It’s tough to think of The Bridge‘s original narrative conceit – two bodies, pieced together to look like one, draped across the US/Mexico border – and reconcile it with the show that is on now. To be fair, The Bridge‘s first season was pretty damn good, but I’m hard-pressed to compare its second season to anything. It’s brutal and bleak, but unlike The Leftovers its still easy to look forward to every weak (I like The Leftovers, but it can be an endurance test at times).
The first scene of “Lamia” is so much better than it should be. Frye, fresh off of his quitting/firing last week, is getting down with some cocaine, some Rush, and a guy named Greg (played by Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office), who has an “in” with the Secretary of State’s office. Adriana shows up to break up the party, Greg calls her a bitch, Frye gets in his face, and it looks like the two are going to get into some lame-ass drug-fueled fisticuffs, until Greg is hit with the realization that he just threw away five years of sobriety. Not everyone jumps back into substance abuse with Frye’s glee and fervor, and it’s heartbreaking to see Greg – who, need I remind you, we’ve known for all of five minutes – slump towards the door, beaten and broken. “The system,” he tells Frye, “doesn’t work.”
Credit director Adam Arkin for making a familiar scene way more interesting than I thought it would be. Arkin’s direction was spot-on throughout all of “Lamia,” and it’s easy to see why FX keeps calling him up (he’s also helmed episodes of Justified, Sons of Anarchy, and The Americans). “Lamia” did a great job of keeping the action moving, pulling the characters together, and tightening the screws for the last few episodes. (If I have one complaint about this season, it’s that aside from Jack Dobbs and Eleanor Nacht, no new characters have been introduced, and it kind of beggars belief that everyone’s lives would continue to intersect like this.)
The most explosive scene of the episode comes after Jack shows Sonya the skeleton he unearthed last week, and it’s that of Bridget Roland, Jim Dobbs’ first victim. This revelation earns him a punch in the face from Hank and a cold shoulder from Sonya, but Jack also gets Hank to admit to Sonya that he shot Jim more or less in cold blood. The acting is top-notch all around, but one feels that going into Sonya’s backstory so much is kind of wheel-spinning, since she and Marco have barely worked together since they halfheartedly looked for Yovani Garza. It’s possible that Sonya and Marco aren’t The Bridge‘s main characters this season, that it might actually be Frye and Adriana.
The two journalists trek out to Red Ridge – which Frye found out about during his coke binge/study sesh – and happen to meet Ray, who continues to suck. Ray’s last name is Burton, but the way everyone says it makes it sound like “burden,” which is funny to me. Ray gets worried about the questions they’re asking and before long, he and Charlotte are sitting across a diner table from Eleanor, who really ups her crazy ante.
Her monologue about her past, and how she met Fausto Galvan, is at once chilling and gut-wrenching. Franka Potente’s matter-of-fact delivery makes her words so much more grounded in reality, and that’s part of what The Bridge has been doing so well this season: showing us a world we’ll never see, where these people exist and these things happen. It’s far from thrilling; it’s downright terrifying, and addictive as hell.
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