Marion Crane meet Norman Bates.
This episode shows Norman at his most lucid. After his discussion with Dr Edwards and discoveries at White Horse Bar in the last episode, he knows that his mother is not pretending to be dead, she is dead. He also knows that the person he sees is not Norma but someone his mind created to protect him from the worst of his pain growing up. He still converses with her, he cannot stop himself. This aspect of his psyche is more powerful and more demanding than the Norman it protects, but he does understand why he can see her again – because of the arrival of an attractive woman at the motel – Marion Crane.
As Norman comes to grips with the reality than Norma is really dead, so does Dylan. Emma discovered the truth in the last episode and reveals it now to Dylan who is grief stricken. He tries to reach out to Norman, to find out why he didn't tell him, but is rebuffed. Perhaps his grief and search for the truth will return Dylan to White Pine Bay and even his own death.
Marion arrives at Bates Motel in a storm, still unable to reach Sam Loomis, her boyfriend, and tell him she has the solution to his presumed financial problems. Norman settles her into room 1 and gazes at her through the hole in the wall. When she says she's hungry, he makes her a sandwich, in a nod to the film Psycho it's a ham sandwich. While she eats he shares with her some profound wisdom about the nature of love and our inability to know who people are.
Sam is playing both Marion and Madeline for fools, denying the existence of both. In this twisted world we find echoes of Norman's understanding that Norma doesn't exist in the way he thought she did. The lies we tell ourselves for the sake of an easier life. Norman wants to get past them, whereas Sam is willing to wallow in them for as long as he can.
Marion asks Norman about Sam and Norman reveals that he knows Sam's wife. Marion refuses to believe Sam's married, and drives to the address Norman gives her. She watches the couple argue then smashes up Sam's car with a tire iron. The iconic shower scene from Psycho looks as though it will play out again in this episode, but Marion manages to get clean without the help of a bloodbath. Norman is tested and this time he tamps down his desire to kill and sends Marion packing, to live out her life free of Sam Loomis.
After all Sam is the bad guy here. Sam and Sam. Sam Loomis and Sam Bates, Norman's dead father. “Your mother suffered.” Norman knows this but needs to feel it to be finally free. The pain is immeasurable, but as his new accomplice rather than master, Norma/n tells him, there is a way to feel better. “And you're not too little now.”
And so we get the shower scene we were expecting, to the soundtrack of Roy Orbison's “Crying”, but it's gender swapped. Waiting for Marion in the motel room, Sam takes a shower. Almost shot for shot we see Psycho replayed, the slightly hammy and rather unrealistic stabbing and the blood draining away. At the end it is Sam who falls to the floor wrapped in a shower curtain, his dead eyes watching us as we consider what this means for Norman.