Stephen Linder Learns That There Comes A Time When Even Extremely Righteous Revenge Plans Should Be Abandoned

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how close I was to bailing on The Bridge, and how Hank's death would have led to my checking out permanently. Fortunately for the show, Hank lives, but my interest is still waning rapidly. But this week, for just a moment, I wonder if this season is trying to make a point that distinguishes it from the other fancy cable shows -- but secretly, stealthily, so you hardly notice it at all.

I mean, in the chaos of this season, with its intermittently chopped-up chronology and this fucking CIA guy now, it's kind of hard to notice much of anything, and very hard for me, personally, to care about the ongoing travails of Marco Ruiz, I MEAN COME ON DUDE YOU BROUGHT ALL THAT SHIT ON YOURSELF. But of the rare instances this season when the show has foregrounded human characters behaving in recognizably human ways, most have revolved around Eva and Linder.

Eva has survived gang rape -- a harrowing experience no matter who the perpetrators are, but for her, it was the very people who are supposed to have sworn to protect the citizens of Juarez and have taken hideous advantage of their privileges. She and Stephen have tried to seek redress through the legal system, with predictably disappointing results, and when that avenue failed, she convened her own one-woman task force against a henchman's head. And though that one guy was hardly the architect of her victimization, maybe using him as a stand-in for all the rest was enough for Eva, because lately, it seems like she has a lot less taste for revenge. She's musing about moving on -- leaving the area and living an anonymously peaceful life with Linder. She can tell he still feels he has a mission to complete on her behalf, but she's done her best to give him a sense of her vision for their future, starting with cleaning up his face.

THERE'S the Thomas J. Wright we all fell in love with back when he was Jonno! Eva's barbering is like a ritual cleansing; when she's finished, Linder doesn't even look like the same person. (What a difference ruffled-up hair makes.) Without his shield of a beard, Linder looks more vulnerable, but maybe the right partner for Eva right now is one who isn't single-mindedly fixated on revenge-driven violence.

Except, it doesn't last. The open, unguarded Linder has gone, and in his place is the same slick-haired weirdo that, last season, it was easy to imagine murdering women. He and his fully-buttoned shirt go looking for Robles at the Juarez police station; he and his smooth flat rock are put off neither by Robles's absence nor by Eva's latest attempt to help him imagine quiet domesticity with her in a cute pink stucco house, and when he finally tracks down Robles at the site of the Captain's latest dirty deed -- not knowing that Robles is about to be indicted for his crimes, including against Eva -- Linder ends up shot in the gut.

It's exactly the kind of wound TV characters survive all the time, and I feel pretty sure that Linder will too. But what is the lesson Linder is supposed to learn? Given that the second-most-vengeful person on this show was last season's cartoonish supervillain Tate/Hastings, I would like to believe the show trying to help us see, through Linder, how pointless bitterness and revenge are -- how they can turn a good man into a gnarled monster, incapable of receiving the love that's being selflessly offered to him. Or, to put it another way...

That would actually be a complex, challenging stance for the show to take, and one I would applaud. But I fear what THE SHOW thinks Linder is supposed to take away from his encounter with Robles is something more like this...