Bates Motel Season 1, Episode 10 ‘Midnight’
Directed by Tucker Gates
Written by Carlton Cuse & Kerry Ehrin
returns for season 2 in 2014
(Randy is taking over for Ricky this week. You can read more of Randy’s reviews for other episodes of Bates Motel over at Processed Media).
Campy, frustrating, intriguing, laughably ridiculous… all of these words describe the first season of Bates Motel in some form or another, whether you’re talking about plot, setting, performances, or characters. Unfortunately, the only word that comes to mind when it comes to the finale is “contrived.” At least the show finally put its cards down on the table – except it didn’t, and what cards it put down make little to no sense whatsoever. Top it off with a “shocking” “twist” that nobody could give a fuck less about, and ‘Midnight’ stands as a testament to all that Bates Motel is and isn’t… too bad the latter of those lists is a lot longer than the former.
There are two big events driving everything in ‘Midnight’: the meeting between Abernathy and Norma, and the Winter Formal at the school, which Norman and Emma hesitantly agree to go to together. Things get off to a bad start when Dylan tells Norma the last thing she needs is a gun – and then proceeds to give her a gun two scenes later anyway, teaching her how to shoot it as she dicked around lightheartedly. Right off the bat we have a bit of plot contrivance to draw a bond between two characters that (up to that point) had been growing slowly and organically – not a good omen of things to come when the first thing you do is crush the momentum of one of the only interesting sub-plots hiding behind the clusterfuck of White Pine Bay mysteries and Norma/Norman’s allusions to psychosis.
From there, things take a slow turn into the ludicrous, as Norma confesses to Norman that her brother raped her for years and she did nothing about it. Seriously – five minutes before the guy goes to his first school dance, and Norma takes the opportunity to tell “him the truth” about her childhood. What is this supposed to explain about Norma, besides a definition for the scar on her leg? Her sexual desires certainly haven’t been quelled in adult hood (she was fucking Shelby for information a few episodes ago, don’t forget) and until this episode, there’s no sign of anything emotionally unsettling with Norma except her attachment to her son.
They don’t even try to make some parallel or connection to getting raped by Keith and killing him. Even that single moment, the show lacks the insight to silently draw a connection between the two. Getting raped as a child didn’t create some dark force in Norma: it’s just the reason we’re given for her mental instability, which I find to be a massive insult to the character (and females in general). It wasn’t enough to show us a brutal, unnecessary rape in the pilot: no, we need a dose of INCEST RAPE to spice up the finale of a show about a serial killer.
As expected, Abernathy dies, shot to death by Romero, who “runs this town” and apparently can’t be corrupted by “assholes” like Abernathy – though he wasn’t smart enough to see all the pot being grown and girls being sold underneath his nose for years, because that’s just the logic in the world of Bates Motel. His characters is supposed to be mysteriously ambiguous but the finale exposes him as flat and coincidental, merely a cardboard presence who talks soft and doesn’t do shit else, except hold onto $150,000 in cash only to throw it in the river after he murders Abernathy.
With everything else wrapped up, the last 10 to 15 minutes are dedicated to Norman, who is still obsessed with Bradley for some reason, despite his repeated denials (the lack of subtlety with this, combines with the lack of definition for his obsession for a completely inept story line). He gets punched in the face by her boyfriend, who didn’t care for weeks that they had sex, despite having ample opportunity to approach Norman EVERY DAY in school. Rebuked by both the blonde and dark-haired women in his life, Norman enters one of his trances when he gets into his teacher’s car (I’ve talked about the blonde streak in the teacher’s hair before, and it turns out it did hold a bit of importance), and then later kills her, after hallucinating his mother.
Yes, he kills his English teacher, the one who he fantasized about in episode two, and was forgotten about until episode nine. Not only that, but she’s the “B” that was sleeping with Bradley’s father, which I’d assume is the reason he got killed (she’s on the phone talking to an ‘Eric’, which I can only assume is Gill’s first name). Isn’t that just the dandiest fucking twist? Norman’s second murder is the woman who ruined Bradley’s family – and apparently was a woman who couldn’t keep it in her pants, even around minors like Norman Bates.
So there you go: Norman’s now a murderer of women. What else is there left for this show to do?
Am I interested in what happens with the Bradley/Norman/Dylan triangle? Couldn’t care less.
Is Romero an intriguing character now? No – he’s just more vague and ambiguous than ever.
Did anything with Keith Summers or the Asian girls (or Abernathy) add up to anything climatic? Hell no.
Do we care about Norma’s rapey past? I don’t think so.
Bates Motel tried to show us how a town could bring out the worst in the Bates family – except that it completely failed in making that believable in any way, shape, or form. When Bates Motel wasn’t busy checking off masturbatory references to Hitchcock’s classic, it was busy spinning a web of conspiracy that didn’t add up to anything, filling our screen with a cast of thin characters – to which I’d add Norma in the finale, as her ‘depth’ as a character adds up to repeated childhood rapes, hardly a way to characterize the most important entity on the damn show. And now Norman’s a killer, thanks to a completely inconsequential, off-screen murder where he kills a character connected to nothing on the show, except a contrived necklace that reveals… she was the mistress of a character we met while he was burning alive. Seriously… that’s the big reveal of the season. Knowing that revealing Norman to be a murderer of attractive women wasn’t going to shock or surprise anyone (if you thought Norman would get out of the first season without killing anyone, you miss the point of A&E greenlighting this show), so they had to throw this shit cherry of a meaningless side reveal in as our “tease” for the second season.
Honestly though: who cares about ‘B’ and her affairs? Who cares about Romero’s priorities? Who gives a shit what happens with Dylan and Bradley? While spending all their time building mysteries, designing creepy sets, and ominous scenes, they forgot what made the show Cuse idolizes so much (Twin Peaks) interesting: it’s not about what happens, it’s about where and with whom it happens. Bates Motel completely missed that point – and by doing so, ends its first season with an absolute dud of a finale.
Other thoughts/observations:
– one positive thing: Norma and Emma playing with Emma’s dress for the dance was a great scene, as was the first few moments Norman and Emma walked into their first dance together.
– we spend our first scene alone with Romero: he pulls the money out of a trunk and leaves without a word. What a way to build a character.
– Norman tells Dylan that “all conversations are stupid”, a statement that makes no sense, even for Norman.
– Aww, Dylan called Norma ‘Mom’ while teaching her how to shoot a gun. Maternal bonding at it’s finest.
– I really wish Dylan was a character on a different show.
— Randy
