative review in Chicago's leading newspaper. That buzz is suddenly imperiled. Everything goes from bad to worse when Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) and pal Nick "Computer" Marshall (Brian Koppelman) arrive at the Bear to inform the demoralized staff that the clock is ticking. All 10 episodes of season 4 of the Emmy-winning series are now streaming, Warning: This review contains spoilers.

MY SAY The prevailing theme this season is time. Time's reflected in every movie clip that's shown on every TV screen someone's watching ("3:10 to Yuma," "Groundhog Day") or every music sample (The Decemberists, Paul Simon) that tracks over every scene. Digital clocks tick away the minutes and hours, the pressure building with each passing second. Time here isn't just linear but circular. One day is like the next except each day brings its own unique surprises, or catastrophes. As always, the past intrudes on the present — really intrudes.

Meanwhile, the key plot device is a villain, a newspaper, in fact — the "Trib" and the unkind (also unnamed) restaurant critic behind that devastating review. This sets up what appears to be a back-from-the-brink season where adversity will (possibly) be overcome and a precious Michelin star will (possibly) become Carm's reward and vindication.

Viewers might catch a line in the hated Trib review praising the Italian beef sandwiches, the specialty of the Bear's own Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), who, emboldened, then begins to plot his own future. This leads to the arrival of the first of this season's big guest stars — Rob Reiner, as a snake-oil consultant who plants questionable ideas in the malleable head of the Bear's sandwich maestro. Those will have consequences, of that you can be certain.

But the really big name arrives by the seventh episode. The best of the season, it's a cleverly structured hourlong series of two-handers, with prominent characters unpacking their emotional baggage at the wedding of Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs) and Frank (Josh Hartnett.) Here "Bear" fans finally meet the elusive Francie Fak — sister of Neil (Matty Matheson) and nemesis of Sugar (Abby Elliott). She's played by Brie Larson of Carol Danvers/MCU renown. There will be fireworks between Francie and Sugar, of that you can be certain too.

So yes, "The Bear" is still crafty, with a lot of head-fakes (and guest stars), while that back-from-the-brink throughline has a long windup. Nevertheless, this fourth season clearly wants to get back to those fraught human dynamics that worked so well over the first three: Carm's neuroses, Sidney's insecurities, Richie's dithering, along with all these other highly charged, highly repressed, highly verbal people who must work through their heartbreak over and over again. It all still mostly works, but also feels a bit much, and at times too much.

The best thing about "The Bear" remains the ineradicable and unspoken truth that trauma never really goes away but just keeps returning like a bad dream or stray cat. That's all part of time's circularity this season. Carm's trauma is as fundamental to his character (and story) as his talent. You wouldn't expect it (or him) to be otherwise.

And the most exhausting thing about this fourth is exactly the same thing, along with a sense — also ineradicable — that we've all been down this road once or twice before.

BOTTOM LINE Get beyond the talk, inertia and emotional overload, and there's still some truth and beauty here. (Plus one big surprise — Francie, at last, in the flesh.)