2.4 Check Out It’s smart because it takes a thin central premise (America’s Most Notorious Serial Killer: The High School Years) and does something tender, almost loving with it. It’s evident in the fleshing out of the main characters and, more cleverly still, in the little thematic tricks that it plays. Of those tricks, the use of twisted pairs is perhaps the most insistent. It’s most obviously present in the duality of Norman and his mother (of which, more later) but this week’s episode extended it further and presented us with a kaleidoscope of little binaries that added texture to a set of storylines that strayed into territory that was among the show’s darkest. The Dylan Paternity Question was the episode’s strongest line and not simply because it provided Max Thieriot with a welcome chance to demonstrate his skills in the tense and emotional showdown with his mother. Incestual rape and childhood abuse are difficult subjects to navigate but Bates Motel did it well by focusing on the aftermath and the lifelong damage that it does. ‘you need to put this behind you’ says Norma, but Dylan, right in a wrong situation replies ‘It’s me. How can I put me behind me?’ Facing his father, he’s told ‘your mom got married to some guy in high school. He knocked her up. That’s your dad’. Just look at that verb, the casual brutality of that impersonal pronoun. The whole thing comes across like a terrible perversion of a custody battle, father and mother arguing over who loves their unwanted offspring the least. Hardly surprising really, in the first moments of his being, they genuinely didn’t want him. Now? They’ve got a story each, one a lie, another possibly truth. Another crippling duality. This sense of queasy rejection meant that Dylan entered the emotional terrain normally occupied by his brother. Christine’s imposition gave us another unlikely view of duality. Norma’s fake mood switch will be familiar to anyone who has taken a well-intentioned phone call at a bad time, but it was the framing that made it special. Watch her, squeezed on the right hand side while lying to Christine then switching to the left after wearily hanging up while Norman sits innocently between her the whole time. The very next shot is of Norma in the mirror (one of several in this episode). Symmetry and duality over and over again. Of course, it’s an internal duality that is the most disturbing and, in the episode’s climax, we get to see Norman’s most intense channelling of his mother that Bates Motel has yet offered. Punctuated with those nightmarish flashback blips, his attack on his uncle was brutal enough even without the additional oddness of hearing him speaking his mother’s words. It’s telling that the event took place at another motel (and note the contrast of this place’s red sign with the blue of the titular one), as though the sequence itself was an inversion of sorts, a strange and woozy switching of positions between Norman and Norma, the two in one. Read Michael’s review of the previous episode, Caleb, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
