A quick review of tonight’s “The Bridge” coming up just as soon as I empty the ocean with a shot glass…
Much as David Tate held Marco’s family hostage, it felt like he had taken “The Bridge” as a whole hostage over the last several episodes. The serial killer case had never been the show’s strongest suit, but this aspect of it simply didn’t translate at all from the Scandinavian original.
So I felt a palpable sense of relief when – save for a brief, smug cameo by Tate outside the courthouse – “All About Eva” focused entirely on the parts of the show that had so intrigued me in the first place: the Sonya/Marco partnership, each of those characters dealing with grief (I thought Diane Kruger was terrific in the scene where she had to say goodbye to her sister’s truck), Frye and Adriana’s own budding friendship, Steven Linder being weird and freaky and an incredibly compelling camera subject, and, especially, material about the missing girls of Juarez.
It was in that last area where “All About Eva” resonated most, whether our disorienting glimpses of what was happening to Eva with the corrupt cops (whom I’m guessing are in cahoots with the man with the red car from Texas), the pullback to show just how many missing girl fliers (some fresh, many old and faded and ripped) were on the same wall as the one where Linder was, or that haunting final shot of Linder, the woman and so many others poking the desert ground with sticks, hoping to find a loved one buried under freshly-dug earth.
FX renewed the show yesterday, at a fairly late date even by FX’s patient standards. A few weeks ago, as we were in the middle of Evil Mastermind Hell, I was ready to shrug off the show’s cancellation as a case of a good idea not fully-realized. Watching “All About Eva,” though, made me very much want to see “The Bridge” return for a second year. This version of the show is one I would watch happily, week in and week out, and I hope it’s what we’ll be getting next year.
What did everybody else think?