Syd holds her deepest feelings and emotions close.

So of course she’s never told anyone, not even Carmy, exactly how much a certain chef means to her.

Syd’s lie in 5x04 about the grapefruit scallop dish was done on purpose, just like her lie in 1x01 about coming to The Beef every Sunday with her dad. Both lies serve the same function: to obscure her naked heart just enough from view of the one person she wants most to see it, to see her.

She does this so that she can withdraw and protect herself if needed.

It didn’t make sense for us to get the full blood orange hamachi reveal in S5 bc of how rushed the context of that season was. But we got a very natural beginning to that conversation.

A conversation where, maybe, eventually, Carmy will pull Syd up after a particularly busy future service. He’ll touch her back and ask if they can talk in the office. She’ll say sure and follow him, completely unaware, looking down at the draft menu on her clipboard while she walks. He’ll ask her to sit down and he’ll sit across from her, gently taking the clipboard from her hands and setting it on the table.

Carmy will ask Syd if he was working at Empire when she had her first-best bite. She’ll say yes, her eyes wide and dark. Carmy will tell her they never served grapefruit and scallop while he was there. Syd will smile tight and say something like, it might have been something similar. There was citrus and the protein was a fish.

(She knows exactly what the dish was but he’s calling her out and she still has too much pride to admit to lying, because what good reason can she give for doing so, other than protecting her heart?)

She takes out her phone and shows him the photo she took of the dish that stole her breath away. She’ll say oh, I remember now. It was blood orange and paupiette of hamachi. Best meal of my life.

And she’ll look up to see Carmy’s eyes glazed and smiling. A tear might escape his right eye.

Carm? What’s the matter?

Nothing. I’m good. I’m good. We- We’re good.

Syd was frustrated with him but she wasn’t trying to control or punish him, which was his expectation of how it would all go down from his family.

Syd literally took the speech Marcus gave at his mother’s funeral in S3 and immediately acted on her knowledge of looking up close at Carmy to do this little but significant thing.

He asks her later to the Ever dinner so she can be with her equals and peers when we find out one of her main complaints is he was being competitive and not sharing.

He’s in love with her but he’s not trying to use her for his own ends. He starts trying to give her the recognition she deserves instead of material things and elevating her instead of himself.

Then at the dinner he confronts Chef David, his own bad boss, after realizing he was being a bad boss to Syd, specifically.

She just completely transformed his way of looking at things and it’s because of love. (And he wasn’t trying to just get in her pants, either, although the show makes it clear he definitely desires her.)

carmy has visually etched so many things about sydney into his subconscious.

last season i wrote this post about how carmy's dream is sydney.

last week i wrote this one about how he's actively imprinting memories of her.

the "you look like syd" scene + the "you look nice" scene... are not random. it's an extension of that first meeting + the other dozen times she's walked into a frame he's already wordlessly existing in.

the camera always lingers on his reaction, his expression.

the audience is always a witness to him openly marveling at her.

this is a directorial choice + it's made throughout the bulk of the series so much it becomes a motif.

there is a real narrative + thematic gravitas to the dialogue detail of carmy saying the exact words "it started when you walked in..." the import of which has been seamlessly illustrated by how often he's recalled that very moment within the bones of the story itself.

they weren't just love at first sight. they were incomprehensible at first sight. they were salvation at first sight.

so much of the final season exemplified how sydney is the embodiment of the thing he couldn't see or connect with beneath his trauma, grief + haphazard sense of self.

she was the anchor, she was the connective tissue.

she was the water, to his fire. she was the cool breeze, the calm, the peace. these things were expressly explored via visual symbolism in the narrative.

"i like this..."

he likes being alongside her, he likes assisting her on her mission + dream, which is evident as he speaks in the internship interview.

he likes the moments where he's so outside of himself + his body + all the machinations of existing as this deeply skilled yet complicated chef (person).

when it clicks what her best bite was, we watch his microexpression almost flood with rapturous awe.

immediately the dimensions of this wordless connection is both validated + compounded.

sydney knows about her connection to carmy throughout the length of the series, even if she doesn't verbalize or give credence to it.

she is always very aware of her why, even when it doesn't make sense or falters.

she knows why she's there, why she keeps coming back.

even amongst the pitfalls + agitation.

which is also why there's more emotional distance on her end until the last season + a half.

"you write in the margins." "i appreciate you." "you're supposed to be here!"

but all carmy knows before that revelation is the moment she walked into his life + everything shifted.

he's the legacy, the access, the vehicle. she's the heart, the humanity, the cohesion.

throughout the length of the series they experience the inverse in the other.

in actuality, they found the thing they most hungered for, the thing that was always missing in the lap of the other.

This is not a continuity error it’s a deliberate choice to keep the moment between them. just them.

It’s the parallels for me - syd lying to him on the first day about why she wants to work there him clocking it . In THE REVEAL also He sees through her lie and she knows he will.