Spoilers for Episode 4 of The Bear’s fourth season are ahead! You can stream the new season in its entirety with a Hulu subscription.
Ahead of The Bear’s Season 4 premiere on the 2025 TV schedule, it was revealed that Ayo Edebiri and Lionel Boyce, who play Sydney and Marcus, respectively, had written an episode. That episode is titled “Worms,” and it’s all about Sydney. So, while speaking with Boyce, I asked him about penning the script for it, and he told me why singular bottle episodes like this allow us to see one of FX and Hulu’s best shows with “fresh eyes.”
In “Worms,” we get a glimpse of Sydney’s life outside The Bear. She goes to get her hair braided in the episode by her cousin Chantel, who is played by Danielle Deadwyler, and throughout its runtime, she debates whether she wants to leave Carmy and co. to work with Adam or stay at The Bear. It’s an eye-opening episode, where we really get a candid and new glimpse into Sydney’s life, and that was the whole goal, as Boyce told me:
The episode is a bottle episode, and it's like the way that those function is, to me – they work so well, because after watching this bottle episode, you can go back and watch the entire show with a new perspective for the character that is focused on. And this one is around Sydney. So I think we reveal things about her that you haven't necessarily seen in any of the other seasons. And I think it's fresh eyes on this show.
Bottle episodes have become a staple part of The Bear. In Season 2, we got to see Richie reach new heights in “Forks,” and Marcus went to Copenhagen in “Honeydew.” In Season 3, we got a glimpse into Tina’s personal life in “Napkins,” and we spent an episode in the hospital with Sugar as she gave birth in “Ice Chips.” With each episode, we were able to develop a new and deeper understanding of each character, and this season, we 100% got that with “Worms” too.
What makes “Worms” even better is that it came directly from the woman who plays Sydney and Lionel Boyce, who is both a co-star and a really good friend of Edebiri.
To Boyce’s point, their story gave us some insight into Sydney’s family, introducing us to Chantel and her teenage daughter, TJ. We get to see Sydney interact with both of them, and when she’s left alone with TJ, we get to learn about a softer, more vulnerable side of the chef as she works through which restaurant to work at via a sleepover comparison.
For the first time, we finally got to see Sydney say everything she was thinking about this career decision and the true deep struggle she’s been having with it. As Boyce said, going back, this knowledge makes me view her actions a bit differently, and it 100% informed my understanding of Sydney’s choices in the back half of Season 4 as she chose to continue working at The Bear.
When I asked the Marcus actor about working on this episode with the Sydney actress, he noted that it was “a really cool experience,” and it helped him realize how much he knows about this show and these characters. So, getting to work on the show in a totally new way was fantastic, as he explained:
So I think it was cool to sit in a different seat, and you start to realize and put together [that] you know just as much as everyone else on the show, because you're reading every script and everything, and it's coming from a different perspective. And I've written on my own stuff before, so abiding by someone else's rules was fun.
He also told me that working with Ayo Edebiri meant a lot too, because they’ve become such good friends and she’s someone he would like to “collaborate with for the rest of [his] career.”
In the end, these two members of The Bear cast wrote a miraculous episode of television. And like Boyce said, it does allow us all to see both Sydney and the show as a whole with “fresh eyes.” So, to go back and see if that’s true for you, you can stream the series in full with a Hulu subscription.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
