“Hidden” deals with Norman trying to regain control over his life.
This episode starts where the last one ended, with Chick, Norman and now Norma looking at Caleb's dead body in the road. Norman wants to call the police. Chick and Norma want to dispose of the body. Chick offers to do it. Norman agrees with the majority vote, but seems unhappy about it. Does he feel that Chick and Norma are ganging up on him?
Chick burns Caleb's body on a lake. The funeral is respectful and ritualistic, a Viking style send off complete with offerings and a bier like boat. When he tells Norman about it later he says he outdid himself. Rather than a way of honouring Caleb, a man Chick hated, I imagine he chose the floating pyre for artistic reasons, another aspect of this eccentric character's integrity.
Norman is unhappy that Chick and Norma outvoted him and wants more control. “What's depressing is having no control over your life.” When Chick turns up later with luggage and bird, Norman tells him he can't live with them or come around all the time. Chick feels unappreciated and leaves in a bad mood.
Sheriff Green arrives at the Bates house asking after Jim Blackwell. She is concerned because Blackwell had the address of the motel among his things, was released from the prison where Romero was serving time, and the latter has now escaped custody. She wonders whether they are both looking for something in the house or motel. Later she returns to check the guest register and Norman lets slip that he knows where Blackwell was from, he tries to convince her that she told him earlier that day. She gives him the licence plates and description of the car Blackwell was driving and asks him to look out for it.
Panicked, Norman demands that Norma show him where she hid the car. They find it, but there are no keys and neither knows how to hot-wire a vehicle, so after an argument that results in Norman suffocating Norma, and seeing a flash of her frozen corpse, they leave it where it is. Like the scene where Chick is expelled from “paradise” we see how Norman is struggling with the way things are. “I don’t like how we’ve become lately.” He wants to change things and he also seems to find it more difficult to cling to the fantasy of him and his mother, together forever. How much this has to do with Madeline is open to debate, but after giving her Norma's clothes perhaps he is imaging that she will be able to replace his mother and become Norma 2.0.
Romero flees the farm, sending the kid inside for a first aid kit. After walking and bleeding for however many miles until he reaches a town, Romero calls an ambulance about a fake O.D. and grabs medical supplies to remove the buck shot from his stomach, clean and bandage the wound.
Madeline invites Norman to dinner, She answers the door in one of his mother's dresses – what is she thinking? Then seduces him over a food processor. Part way through making out Norman has a vision of Norma slitting Madeline's throat and runs away, leaving Madeline to live another day. When he reaches home Norma isn't there and he sees the house as it truly is now, a dirty hovel. Has he succeeded in breaking free? I doubt it, but he is certainly pushing hard towards some level of autonomy.
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