Bates Motel: Series 2

On May 5th, the second season of Bates Motel ended with ‘The Immutable Truth’ bringing answers, closure and honestly not much to write about in the third season. The writers will now have to create new ‘everyday’ problems for Norman (Freddie Highmore) and Norma (Vera Fermiga).

A year ago it was (and still is for some people) a true ordeal to even consider a prequel to the classic Hitchcockian Psycho. But the risk paid off really well because Norman turned out to be a compelling character, and his relation with his mother even more twisted that anyone could ever imagine. The first season, even if decent, is nothing compared to the second one which has fixed several problems dealing with storytelling, characters and the town of White Pine Bay. We could argue that the first season was too much about the covering up of Keith Summers’s (W. Earl Brown) murder, the sex trafficking mystery and less about the characters themselves. The writers, the actors and maybe the characters had to get used to this new town and its dark secrets.

The Bates finally come out of their cocoon for the second season, which portrays White Pine Bay as a more living town with its city council, community theater and grown up house parties. The second season works indeed as a perfect second launch pad for the show: new interesting characters are introduced like Caleb (Kenny Johnson), Nick Ford (Michael O’Neill) and Cody (Paloma Kwiatkowski), the Motel starts having customers and different storylines meet and cross each other paths. Cody for instance turned out to be essential for the show as antithesis (and even enemy) of Norma. Their battle for the affection of Norman were incredible but truth is that just her presence permitted to the show to relax and play more on Norman’s good/bad boy duality. Season two permitted to some previous characters to shine on their own as well: Sheriff Romero (Nestor Carbonell) freed himself from the lone ranger image to become a more likeable character. Season two was definitely a promising or even a better counterpart to the first.

‘The Immutable Truth’ brought a sound conclusion to the second season: Emma, after having tried to leave the Motel, becomes, once again, part of the family, Norma loses Christine (Rebecca Creskoff) and George (Michael Vartan), and is left alone with Norman. The drug war ends since both parties are killed, and Norman gets away with murder and kind of discovers the truth about himself. With this last episode the audience starts to give up to the idea that the nicest person on earth could be the perfect sociopath.

Norman during season one and two in fact clearly shows eleven of the fifteen characteristics that define a sociopath: superficial charm, manipulation, grandiose sense of self (because as we know his life is regularly crushed under the will of his mother), pathological lying (he was able to pass the polygraph test even if guilty), lack of remorse (since as we know his subconscious mind can blame everything on other people because it swears by Norma, who said that he is a good boy), need for stimulation (his obsession with stuffed animals and keeping the beings he loves as they are forever), lack of empathy for his victims (since he is always convinced to have committed his crimes to save someone else), impulsive nature (Norman has several mood changes), juvenile delinquency (he has murdered his father), promiscuous sexual behavior (Norman’s personality changes radically after having sex with Bradley or even Miss Watson) and a lack of realistic life plan. Season two has allowed the audience to grow fond of Norman in the same way a sociopath would make you believe that he is too kind to commit horrible crimes.

With this last episode, Bates Motel turns out to be more a tragedy about Norma, a mother who unconditionally loves his son but is making him a monster, than about Norman himself. And despite all that is resolved, this episode also unfortunately leaves few issues on the table: Norman is not supposed to tell his mother that she was the one who killed Miss Watson, and  how is Dylan going to fill the vacuum left after the drug war?

What are now the expectations for Season 3? Co-creator Kerry Ehrin in an interview with Zap2it has shared some information about what to expect from the third season of Bates Motel. Ehrin promised many further complications:

‘…What’s going to happen with Norma’s dream of running this motel, living there happily with her kid, when she’s on the outs now with the very people who got her inside the city council? All that stuff has to be played out, so there are actually quite a lot of open doors that we want to continue’.

In the same interview she has decided to enlighten the audience with some details about the destinies of Emma, Dylan and the show itself. During this second season, for instance, Norman has lost Bradley and then Cody, what is the chance that Emma might be the next one to disappear? Ehrin answered:

‘…We want to pull her more into the interior of the Bates family next season. We’re not exactly sure what that looks like yet, if it is maybe getting closer to Norman and kind of going down the road with that a bit in terms of a romance. We just want to pull her way deep inside the family. Especially now that she knows the truth about Dylan’

As we all know in the original Psycho the character of Dylan does not exist and the writers still do not know how to deal with this problem since he has become a beloved character and he represents the eyes of the rational audience over Norman and Norma’s toxic relationship. If Dylan might die what about the show itself? The writers do not have a concrete ending for Bates Motel yet but they are ‘trying to work that out’ so that they can start writing toward it.

In the meantime Bates Motel as we know has been renewed for a 10-episode third season that will probably air in 2015, until then, we can only hope that the writers will give us more adventures before finally pulling the plug on the show.