I still can’t see a goddamn thing on The Bridge, you guys. Let’s talk about “Sorrowsworn.”
This week’s episode might have been less plot-driven than the previous two installments, but that’s okay because the character work was just as fascinating to watch. I’m mainly talking about Franka Potente’s Eleanor Nacht, who is quickly becoming my favorite TV villain since Fargo‘s Lorne Malvo. Something about Eleanor just puts people on edge: the way she dresses, her unplaceable accent, her seemingly unblinking eyes. Watch her in the cold open: she stares down a saleswoman using nothing but friendly words, but they sound wrong coming out of her mouth. They sound like someone pretending to be human. Later, when Eleanor sneaks into Dex’s bedroom (Dex was friends with the dearly departed Kyle), she talks like a serial killer, telling Dex “You looked upon me,” and saying “I transformed him” when Dex asks about Kyle. You know who else talks like that? Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon.
We get to see some season one characters come back too, the first of which are Ray, Cesar, and Charlotte. Ray and Cesar are transporting a load of dope and get robbed by a bunch of kids on glow-in-the-dark bikes, which makes for a pretty cool visual in a very dark episode. Ray – who still dresses like he might need to go to an Incubus concert at the drop of a hat, wearing a blue polo and pooka shell necklace – wants to skip town, telling Charlotte that they should “act like white people and disappear.” Somehow, I know this plot will dovetail with the rest of the overall narrative, but last season it always seemed like Ray and Charlotte were on a different show only tangentially related to this one.
Steven Linder returns as well, and Thomas Wright has significantly improved his performance. Linder bothered me last year, mainly because Wright chooses to talk like Buffalo Bill and ignore the fact that Buffalo Bill is already on this show. But I loved him in “Sorrowsworn.” With his hair and beard grown out, he looks less like an awkward Wolverine, and more like me.
Linder is way more intense, too, bashing a captive Mexican cop’s head with a rock because he threatened Eva. See, this is the difference between Charlotte/Ray and Linder/Eva: I don’t care if the latter subplot ever interacts with the main story, because it just makes up another part of The Bridge‘s atmosphere.
That seems to be what showrunner Elwood Reid is after this season: not so much telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but building a world, then looking inside it to find the stories. For instance: we as an audience know that Kyle is already dead, but “Sorrowsworn” nevertheless focuses on Marco and Sonya’s attempt to find him (which they do, stuffed into a barrel, which was a little too reminiscent of Breaking Bad to be effective).
“Sorrowsworn” might have been a less consequential episode than “Yankee” or “Ghost of a Flea” – pretty much the whole narrative focused on Sonya and Marco finding out something that we already know. But it did a good job of world-building. Next week I’d like to see more of the story, and the villainous Mennonite who seemed to set it all in motion. And I’d like The Bridge to turn on some goddamn lights, too.
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