The one and only Donna Berzatto returns to The Bear

[Editor’s note: The recap of episode nine publishes July 9. This recap contains spoilers.] 

You could make a drinking game out of it (but you probably shouldn’t): take a shot every time this season that Natalie asks someone “You okay?” or “You good?” It’s the work she feels she has to do in this world—making sure everyone around her feels comfortable and cared for. Because if they don’t, they might turn on her. And then all the years will fall away, and she’ll be right back where she started: at Dee Dee’s house, helpless to keep the beast at bay. There’s a reason everyone calls her Sugar.

At the beginning of “Ice Chips,” she is the one who isn’t okay or good or comfortable or cared for. She’s all alone in rush-hour traffic, with a trunk full of C-folds and a baby just starting to fight its way out of her womb. Pete is on a plane, and no one at The Bear is picking up their phone. So Nat girds her literal and figurative loins and makes the call she’s been avoiding for a long, long time.

The thing about people with borderline personality disorder—and Donna Berzatto is a textbook case—is that they want to be needed and they need to be wanted. Their love is the selfish, smothering kind, and it comes with more strings than a spider web. And sometimes, the only way to escape with your sanity intact is to cut ties altogether—especially when that person was last seen driving a car through the wall of her own house.

But I’ll give this to Dee Dee: She doesn’t try to sneak up on you. “HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY!” scatters across the hospital parking lot, growing louder and louder until she pounces on her daughter like a vampire who’s finally gotten the invitation she’s been waiting for. She then starts shouting, “Hee! Hee! Hee!” directly into Nat’s ear, which does the very opposite of calming her down. And we haven’t even made it into the lobby yet.

Donna doesn’t take her hands off Nat for the duration of the episode, compulsively squeezing her shoulders, stroking her hair, and grasping her palm. But the meaning of those touches changes when she finally learns how to hold her daughter close without suffocating her.

Episode director Joanna Calo films “Ice Chips” mostly in extreme close-up, cutting back and forth between the faces of mother and daughter. The effect is almost unbearably intimate: We can see every rivulet of mascara melting beneath Nat’s eyes and the deep fissures that form around Donna’s mouth whenever she frowns, which is often.

It also gives us the chance to examine Jamie Lee Curtis and Abby Elliott’s stunning performances in forensic detail. Like her character, Elliott has been a quiet, steady supporting player throughout The Bear, which is first and foremost a show about male intimacy. This episode, however, is about a very different kind of legacy than what happens between Michelin-starred chefs. Where Carmy’s feelings are as tightly packed as the layers of a mille-feuille, his sister’s are always plain to see. But that doesn’t mean Nat’s an open book—and Elliott is brilliant at revealing as much of her character as she conceals.

She and Curtis feed off each other’s energy so beautifully that all the years of love and rancor between them feel solid enough to touch. From her shaking fingers to her unhinged cackle, Curtis’ Donna feels more like a possession than a performance. (If anyone’s been “haunting” season three, it sure isn’t Big Neil.) Speaking as someone who—full disclosure—grew up with a borderline parent, her take on the character is terrifyingly on point.

Nat may be the one who’s about to give birth, but inside the hospital room, it’s the Dee-Dee Show. She’s regaling the nurse with the tale of the night she gave birth to Mikey, back when obstetricians were just “men who said things.” Her reason for wanting to have a baby? She wanted someone to love her the way she’d seen with “all those smug mothers down at the Jewel, blocking the aisle with their strollers.”

Horrified at the situation she’s put herself in, Nat is like: Heyyy, any word from Pete? (I know you’re in labor and all, but do not let this woman field your calls!) Donna scoffs when Nat says she doesn’t want an epidural. Which would be perfectly fine, if her underlying motivation weren’t so chilling: “Why not see if I can withstand the pain?” Wooooof.

That pain is, of course, a lot. Joanna Calo makes us feel the cost of every contraction, as Nat finally submits to the “hee”-ing (guess managing a restaurant doesn’t leave much time for Lamaze classes) and realizes that it’s pretty effective. Emotionally, Donna may be a child, but she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to getting through labor. And yeah, maybe Nat will get that epidural after all, with a side of Pitocin.

