Your Cheating Heart Will Make You Weep

Some TV shows glamorize infidelity, sticking a thumb on the scale by making the cheater's spouse a terrible person so you'll think that he or she deserves to get cheated on (Scandal, to name one of about a billion examples), or convincing you that the co-cheaters are true soulmates who just had the bad luck not to meet each other until after one of them was married (as on, for instance, Homeland). And while The Bridge has the bad language, adult situations, and sometimes shockingly graphic violence typical of your edgy, modern prestige dramas, it just spent eleven episodes telling a story that, at a fundamental level, boiled down to an affirmation of traditional family values.

Detectives Cross (Diane Kruger) and Ruiz (Demián Bichir) spent most of the season chasing a serial killer they think is promoting his social commentary -- on economic inequity; on the proper allocation of resources to maintain public safety or, failing that, investigate and punish criminals; on illegal immigration -- in a manner the authorities can't ignore; basically, it's what would happen if Chris Hughes decided to start killing people instead of just writing editorials about them. Sure, the killer starts by bisecting two different bodies and arranging them perfectly on the border between the U.S. and Mexico to make a point, and moves on pretty quickly to poisoning, like, a dozen people who weren't doing so great to begin with -- but at least you can almost respect the activist spirit behind it. It's like civil disobedience to the extreme! OKAY, FINE, IT'S NOT...but you know what I mean. Anyway, the question of how seriously to take the ideas behind the murders is moot: the real killer was just using all this sociological business as a smokescreen to disguise his true, rather prosaic motive: revenge for having been cuckolded.

The reason the slow sequence of reveals worked -- the wrong killer, then the right killer, and then his reasons -- is that we had a similar slow sequence of reveals with regard to Ruiz. This warm, kind family man, who takes policing seriously even though he's working within a system in Juarez that's famously corrupt, has so much to teach his cold, awkward American counterpart! Or maybe he's not such a family man if he'll sleep with Charlotte Millwright (Annabeth Gish) just 'cause. Oops, he also screwed up an earlier marriage by cheating on that wife like we've just seen him cheat on his current wife. Yikes, that mistress wasn't just some lady -- she was married to a colleague. Oh fuck, that colleague didn't kill himself, and he blames Ruiz for the car accident that killed his wife and their son, and he has a real lex talionis idea of justice, and the probably nearly unique capacity to develop and execute an incredibly intricate, devastating revenge plot.