The Bear‘s Childbirth Episode Is Quietly Radical

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 8 of The Bear.

There is a moment during Season 3 of The Bear in which it becomes clear that one of the episodes was written by someone who has either been through childbirth or at least been present at the labor and delivery of someone else. As a desperate Natalie labors, a stranger in scrubs named Dr. Levin gives her the most frustrating non-answer to the most urgent question she’s maybe ever asked in her life. In trying to decide whether to take pitocin to speed up her slowly progressing labor, which would force her to get the epidural she doesn’t want, she asks: “If you were to guess how much longer you think the whole thing will take…?” To which the doctor responds, “Well, however long it takes.” Then he’s paged with a distress call and says something cryptic and terrifying into a walkie talkie about “Opening the OR for a possible crash,” forcing Natalie to consider the worst possible outcomes of her present situation before he hurries out of the room.

He’s not wrong. Labor does, indeed, take however long it takes. And perhaps time is so of the essence that he can’t afford to spare Natalie (Abby Elliott) from this terrifying detail that she’d rather not be privy to. But the moment viscerally captures aspects of so many women’s experiences of childbirth: the isolation, the fear, the impossibility of making decisions that feel utterly consequential in the moment even if years later, the acquisition or not of an epidural is just a beat in a story of triumph or terror or both. Giving birth for the first time, having nothing to go on but nascent maternal instinct and too many webpages with conflicting information cached in your browser history. Too much noise (the beeping monitors, the unsolicited advice), too much downtime (the endless waiting for nature to take its course), too much pain and too many societal messages about how to handle it. “Ice Chips,” which was written by showrunner Joanna Calo, addresses all of this, and offers a counter-narrative to so many childbirth tropes we often see on-screen.

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The episode is about the relationship between Natalie a.k.a. Sugar and her mother Donna a.k.a. DeeDee (Jamie Lee Curtis, once again utterly captivating), even more than it is about Natalie’s own path to motherhood. Of course, that path is significantly shaped by that relationship—one which she explains to her mother in the hospital room was always defined by fear. Her mother scared her and her two older brothers, she says. Natalie would “make myself sick to make you feel better.”

This, she explains, is why she went months without telling her mother about her pregnancy. The only reason Donna is here now is that literally no one else picked up the phone when Natalie went into labor lifting boxes of c-fold paper towels into her trunk in the parking lot of the Restaurant Depot. Not her husband Pete, who for some godforsaken reason has taken some sort of week-long buddy trip when his wife was two weeks away from her due date (Pete, literally what?!). Not Sydney, or Carmy, or Marcus, or Richie—we’ve just seen them all lock their phones in their lockers in preparation for dinner service at The Bear.

Some time before Dr. Levin’s entrance, the episode begins with Donna annoying the living hell out of her youngest child as she suffers through contractions. She offers unwanted labor coaching and regales the hospital staff with tales of her own heroic deliveries (“Did I tell you that I walked to the hospital?”). She cackles at Natalie’s birth preferences and tries to persuade her to change them. (“Natalie, I’m just telling you as someone who’s been around the block, this particular block hurts like a motherf-cking son of a b-tch. But you do whatever you want.”) But with each contraction, the episode evolves into the most honest conversation we’ve witnessed between the complicated matriarch and any of her offspring.

Donna briefly hints in this episode that her own mother is not someone she’s fond of remembering; there is a sense, then, that as we watch Natalie finally share the feelings she’s been tiptoeing around for ages, perhaps we are watching that cycle break before our eyes. “I just don’t want her to feel the way that I felt,” Natalie says of her own daughter. “Oh, she won’t,” Donna reassures Natalie. “You don’t know that,” she protests. Donna: “Oh, I do. I do, I do.”

It’s a moving breakthrough in a fraught relationship. We hear the stories of all three Berzatto children coming into the world, and see the age-old practice of maternal wisdom passing down between generations, even if it’s met with glares and groans. Perhaps most moving is Donna’s retelling of Natalie’s own “beautiful” delivery—in contrast to Carmy’s, which was “f-cked, all around,” and Mikey’s, during which she sensed that he didn’t want to come out at all. Natalie’s involved a vivid dream about a fish tank, and Donna’s ex-sister-in-law playing her the Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You,” which ultimately soundtracks this episode.

But it’s also 40 minutes of television that will strike a chord with anyone who has gone through labor and childbirth or been at the bedside of someone who has. In many ways, Natalie’s labor was unlike either of mine, which moved more precipitously, took place in New York City’s markedly smaller delivery rooms, and did not involve the same particular brand of maternal trauma. Still, there is a sense of calibrated authenticity to the experience that is relatively rare in depictions of labor onscreen.

There are the quiet conversations between contractions. The way in which birth preferences written when all of this was just a hypothetical scenario get scrapped as reality dawns. The eternal stretches of time when not a single person in scrubs comes by to check in on the most frightening hours of a person’s life. The animal noises, the arguments, the feeling that watching the gently pulsing curves on a monitor might will them into submission. The sheer, delicious relief of a cup of ice chips.

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Last year, my colleague Eliana Dockterman wrote about the proliferation of pregnancy trauma in pop culture, from House of the Dragon to Fleishman Is in Trouble, Yellowjackets to The Last of Us. “For some watchers and listeners, these tales may feel like the long-awaited validation of women’s stories,” she wrote. “Fertility, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood involve pain. It’s time we confront it.” And in some cases, like Dead Ringers and This Is Going to Hurt, she wrote, they tackle systemic issues that trickle down to harm women, babies, families.

“Ice Chips” is a deviation from this trend. The scars and trauma that propel it are largely the emotional kind. It traffics in mundanity, presenting labor as simultaneously overwhelming and normal, dramatic and familiar. As labor in the sense of hard work, which is nothing if not a central theme on The Bear. It may rely on the acceleration of the contraction monitor’s beeps to heighten the tension, but childbirth here is no cheap narrative device. The arc is not as starkly drawn as the culmination of one toxic mother-daughter relationship to make way for a new, healthier one—Natalie and Donna will need more than one good talk to repair their bond, if they ever truly can. But it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

And in the end, we do not get the usual payoff of a birth scene—the Healthy first screams of a baby. We do not see the final, grunting pushes, or the pink and blue stripes of the universal hospital blanket wrapped around a bundle of joy. The final shot is of Donna, flanked by the Fak brothers in the waiting area. She sits at ease now, having gotten to coach her estranged daughter through a momentous occasion. To offer advice to a bewildered Pete, finally back from wherever he never should have gone off to. She has managed to stash her baggage away for long enough to be of use and comfort. “You’re a grandma now,” says Neil. “You’re gonna be a good one.” She’s not the one who gave birth, but in some small way, she has been reborn.