To both distract herself from the pain and distract her mother from asking questions she’s not prepared to answer, Nat probes into the story of her brothers’ births. They were both rough: Mikey “got twisted up” inside Donna, and Carmy’s delivery was “fucked all around.” (It tracks that both of these troubled souls would have preferred to stay in the womb, protected from the slings and arrows of the outside world.)

A few episodes ago, Mikey waxed poetic about how the most special moments in life revolve around food. And while a plastic cup of ice chips isn’t exactly Christmas dinner, it’s clear from Nat and Donna’s grins that this is the best meal they’ve shared in years. As the deep freeze between them starts to thaw, Dee Dee asks her daughter if the reason she didn’t tell her about the baby is because she didn’t want her around. That isn’t it, not quite: Nat does want her mother to be in this kid’s life; she just doesn’t want the stuff she brings with her. “I don’t want her scared like I was scared.”

If there’s any moment when Donna might be receptive enough—and sober enough—to absorb her daughter’s explanation of the ways she fucked her up, it’s this one. Nat admits that she always thinks people are angry at her, that she’s always put everyone else’s needs before her own—especially her mom’s. Donna thinks it’s sweet, but Sugar is done with all that: “No, it isn’t sweet. It’s fucked up, Mom! I made myself sick to make you feel better.”

And, miraculously, Donna gets it. She’s the reason Natalie lives in a constant state of fear—and why she’s terrified that she’s going to repeat the cycle of abuse in turn when this baby is born. BPD is a disease that’s catching, if you’re not careful, and it’s often passed down from mother to daughter. (When Nat mentions that she doesn’t remember her grandmother, Donna says raggedly, “You don’t want to.”)

That’s when Nat asks to hear her own story. There’s nothing performative about the smile that lights up Donna’s face when she describes the dream she had the night her daughter was born: It’s about seeing beauty in a place where no one else thinks to look and wanting to share that beauty with someone else. It’s about wanting to be understood, and by being understood, to feel less alone. And it’s about a lot more than just seven fishes.

By the time Pete arrives to find Donna cradling Nat in her arms, both of them swaying in time with the Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You,” the gravity in the room has shifted: For the first time in her life, Natalie is the center of her mother’s world instead of the other way around. It’s the greatest gift Dee Dee could have given her. And she knows that Pete’s arrival is her cue to leave—because, heartbreakingly, Nat’s dream for the baby to be born into “something really good” can only happen in her absence.

In “Legacy,” Carmy told his fellow chefs that the only way for him to feel he’s made a positive mark on the world is to “be square with everything and everybody.” For him, it’s a pipe dream; but for the women in his family, at least for today, it’s praxis.

I expected “Ice Chips” to start out bad and only get worse, like “Fishes.” (I don’t know about you, but I was so sure that Donna was lying when she assured Nat that she’d called Pete.) But Callo and episode writer Christopher Storer give us something far more cathartic—and far more surprising.

Stray observations

• It’s tragic—and telling—that the first person Nat thinks to call after Pete doesn’t pick up isn’t Carmy but Sydney. Even though she’s only known Syd for a handful of years, Nat trusts her implicitly. Her brother, the boy who wanted to stay in the womb for as long as he could, not so much.
• That Richie’s voicemail message is “Yo! is not available” just feels so right.
• This is a small thing, but it doesn’t seem like an afterthought when a nurse on the loudspeaker calls for “hands” to help revive a mother. A hospital is one big kitchen, only the stakes are infinitely higher.
• “It’s not calming me down!” “It is. It’s calming you down.” I will definitely be discussing this mother-daughter exchange in therapy next week.
• Because Donna doesn’t know the meaning of boundaries, a back massage she gives Nat quickly turns into a grope. “You have your dad’s ass. He had a nice ass.”

• Speaking of the Berzatto patriarch, he’s a heavy presence in the room by his very absence. He was MIA for Mikey and Nat’s deliveries, but he was there for Carmy’s—and he made things so much worse.
• Those ice chips really do look tasty.