Watching/Ranking The Detectives

On The Bridge, the ongoing, sometimes uneasy co-operation between El Paso detective Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger) and Juarez detective Marco Ruiz (Demián Bichir) as they work together on the ever-expanding investigation of that body (a.k.a. those bodies) on the bridge between their jurisdictions has given us a close-up look at the differences between their departments. On the American side, for instance, the officers have learned to be tolerant of the upright-to-a-fault Sonya and her Aspie quirks. And on the Mexican side, some officers have learned to be tolerant of the local cartel bosses, while others have gotten really good at camouflaging their actually good police work.

The latest episode broke the case wide open by revealing, at last, the identity of the real killer who's perpetrated this whole incredibly complicated plot just to get a little simple revenge. Cops on both sides of the border were tested by this latest twist, and so in honour of Careers Week, it seemed appropriate to rank them according to their professionalism, or lack thereof. So here they are, from first to worst.

As someone who always hated doing group assignments in school because everyone else would just fuck around and I'd try to do everything myself for the sake of my own grade, I was really feeling Sonya this week as she basically solved the whole case herself. She was the only one who didn't believe that Childress (Chris Browning) was the prime mover of this whole plot, the only one to turn up the David Tate connection, the first to suggest that maybe the body with its face blown off hadn't belonged to him, and the only one to be bothered about the Santi Jr. (Adrian Gonzalez) crime scene getting all puked up. I'd say she deserves a week off if I thought there were even a tiny chance that she'd take it.

Wade (Ted Levine) didn't have a ton to do in this episode other than back up Sonya and bust Robles (Juan Carlos Cantu) for shit-talking him in Spanish, both of which he executed with his usual quiet yet undeniable authority. Robles gets pissed when Marco refers to Wade as "my boss," but...come on. The man does everything like a boss. His boss-ness is undeniable.

I wasn't wild about the way Delgado (Ellie Araiza) called Marco "pussy cat" when he showed up at the station in Juarez, but he kind of is one, so I'll let it go. She also gets a high rank for acknowledging that the Juarez police force does not typically go hard in its investigations of suicides because of the thousands of murders they have to deal with every year, and also for being the first cop on either side of the border to agree with Sonya that it's possible David Tate faked his death. Good show, Delgado. Also: your hair is pretty.

Having an affair with a colleague's wife really isn't cool, and I'm not going to sit here and act like it is. But Marco still managed to stay out of the bottom third of this list by carrying on said affair in his spare time. Worse by far is barfing all over a gruesome crime scene as the realization of what's actually been going on this whole time washes over him, and not immediately sharing what he knows. Also, having known and worked with David Tate and not suspected before starting the affair that Tate might be capable of a reprisal this baroque and grisly suggests that Marco may not be as great an investigative mind as he thinks.

Apparently the guy I've been calling Detective Swan Ronson has a name, and it's Cooper (Johnny Dowers). I'm glad I learned it just in time for him to call Sonya "the village idiot savant" in the middle of the squad room in front of all her colleagues. Not at all professional! Now everyone's just going to remember that and not the body you found.

This fucking guy. I guess I have to give Robles for knowing what a good murder investigation generally entails so that he could put one together as soon as a rich Juarez resident was horribly murdered. But he's just so venal that I feel like the character has nowhere to go. The only thing the show could do with him to surprise us would be to reveal that, despite the stench of corruption oozing out of his every pore, he's actually a good cop pretending to be a bad one? ...BRB, re-watching all of Alias.