A quick review of “The Bridge” season finale coming up just as soon as we pretend people missed me…
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a show with a season structured quite like what Stiehm, Reid and company did with “The Bridge.” The first 11 episodes were, for the most part, adapting the 10-episode story from “Bron,” and then these last two have played as an extended prologue for the second season. (Which was just a possibility when the episodes were being made, but is a certainty now.) Even “The Wire” would only tease a few events for the following season in its finales, which were still devoted to bringing that part of the story to a close.
And with one exception, everything we’ve been shown of where season 2 is going to go seems much more promising than much of what we got in the later stages of season 1. We have Frye and Adriana looking into the mysterious money cache – and now Adriana personally involved in the missing girls case due to the disappearance of her kid sister. We have an opportunity for a look at police corruption south of the border and political indifference north of it, the deepening of the friendship between Sonya and Marco, and even the potential for the Charlotte corner of the show to perk up with the arrival of Timothy Bottoms as the all-knowing Arliss Fromme.
I’m looking forward to seeing how all of that plays out next summer. What I am not looking forward to, however, is seeing Marco attempting to murder David Tate.
While I understand Marco’s desire for revenge, and the generally nihilistic state he’s in right now, the last thing “The Bridge” needs is more David Tate. I can only hope that the finale’s closing scene was the last vestige of what was made before FX and the creative team became aware of just how much the audience disliked that character and that turn of the story, and that we’ll begin season 2 with Marco looking at Fausto Galvan’s fireplace some more before shaking his head and saying, “You know what? That’s ridiculous. What can you tell me about the missing girls instead?” It would be clumsy, but ultimately less painful than cozying back up to a character who nearly destroyed the show and distracted us from the things it does well.
What did everybody else think? Do you want to see Marco get his revenge? Did these last two episodes make you feel more optimistic about what will happen in a second season, or less? And can you look at Bottoms these days and not picture him as former President Bush?