[Editor’s note: The following contains some plot details for The Bear Season 3.]

The Pitch: After two seasons and a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and dropped plates, the stalwart chefs of FX’s The Bear have finally opened their restaurant. Season 1 saw Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) return home to bring his Michelin-star experience to his family’s humdrum Italian beef place; Season 2 followed his and his team’s journey into transforming The Beef into the haute cuisine restaurant of his dreams. With the evolution complete, Season 3 asks the next vital question: Now what?

After all, the quest to get The Bear up and running was just the beginning — now it has to stay that way. And that’s looking increasingly hairy, considering Carmy’s increasingly brittle temperament after locking himself in the walk-in last season and scaring off his sorta-girlfriend, Claire (Molly Gordon); Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) trepidation about the future of the restaurant and her place in it; and the host of other personal and professional peccadilloes that face the rest of The Bear’s employees.

Meanwhile, Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) balances his newfound love of service with the knowledge that his ex-wife (Gillian Jacobs) is getting remarried. At the same time, Sugar (Abby Elliott) juggles restaurant logistics, the final weeks of her pregnancy, and the uncertainty of both those things. All the while, the specter of the restaurant’s first review looms over their heads like a Sword of Damocles that can cut their dreams short before they’ve even begun.

Take Us to The Bear: One of the small miracles creator Christopher Storer accomplished in The Bear’s second season was striking a balance between the quotidian melodramas of our cast of characters and the broader saga of their shared goal (the restaurant). Carmy and crew are deeply flawed individuals who find purpose in a communal ambition; their professional development ripples down into their sense of self-actualization. Their personal lives may be messy — fragmented relationships, broken families, loss, grief — but the project of the restaurant is the thing that brings them purpose.

In Season 3, Storer plays this out in ways both euphoric and melancholic, not to mention tension-inducing; Take the season’s first episode, a meditative, lyrical half-hour that mostly flashes between Carmy’s past and future, all to the repeated strains of Nine Inch Nails’ “Together” — evocative flashes of scarred palms and the show’s patented food porn, trapping Carmy in the limbo he’ll be in all season. He’s terrified for the restaurant’s future, and haunted by his past personal (the death of his brother Mikey) and professional (the abuse of Joel McHale’s head chef) traumas.

After taking a bit of a backseat last season, Carmy is a big focus of The Bear’s concerns as it opens, as he both fights and replicates the tyrannical management style he came up in as a young chef, his colleagues forced to battle and succumb to his ambitious whims. (Early on, he sketches a list of “non-negotiables” all great restaurants have, which range from practical items like teaspoons to less tangible goals like “constantly evolve through passion and creativity.”) It’s a common thread for Carm, as Bear fans know, but the third season doubles down on its toxicity, White playing each frayed nerve with his signature blend of pensive glares and bulged forehead veins.

The Bear (FX)