‘Bates Motel’ season 3, episode 3 review: Norman goes psycho on Norma
When we last saw Norman on “Bates Motel” things were not looking good for our little psychopath. A woman who Romero thinks is Annika has turned up dead and he was the last person to see her alive… or was he? There is the mysterious members of the ‘hunting club” that do a lot of inappropriate things, could they be involved?
Norma goes to the morgue to identify Annika’s body, but she says it’s not her. Romero heads out to the hunting club to talk to Bob (one of the head honchos), but instead they end up in a chest puffing match with each other and we see that this conflict is not going to be easily resolved. This is not Romero’s only problem though, because the elections for sheriff are coming up and it seems that the hunting club (who has a lot of influence) is pushing to back another man to take Romero’s place, a man named Marcus.
Norma has gone back to school to take business and marketing to try to help her business, but she ends up in the wrong class… a psychology class. The teacher isn’t the nicest to her and apologizes the next day, but he also gives her an offer: An offer to be her therapist if she ever wants to talk about her problems.
Easily the best part of this episode was the interaction between Norman and Norma during and after Romero comes to the house to question Norman about being the last person to see Annika alive. Norman telling his mother that there is something wrong with one of them and that he’s tired of it always being assumed that it’s him and not her was chilling, because in a way he’s right. While Norman obviously has some deep rooted psychotic tendencies, so does Norma and it was about time someone told her so.
Norman finally explodes at his mother and it was a fight that was a long time coming. He tells her that he’s wanted to take responsibility for what happened to Miss Watson, but because of her he didn’t and now she is talking to other people about him, making feel like he’s always doing something wrong or is always responsible if someone turns up dead. This melt down of Norman’s was epic and if the Emmy’s weren’t looking at him before, they are sure to be paying attention now.
We are still not really that interested in Dylan’s story about starting a plant farm in the middle of no where and struggling to know his dad, but seeing Emma driving her beetle full of plants up to Dylan’s farm house was the best. Annika showing up alive (at least for a few minutes before bleeding out from a gun shot wound) was a great cliffhanger, but not as great as her handing a flash drive to Norma. What is on that drive!?!? Episode grade: B+
What did you think of tonight’s episode of”Bates Motel”? Was it everything you had hoped for? Leave us a comment below with your thoughts.