Replicants (The Bear)

Carmy attends an Al-Anon meeting and is moved by another member's vivid story of her brother's addiction. He later drives to Oak Park in the van and tours the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Sydney receives an updated partnership agreement from Carmy. Marcus sells his late mother's house with his roommate Chester's help. Carmy hires Luca as a stage to help Marcus. Tina talks to Carmy about his current struggle with reducing ingredients and advises him to slow down the pace of the menu. Carmy reveals to Sydney that he has decided on a set menu, admitting that his insistence on changing the menu every day was selfish and detrimental to the restaurant. Natalie brings baby Sophie to the restaurant. Sydney receives a call from the hospital saying her father has suffered a heart attack.

Computer's countdown clock reads 363 and then 361 hours, meaning 45 days have passed since the Tribune review, and there are 15 days left before Cicero and Computer shut down the restaurant. It is roughly September 21, 2023.

• The title refers to a type of semi-sentient naturalistic cyborg called a replicant that was introduced into popular culture by Blade Runner.^[1] Richie has a long-standing interest in science fiction generally and the works of Philip K. Dick specifically.^[2] In the season one episode "Sheridan," he rolled into the restaurant and announced himself with the salutation "What's good you fuckin' replicants?"^[3] and in season three Richie called Carmy a "baby replicant who's not self-actualized."^[4]
• Tina, Richie, and Sydney all have their alarm clocks set to 6:00 a.m., which is the time Phil Connors' day resets each morning in the movie Groundhog Day. The Groundhog Day clock radio alarm clock plays "I Got You Babe" every morning, which is what wakes up Carmy in the season premiere "Groundhogs."
• In a callback to season one, there is a Ballbreaker arcade game cabinet next to the batting cage where Sweeps is talking to himself about wine.
• Richie welcomes Natalie back from maternity leave with something like "Vista per gli occhi, eri tardi." This means, more or less, "a sight for sore eyes—where have you been?"

"Replicants" was written by Karen Joseph Adcock.^[5]

In this episode, Carmy tries twice to tell Sydney about the changes to the partnership agreement (which later trigger the crisis of "Goodbye") but he is interrupted twice, once by the arrival of baby Sophie, and once by the news of Sydney's dad's cardiac incident.^[6]

Richie talks about how the old Beef was "rocking," and the vibe at the Bear is not the same. Carmy modeled the Bear on Thomas Keller restaurants (among others), about which New York Times food editor Melissa Clark wrote in 2024, "Phones glowed as the diners I witnessed snapped more photos of themselves at their hard-to-get table than of the food on their plates. No one giggled."^[7]

Kate Berlant guest stars as Georgie, a participant in Carmy's Al-Anon group who shares about an alocasia houseplant and/or living with her brother's addiction.^[8] Berlant's story mirrors the struggles of more familiar characters as they confront "the complicated relationships they have with those who are closest to them: the broken trust, the bitterness, and the self-destructiveness that festers owed to those things."^[8] The Bear creator Christopher Storer was an executive producer on Berlant's FX comedy special Cinnamon on the Wind.^[9]

Natalie wears Sophie in an ErgoBaby-brand baby carrier. Carmy wore Nike Cortez shoes to the Al-Anon meeting.^[10]

• There is a framed, as-yet-unhung Daughters of the Dust film poster in the corner of Sydney's new apartment.
• Cookbooks visible in Sydney's apartment in "Replicants" include Everyday Greens by Annie Somerville, Everything I Want to Eat by Jennifer Koslow, Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook by Christina Tosi, The Tortilla by Diana Kennedy, bäco by Betty Hallock and Josef Centeno, and Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World by Jeff Gordinier.
• Richie has a copy of Michael Mann (2006) by F. X. Feeney on the desk in the Bear office.
• The full list of Carmy's non-negotiables is visible on the wall in the office in this episode.^[11] It may be noteworthy that "break down all boxes" was cut from the final version of the list.^[12] Jess thinks it sets expectations and is "excellent."^[13]
  • Everything needs to feel, look, and sound of the place.
  • We need to be streamlined and focused. Less is more.
  • We are at our best when we promote a spirit of vibrant collaboration.
  • No repeat ingredients in any and every dish.
  • Always be thinking about consolidation and speed
  • We need to display confidence and competence.
  • We must pride ourselves on in and out service.
  • We are always in pursuit of excellence.
  • Details matter
  • Know your shit
  • Time. Always time.
  • This is not about you, it is about the guest.
  • Perfect means perfect.
  • No excuses.
  • Respect tradition.
  • Push boundaries.
  • Clean as you go.
  • Shirts perfectly pressed
  • No surprises.
  • Technique, technique, technique!!
  • We will change our menu every day.
  • We will constantly evolve through passion and creativity.
  • We will never run out of teaspoons.^[11]

