‘The Bridge’ episode 4 review: Making sense of senseless acts

Now that we have made it four episodes into “The Bridge,” we do have more of an understanding of where Meredith Stiehm and the writers are trying to go with this mystery, or what you could call a show that is “The Killing” meets “Monk” and “No Country for Old Men.” It’s a very strong show, but we may be starting to downgrade it slightly. At first, we thought this would be on the same caliber as “Homeland,” the series that Stiehm came to “The Bridge” from, but now we’re starting to compare it more to another FX series in “Justified” that is very good, but occasionally marred by a couple problems that keep it from being the constant thrill that we want.

For “The Bridge,” one of the bigger issues right now is merely characters that mean nothing to us. This isn’t “Game of Thrones,” where you can have a somewhat-isolated storyline without some sort of understanding as to what is going to come of it. Charlotte’s just not interesting to follow, mostly because she’s both confused constantly and unambitious. Meanwhile, some of the other Spanish-language portions of the show are somewhat disjointed, since we don’t know many of the characters well enough.

The real highlight for this show is when we have Marco Ruiz and Sonya Cross involved in everything, and there were moments of that this week as we saw them try to unravel a hostage crisis set up by the killer. By the end of this episode, Marco had seemingly interacted with the killer for the first time, but in a way that left him battered and lucky to be alive. It may actually be thanks to his heritage that allowed him to survive in the first place, since this killer’s point right now appears to be showing off the hypocrisy that comes with American detectives caring about the death of one blond girl with blue eyes, but not dozens of young Hispanic women.

The flaw in the investigation this week came with a trap that many crime shows fall into: That everyone surrounding the leads is somewhat incompetent. These “FBI Agents” did not get a single thing right here: They didn’t get the money together for the ransom, could not find the killer at the drop, and one of them got their head cut off. We don’t think that they could do any worse, and all the ending to this episode is going to do now is get more of these suits involved in an investigation they have little investment in.

We do hope that next week has a few more huge moments that will have us talking, and also some more interaction with Marco and his family back home. That duality was something that we found ourselves missing this time.

If you want to check out some of our other reviews for “The Bridge” so far this season, you can do so over here.

Photo: FX