FX's The Bridge - Episode 1.13 The Crazy Place (Season Finale)
Sonya and Marco search for a missing girl. Charlotte meets someone who knows too much about her new business venture. Marco makes a decision that could change everything.
The structure of The Bridge's first season was really one of the strangest things on TV this year. The first 11 episodes of the season were about the Bridge killer. That story rapidly spiraled out of control into an overly soapy mess that was just the show mimicking the plot from the original Danish series Bron. These last two episodes have been a weird mix of stuff. They have simultaneously felt like an appropriate extended epilogue to the season's main arc as well as a prologue to the stories the show wants to tell in season two.The political corruption in Juarez as well as the ignorance in El Paso is fertile storytelling that the show has always done well. As it got more interested in the David Tate story, that facet did falter. But in these last two weeks, it made its pleasant return. That's the world I always wanted the show to be in. So I'm very optimistic about the just commissioned second season.
Sonya is so dismayed about the missing girls in Juarez that she has become determine to create change. Hank and Marco are wise enough to know that getting things to work differently is next to an impossible task. But the idea of Sonya heading directing into the world of Juarez is exciting.
The wonderful odd couple of Frye and Adrianna will stay relevant as well. They caught a brand new big case and Adrianna will now directly be related to the Juarez girls case as her younger sister has gone missing.
Charlotte has never really worked as a character. I just didn't see the progression of a character arc that took her from the helpless and unsure woman wanting to shut the tunnel down early in the season to the more confident woman in business with Fausto at the end. The introduction of Timothy Buttons' Arliss Fromme is a nice little wrinkle that I hope makes this plot dovetail more into the main story a bit more.
Some more thoughts:
- David Tate didn't work because he functioned like a season long Big Bag and that type of character just didn't suite the structure of the show.
- Thusly, the final ending didn't work for me because Marco wants to be the one to kill him. I don't care about that. I just want that story to be dropped completely in the second season.
- Overall, I would give the first season of The Bridge a B. It had some nice moments and some frustrating ones but it never really broke out in a way that fulfilled all of its potential.
- That's it for now everyone, see you for season two next summer!
