carmillavoiez
Apr 23, 20173 min
What I love most about this season is that we are not spoon fed information about Norman's perception vs reality. Instead we receive information via drip feed, like when we discover Dr Edwards didn't meet with Norman in a café. We still don't know whether Norman's feelings for Madeline were ever reciprocated and it's unlikely that she'll be confessing her love any time soon. Did he imagine the after dinner kiss or was that real? Was he saving her from Sam or simply breaking her heart?
Norma/n is in control this episode for better or for worse. She thinks she can protect Norman, but everything she says and does seems to dig a deeper hole. Now they've found Sam's body and Norman is facing a triple homicide charge, yet even this is the tip of a very large iceberg.
Police and SOCO are all over the Bates property. Audrey Ellis' luggage is found buried in the garden, but the cop in the basement says he has that “beat by a mile”: Chick slumped over a typewriter with a hole in his head.
“Sometimes it sucks to be family,” Norman's lawyer, Julia, says to Dylan when she tells him she needs him at the hearing to show Norman's connection to humanity. Poor Dylan and poor Emma. Emma has arrived to support Dylan only to be told that her mother's body was found in the lake. Emma doesn't want to blame Dylan, he didn't introduce her to Norman, but she cannot bear to hear him defend his brother either. She stays in White Pine Bay to take care of her mother's body, and while Emma and Dylan do hold each other, and try to offer comfort, we can tell that this wound will not heal easily, if at all. Dylan feels as though everything good is slipping away. It reminds me of the scene at the Christmas tree field when he told Emma that his family is like a black hole that sucks everything into it. When Madeline confronts him in the court house he cannot defend his actions. Would things have been different if Dylan had confided in Emma about the earring from the start? We will never know, and neither will he. His conflicting sense of loyalty to the two halves of his family cannot be reconciled. Norman may be sick, but that doesn't make the murder of Emma's mother any more bearable.
Before she leaves White Pine Bay, Emma visits Norman, having scattered her mother's ashes in the mountain wind. Norma/n tries to tell her he didn't kill her mother, but Emma knows Norman almost as well as Dylan does, and she knows this isn't Norman. She asks to speak with him and is told he's asleep in his bed, and will wake up to the smell of freshly baked pie. “Tell him I miss him,” Emma says in a surprise move.
Next on the list of visitors is Romero. He holds the receptionist hostage, shoots one of his fellow officers in the shoulder and locks them in Norman's cell, taking Norman and the receptionist with him. Romero doesn't see Norma when he looks at her son, he only sees what's been taken from him and for a moment it looks as though he'll choke Norman right outside his cell with everyone watching. Instead he tells Norman to take him to Norma's body.
One episode remains and yet we feel further from a resolution than we did in episode 8. Who will live and who will die when Norman and Romero face off over Norma's shallow grave? Will Dylan and Emma recover from this trauma or will Dylan take Madeline's advice and kill himself? What will Sheriff Green do when she finds her police officers locked in a cell and Norman gone?