[Spoilers] I thought the last episode of S2 ("The Bear") was contrived and rude to the audience

To be clear, I like the show and I thought this season was better than the first, I just think they beefed it (ha) on the final episode of S2.

I think the last episode was hokey, staged tragedy porn that leaned way too heavily on soap opera plot conventions to help generate strife and ruin relationships. "Oh no, Carmy is locked in the walk-in that he failed to fix all season, how ironic! Oh no, now Carmy is spouting off at the mouth while his girlfriend can hear him right when Tina happened to walk off and leave him unattended and he's going to lose the one good thing he had going for him! Oh no, Richie waited until after he got done flawlessly saving the day and keeping his temper under control to go back to his old ways! Oh no, Marcus's mom is either waking up or dying and he didn't give the nurse any other way to contact him despite him being extremely paranoid about it all season and we're seeing this right as he hangs up a sign that implies he accidentally failed to follow the sign's advice!

To be clear, I'm completely fine with any of those things happening during the season. I'm not opposed to tragedy in media, and I'm also not opposed to "magical writing" to tell stories about characters and events where plot contrivances conveniently result in blowups at the worst possible times. I just think that The Bear had a "plot-contrivance-per-episode" rate similar to, say, Billions, when suddenly this last episode the writers ratcheted it up to Grey's Anatomy.

Also, they ended the first season with a clear win and a direction to go in the second season. This set up the expectation that the writers will end seasons of The Bear with some finality. It would have been totally fine to end the second season with a clear tragedy instead of a clear win, but to end it with a bunch of separate tragedies that aren't actually related to the success or failure of the restaurant is a huge departure in pattern from not only the first season but also each individual episode of the show. "But that's just how real life is sometimes, everything blows up at once!" Sure, but it doesn't blow up in ways specifically designed to cause nearly all of your main characters to experience an ironic regression customized to take advantage of their specific flaws and failures. Either make the whole show a magical drama, or make the whole show a gritty realistic simulation, or cleanly balance those two elements, but don't suddenly turn on the soap at the very end of the season.

I think this final episode would have been a better penultimate episode.