A Miscarriage Of Justice On The Bridge Has Eva Wondering, Who Will Police The Police?

When one of the latter episodes of The Bridge's first season finally revealed what had launched David Tate's incredibly baroque plot against Marco, I described his motive as "prosaic," and I stand by that. In the latest episode, we see Eva take revenge against one of the many men who wronged her. It's just a bit more effective.

Before setting off to find and presumably murder Eva, Alejandro probably thought it was going to be pretty easy. She's a tiny woman; he has behind him the force of a very corrupt police department; she must have lacked the protection of powerful people to have been abducted and assaulted in the first place. Except, whoops, since then Eva's acquired some pretty ruthless friends, so: cut to Alejandro going through a tiny fraction of the kind of pain Eva did -- held against his will, viciously beaten, required to listen to a whole bunch of God talk. Then beaten some more.

Linder and Bob have been doing a pretty good job of keeping everyone who visits the ranch from discovering their increasingly bloody secret out in the barn, but when Eva's curiosity finally drives her to check out what's making that weird noise, she's shocked to see one of her rapists bound and barely clinging to life. (Her shock is actually kind of shocking: after all she's seen, wouldn't she have gone INTO the barn expecting to find something like this, if not worse?) Alejandro begs her to help him, and while she's not quite ready to do that, she is sufficiently horrified to go ask Linder what the deal is and to remind him, emotionally, that she gave a statement to the prosecutor and that her case will proceed according to the law. "It's a form of justice," he agrees. "Might work, might not." Oh, Linder! Why are you such a cynic? Why can't you believe in the rectitude of the Juarez legal system. Oh right: bitter experience!

Sure enough, mere hours later Abelardo is being abducted and killed, and since they can't find her statement anywhere, Marco and Sonya have the heartbreaking job of going to the ranch to tell Eva the bad news. And that's when Eva stops believing that justice can triumph over corruption or that there's any point in preserving the life of one of the men who brutalized her.

Of course, answering violence with violence is not productive, and maybe Eva could have tried to solve her problems another way -- but, you know, she did try that, and as far as she knows at this moment, that ended up killing a guy and probably getting her statement into the hands of men who ALREADY wanted to kill her and definitely won't change their minds once they read it.

And of course Alejandro's partly using his last moments on earth to be terrible PRECISELY so that they WILL be his last moments on earth: he's probably pretty sure, when he sees Eva enter with an axe, that she has intentions to use it on him, and he wants to make sure to goad her into vengeance rather than hope for her mercy -- particularly since that didn't work when he tried it before. But still: neither of them would have been in this barn playing out these roles if Alejandro hadn't had a part (and a big one, if it's true that he was first, as he claims) in degrading Eva and trying to negate her humanity.