• Carmy toured Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio house museum in Oak Park, Illinois.^[14] The scenes were filmed over the course of one morning in early 2025.^[14] The historical site's digital communications manager, Christine Trevino, conducted the onscreen tour, pointing out and explaining key details of the building design and history to Jeremy Allen White and The Bear crew.^[14] The cast and crew were granted special permission to interact with objects and furniture that are usually off-limits to visitors and were permitted to film in the typically closed-off kitchen and balcony of the drafting room.^[15] Carmy views some of the "house's most resonant details including the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and stained-glass skylights, as well as the kitchen's old stove and wood-grained dining room."^[16]
• The show also filmed the Arthur and Grace Heurtley House, one of Wright's Prairie School designs, and the Nathan G. Moore House, which was originally built in a "half-timbered Tudor style but gained idiosyncratic features such as Mayan- and Gothic-inspired motifs after a fire in 1922."^[17][18] The Heurtley House and the Moore House are across the street from each other, on the same street as the Wright Studio, on Oak Park's Forest Avenue.^[17] While standing on the sidewalk in front of the Heurtley House, "it seems like a moment [Carmy] made a decision."^[15]
• Sydney's basketball court scene was filmed at Margaret Hie Ding Lin Park on the near south side.^[19]

The songs featured in the episode are "Let Me Live In Your City (Work In Progress)" by Paul Simon, "Slip Away (A Warning)" by Lou Reed and John Cale, "It's Magic" by Doris Day, "Hope the High Road" by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, "Looking Into You" by Jackson Browne, and "Pull the Cup" by Shellac.^[20][21]

• "Let Me Live in Your City" is an "acoustic ballad" that was released as one of the bonus tracks on the 2004 reissue of There Goes Rhymin' Simon.^[22] About the use of "Let Me Live in Your City," The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "Some of the show's richest moments happen when the characters step away from the kitchen. Paul Simon's [song] plays as Carmy drives alone, the camera catching the undersides of bridges and blurred city scenes—like seeing the world through a dirty windshield. He visits the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio, a sequence that flirts with travelogue territory but ultimately pulls us closer to him. With no dialogue, Simon's warm, conversational vocals overlaying Carmy's quiet wandering makes the scene feel unusually intimate."^[23] Consequence wrote about the episode's music, "Carmy's tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio is such a lovely advertisement for a Chicago landmark—so lovely that it almost feels a bit on the nose for it to be accompanied by a song called 'Let Me Live in Your City'."^[24]
• "Looking Into You," off Jackson Browne's 1972 debut album, Jackson Browne, kicks in when Carmy is just about to explain the revised partnership agreement to Sydney but is interrupted by the arrival of Sugar and the baby. "Looking Into You" is a dense ballad about a "young man's efforts to find some meaning in his current life by inspecting from whence he came. Ultimately, he realizes that a loving relationship is the only thing that truly makes perfect sense to him."^[25] Browne sings of a stop on a journey that's "a hotel at best," but for all the rewards and pleasures of his pilgrim's progress, "...words and music will never touch the beauty that I've seen / Looking into you."^[25]
• "It's Magic," mentioned in Georgie's monologue and playing with intercutting between Sydney, Sweeps, Carmy, etc., originally comes from the 1947 film Romance on the High Seas.^[26]
• Shellac was a Chicago "noise rock" group led by Steve Albini, "the late genius engineer and prolific curmudgeon...known for his work recording iconic albums by Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and many others." The "jarring instrumental" track "Pull the Cup" has a "roomy groove...resembling the emotional peaks and valleys of the show's characters."^[27]

The photo album of food on the office walls continues to fill up with dishes green-taped to the wall and annotated in black Sharpie with ingredient identifications and prep notes. Plated-dish photos in "Replicants" include a nettle raviolo with pistachio espuma; hamachi with grapefruit pearls, coconut, and lemon ice; a puréed soup of butternut squash and spiced peppers, and a soft-cooked quail egg's nest made from asparagus, mandolined-crosswise and fanned into a green rosette, built on a frame of confit potato and black garlic. Also visible is the bouquet of sheeted-carrot and salmon roe that Carmy first created in "Tomorrow," and a raviolo with a mascarpone-Parmesan filling.^[11]

The Daily Beast called Berlant's four-minute monologue a "highlight of the season."^[8]

Richie's line "Who wants to melt some provolone on a fuckin' baby right now?" was deemed especially memorable by The A.V. Club.^[28] Vulture felt that the episode simultaneously highlighted that although Richie is hilarious he also nurses an ongoing bitterness: "...Richie doesn't know how to have an adult conversation with a male he's related(ish) to. He seems to only know how to throw syllabic grenades, dropping lines about Carmy's supposed fear of refrigerators..."^[29]

The pairing of Rob Reiner and Edwin Lee Gibson was called a "comedy dream team."^[28]

Substream magazine's Murjani Rawls thought:^[30]

"...the high point of 'Replicants' is the conversation between Carmy and Tina. Even with Carmy taking a step back and helping to guide people towards their sense of purpose, a part of him still wants validation. In part, it's tangled up in all the trauma that Chef David's tutelage has instilled within him (and the realization that he will never gain closure from that) and the loss of Mikey. Tina has been there from The Beef to Carmy's new incarnation. She has insight that nobody else in the restaurant has. Carmy, as of right now, doesn’t have that parental figure in his life. When Tina tells him, 'you da s--t, you don't have to prove anything,' it feels like the words he’s always been waiting for. Sure, Sydney or Richie can say it, but it means a lot for her to be the person."^[30]

In 2025, Vulture ranked "Replicants" as 29th-best out of 38 episodes of The Bear, celebrating the arrival of Sophie and Luca but finding that the serious tone of the Berlant monologue "sets the episode off on a slightly off-kilter foot from which it never really recovers."^[31]