Photo: Joseph Lederer / A&E
Pure Hilarity! Pure Norma!
Norma's new best friend introduces her to 'the real White Pine Bay' by inviting her to an elegant garden party! Too bad the brother who used to rape Norma is hanging around town threatening to ruin everything.
Even for Bates Motel, this is an episode of dizzying highs and miserable lows for good old Norma. Low: she doesn't get a part in South Pacific even though she nailed her audition song. High: the director, Christine, quit in protest and wants to be friends and go out day-drinking! Low: Christine confirms that the "respectable" White Pine Bayans hold all that Shelby business from last season against Norma, who's now socially tainted. High: Christine wants to rehabilitate Norma and will start by inviting her to Christine's elegant garden party! Low: Norma's rapey brother Caleb has tracked her down! High: Christine's foxy brother is Michael Vartan and he's interested in Norma! Low: Dylan believes Caleb's story that the reason Norma hates him is that their parents abused them and he didn't protect her, and when he confronts her about it and Norman tries to beat him up, Norma has to stop them by dropping the bombshell that CALEB IS DYLAN'S "DAD"! I don't really care for that phrasing, but...I mean, I think we all saw it coming.
It's a pretty Norma-centric episode -- all Norman has to do is decide to ankle his role in the South Pacific chorus in favour of rocking tech with Cody, the nosy cashier, and pretend to be sad about Bradley's apparent suicide even though he knows she's not actually dead -- so how Bates Motel-y is it? Let's run the numbers.
| Bates Motel-y Element | Present? |
|---|---|
| Norman's weirdness makes someone uncomfortable enough to react (verbally or non-verbally). | Norman actually does a pretty decent job pretending to be normal this week. |
| Norma has a public meltdown. | Quite the opposite: she's the sparkling life of Christine's party! Sure, she shrieks at Caleb to get out of her house. But that's in private. |
| So that's how it is in their family. | Not only did Caleb rape Norma when they were younger, but he's Dylan's biological father. |
| The weed business is boring. | So boring. Dylan and Remo find two of their guys dead in the tent at the pot plantation -- reprisal, presumably, from a rival crew for the guy Zane killed last week. So Zane decides that if the one guy he killed was worth two of his, then two of his must be worth ten of the other crew's! Zane's a psychopath, in case you forgot. Who cares. |
| Dylan evinces resentment about his place in the family. | Dylan decides not to take Norma seriously when she says Caleb's a bad guy (but won't tell him why), and goes behind her back to spend one night drinking and decide that he's great and Norma's a jerk, to spite her. |
| Emma pines. | Emma's less concerned about Norman than she is about feeling nothing about Bradley's apparent suicide. At the farewell beach keg party she's organized, she falls in with the local weed cupcake salesman and gets all wasted/flirty with him. Much better bet! |
| The bypass!!!!!1!!!1 | Dead Miss Watson's dad "happens" to run into Norma when they're both leaving Christine's party, and butter her up about how brave she is to have publicly opposed the bypass. He's against it too, but it runs counter to his business interests to speak out about it. He's about to pull off when Norma asks if he would like to get together and talk about strategy sometime? He would! Obviously he knows that Norman the grave-lurker is her son, and has figured out that the way to Norma's heart is through the bypass. |
| A Bates has sex. | Not quite, but when Cody and her friend Philip start making out at the beach party while Norman weirdly sits next to them, Philip keeps trying to involve Norman by feeling up his thigh. |
| A Bates commits murder. | No, but I have to think one or all of them is going to take out Caleb soon. |
| Winky Psycho foreshadowing. | Cody thinks Norman's gay, which I have decided counts. |
| 5 / 10 Final Score |
50 Bates Motel |
| 50% American Horror Story party full of secret perverts I assume. |