The Bates Motel Finale Takes A Stab At Advancing The Psycho Mythology

I guess it's pretty likely that when A&E picked up Bates Motel for a third season about a month ago, producers had already written the season finale, if not actually shot it, so I guess I can't blame the early renewal for the open-ended finale. But I have to blame something. Given that this is a story the ending of which we already know, I'm really getting annoyed by how slowly we're getting to it.

Part of the problem is the close proximity of Bates Motel's launch to that of Hannibal. NBC's serial-killer prequel adaptation not only had the jump on A&E's: it also came with solid source material from the original author that the show's producers could go on. I admit that I'm not that familiar with the oeuvre of Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is based, but I would bet a nickel that he never covered Norman Bates's teen years; I feel like the point of Psycho, by the time you get to the end, is kind of that you can fill in the blanks yourself on what they might have been like. So the opportunity (or challenge) for the series would be to flesh out that time in the character's life in ways that are unexpected, and after two seasons, I think it is doing that in exactly the way you'd expect the co-creator of Lost to do that: slowly and mostly boringly.

And look, I know the show couldn't just be about Norman, his inappropriately close mom, and the succession of motel guests that one or both of them kill when they're not fucking. But after two seasons, wouldn't you rather watch that show? I WOULD. Instead, we get the Nikki and Paulo-esque plot cul-de-sac that is the White Pine Bay weed business -- and now, the promise (threat) that there's going to be even more of it in Season 3 now that Romero's apparently nominated Dylan to take it over from Nick Ford, who I guess actually was dead after all. But what does this plotline have to do with the rest of the story? Does the town's corruption drive Norma even crazier? Does she enlist Norman to counter the weed kingpins influencing local government by killing everyone who supports the construction of THE BYPASS? Because right now it kind of just feels like this is still an issue so there's something for Dylan to do, and it's not enough.

Because here's what Hannibal does that Bates Motel doesn't: it out-crazies the movie that preceded it. The producers of Hannibal are evidently trying, with every episode, to test the boundaries of what a broadcast network is willing to show us in primetime, and honestly, I watch a lot of it through my fingers and/or screaming at the TV, "WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF." It also knows it's a show about a serial killer, and the only times it stops focusing on its serial killer is when it turns its attention to OTHER SERIAL KILLERS. Whereas Bates Motel seems like it's trying to build a Twin Peaks-y world in which Norman Bates's particular brand of mayhem is just a part. But nothing else that has happened so far is as interesting as the murderous psychic bond between Norma and Norman, which we visited maybe three times this season; I'm also not that confident that the show's producers, in classic Carlton "Lost" Cuse style, have fully worked out exactly what that bond even is yet.

Ultimately, Bates Motel will justify its existence to me when it feels like it's building on the story and character elements that make Psycho a compelling, classic film, as opposed to referring to them in the process of telling a story that's much more banal. But if A&E not only renewed it early but gave it its own aftershow, it must already be doing what it needs to in order to be successful from a network perspective. If executives wanted it to be their Hannibal, it would be, but apparently, being their mildly incesty Eureka is enough for them. If Season 3 isn't a lot more berserk, though, I will have to find another way to spend that time.