[Editor’s note: The recap of episode nine publishes July 9. This recap contains spoilers.] Three memorable moments from the 81st Golden Globe AwardsYou might make a consuming recreation out of it (however you in all probability shouldn’t): take a shot each time this season that Natalie asks somebody “You okay?” or “You good?” It’s the work she feels she has to do on this world—ensuring everybody round her feels snug and cared for. As a result of in the event that they don’t, they may activate her. After which all of the years will fall away, and he or she’ll be proper again the place she began: at Dee Dee’s home, helpless to maintain the beast at bay. There’s a cause everybody calls her Sugar.Originally of “Ice Chips,” she is the one who isn’t okay or good or snug or cared for. She’s on their lonesome in rush-hour site visitors, with a trunk stuffed with C-folds and a child simply beginning to struggle its manner out of her womb. Pete is on a aircraft, and nobody at The Bear is selecting up their telephone. So Nat girds her literal and figurative loins and makes the decision she’s been avoiding for an extended, very long time.The factor about individuals with borderline character dysfunction—and Donna Berzatto is a textbook case—is that they wish to be wanted and so they should be wished. Their love is the egocentric, smothering type, and it comes with extra strings than a spider net. And generally, the one strategy to escape along with your sanity intact is to chop ties altogether—particularly when that particular person was final seen driving a automotive via the wall of her personal home.However I’ll give this to Dee Dee: She doesn’t attempt to sneak up on you. “HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY!” scatters throughout the hospital parking zone, rising louder and louder till she pounces on her daughter like a vampire who’s lastly gotten the invitation she’s been ready for. She then begins shouting, “Hee! Hee! Hee!” instantly into Nat’s ear, which does the very reverse of calming her down. And we haven’t even made it into the foyer but.Donna doesn’t take her fingers off Nat all through the episode, compulsively squeezing her shoulders, stroking her hair, and greedy her palm. However the which means of these touches modifications when she lastly learns the right way to maintain her daughter shut with out suffocating her. Episode director Joanna Calo movies “Ice Chips” largely in excessive close-up, chopping backwards and forwards between the faces of mom and daughter. The impact is sort of unbearably intimate: We will see each rivulet of mascara melting beneath Nat’s eyes and the deep fissures that kind round Donna’s mouth each time she frowns, which is commonly. It additionally provides us the possibility to look at Jamie Lee Curtis and Abby Elliott’s gorgeous performances in forensic element. Like her character, Elliott has been a quiet, regular supporting participant all through The Bear, which is before everything a present about male intimacy. This episode, nonetheless, is a few very totally different sort of legacy than what occurs between Michelin-starred cooks. The place Carmy’s emotions are as tightly packed because the layers of a mille-feuille, his sister’s are at all times plain to see. However that doesn’t imply Nat’s an open e-book—and Elliott is good at revealing as a lot of her character as she conceals. She and Curtis feed off one another’s vitality so fantastically that every one the years of affection and rancor between them really feel strong sufficient to the touch. From her shaking fingers to her unhinged cackle, Curtis’ Donna feels extra like a possession than a efficiency. (If anybody’s been “haunting” season three, it positive isn’t Massive Neil.) Talking as somebody who—full disclosure—grew up with a borderline dad or mum, her tackle the character is terrifyingly on level.Nat often is the one who’s about to offer start, however contained in the hospital room, it’s the Dee-Dee Present. She’s regaling the nurse with the story of the evening she gave start to Mikey, again when obstetricians had been simply “males who stated issues.” Her cause for eager to have a child? She wished somebody to like her the way in which she’d seen with “all these smug moms down on the Jewel, blocking the aisle with their strollers.” Horrified on the state of affairs she’s put herself in, Nat is like: Heyyy, any phrase from Pete? (I do know you’re in labor and all, however don’t let this lady area your calls!) Donna scoffs when Nat says she doesn’t need an epidural. Which might be completely fantastic, if her underlying motivation weren’t so chilling: “Why not see if I can stand up to the ache?” Wooooof. That ache is, in fact, quite a bit. Joanna Calo makes us really feel the price of each contraction, as Nat lastly submits to the “hee”-ing (guess managing a restaurant doesn’t depart a lot time for Lamaze courses) and realizes that it’s fairly efficient. Emotionally, Donna could also be a baby, however she is aware of what she’s speaking about in the case of getting via labor. And yeah, possibly Nat will get that epidural in spite of everything, with a aspect of Pitocin.To each distract herself from the ache and distract her mom from asking questions she’s not ready to reply, Nat probes into the story of her brothers’ births. They had been each tough: Mikey “acquired snarled” inside Donna, and Carmy’s supply was “fucked throughout.” (It tracks that each of those troubled souls would have most well-liked to remain within the womb, protected against the slings and arrows of the skin world.) Abby Elliott as Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto Picture: FXA few episodes in the past, Mikey waxed poetic about how probably the most particular moments in life revolve round meals. And whereas a plastic cup of ice chips isn’t precisely Christmas dinner, it’s clear from Nat and Donna’s grins that that is one of the best meal they’ve shared in years. Because the deep freeze between them begins to thaw, Dee Dee asks her daughter if the rationale she didn’t inform her in regards to the child is as a result of she didn’t need her round. That isn’t it, not fairly: Nat does need her mom to be on this child’s life; she simply doesn’t need the stuff she brings together with her. “I don’t need her scared like I used to be scared.”If there’s any second when Donna may be receptive sufficient—and sober sufficient—to soak up her daughter’s clarification of the methods she fucked her up, it’s this one. Nat admits that she at all times thinks individuals are indignant at her, that she’s at all times put everybody else’s wants earlier than her personal—particularly her mother’s. Donna thinks it’s candy, however Sugar is finished with all that: “No, it isn’t candy. It’s fucked up, Mother! I made myself sick to make you are feeling higher.”And, miraculously, Donna will get it. She’s the rationale Natalie lives in a continuing state of concern—and why she’s terrified that she’s going to repeat the cycle of abuse in flip when this child is born. BPD is a illness that’s catching, should you’re not cautious, and it’s usually handed down from mom to daughter. (When Nat mentions that she doesn’t bear in mind her grandmother, Donna says raggedly, “You don’t wish to.”)That’s when Nat asks to listen to her personal story. There’s nothing performative in regards to the smile that lights up Donna’s face when she describes the dream she had the evening her daughter was born: It’s about seeing magnificence in a spot the place nobody else thinks to look and eager to share that magnificence with another person. It’s about eager to be understood, and by being understood, to really feel much less alone. And it’s about much more than simply seven fishes.By the point Pete arrives to seek out Donna cradling Nat in her arms, each of them swaying in time with the Ronettes’ “Child, I Love You,” the gravity within the room has shifted: For the primary time in her life, Natalie is the middle of her mom’s world as a substitute of the opposite manner round. It’s the best reward Dee Dee might have given her. And she or he is aware of that Pete’s arrival is her cue to go away—as a result of, heartbreakingly, Nat’s dream for the child to be born into “one thing actually good” can solely occur in her absence.In “Legacy,” Carmy advised his fellow cooks that the one manner for him to really feel he’s made a constructive mark on the world is to “be sq. with the whole lot and everyone.” For him, it’s a pipe dream; however for the ladies in his household, not less than for at present, it’s praxis. I anticipated “Ice Chips” to start out out unhealthy and solely worsen, like “Fishes.” (I don’t learn about you, however I used to be so positive that Donna was mendacity when she assured Nat that she’d referred to as Pete.) However Callo and episode author Christopher Storer give us one thing much more cathartic—and much more stunning. Stray observationsIt’s tragic—and telling—that the primary particular person Nat thinks to name after Pete doesn’t decide up isn’t Carmy however Sydney. Despite the fact that she’s solely identified Syd for a handful of years, Nat trusts her implicitly. Her brother, the boy who wished to remain within the womb for so long as he might, not a lot.That Richie’s voicemail message is “Yo! shouldn’t be out there” simply feels so proper.This can be a small factor, nevertheless it doesn’t seem to be an afterthought when a nurse on the loudspeaker requires “fingers” to assist revive a mom. A hospital is one massive kitchen, solely the stakes are infinitely greater.“It’s not calming me down!” “It’s. It’s calming you down.” I’ll undoubtedly be discussing this mother-daughter change in remedy subsequent week.As a result of Donna doesn’t know the which means of boundaries, a again therapeutic massage she provides Nat shortly turns right into a grope. “You could have your dad’s ass. He had a pleasant ass.”Talking of the Berzatto patriarch, he’s a heavy presence within the room by his very absence. He was MIA for Mikey and Nat’s deliveries, however he was there for Carmy’s—and he made issues a lot worse.These ice chips actually do look tasty.