Sorry if there’s less enthusiasm than usual for the usual shoot-em-up conclusions to TV dramas. Doesn’t it seem that this is too easy a solution in American television?
Days after the latest mass shooting in the U.S., it’s a little difficult to accept as entertainment another psycho with a gun reaching his final endgame.
Gunplay defines the end of “Breaking Bad,” the start of another ugly “Sons of Anarchy” season and dominated Wednesday’s episode of “The Bridge,” where current crazy killer Tate has his target Marco with him as two countries of police aiming guns at them.
At least he staged all this on the El Paso bridge to Mexico, as if in an attempt to bring the action back to where it started, even if what’s going on has nothing to do with the disturbing mystery that began the series.
No, this killer Tate had been holding a mountain-sized grudge for years and it’s all just come out: He was angry that Marco had an affair with his wife years ago, and he’s mad at the journalist Daniel Frye for helping cover up the hit and run on the bridge that killed his wife and son.
So Tate had Marco point his gun at Frye and tells him to shoot. It’s the only way he’ll ever see his son Gus, who was being kept in a “Batman”-style death trap — a tank being filled with water higher and higher (Why the kid didn’t block the running water with his head, I don’t know).
Marco was close to pulling the trigger, but refused, throwing the gun down. It didn’t save him; Tate picked up the gun and shot Frye, who went right over the side of the bridge into the Rio Grande.
Marco wanted to shoot Tate out of rage but the late arriving Sonya kept him from doing so. Tate, no longer wearing a vest of explosives that would make Brody drool on “Homeland,” seemed a free shot, but Sonya went so far as to shoot Marco in the leg to keep him from shooting Tate. Then she shot Tate herself.
None of this saved Gus. Although Sonya figured out like a savant that it was running water she heard at a hideout, we learned later that she was not successful in getting there on time and saving him. This sad fact adds a little realism to a show that’s been veering from it in the last few episodes.
On the other hand, Frye, after being shot and falling into the river, was still somehow alive and recovering from spine and brain trauma and massive internal injuries.
So that’s something that might happen in the final two episodes left this season: We will see if he gets better. Also, Marco will have a funeral to attend.
There was a little activity Wednesday in one of the show’s side stories: Having killed his informant connection Dan, Ray drags his body down into the tunnel, where he found a lot of other bodies. How this massacre happened is not too clear and he leaves, but not before making it seem as if Dan was behind the killings. Also, he takes a package of drugs that are laying around.
There may be some time to figure all of this out.
Never seen at all was the mumbly guy Stephen or any of that story. So maybe he’ll have something to do in the next two episodes as well.
In the previews, however, Sonya was seen trying to talk Marco back into the case of missing women — right, that’s where this story began — by confronting him in a bar, where he’s grown a greying Saddam Hussein-like beard.
If the episode seemed one long, tense standoff, there was at least some growth seen in a couple of characters, especially Sonya in giving false hope to Marco by telling him Gus was alive when he wasn’t. Lying to make someone feel better is something she hadn’t considered before.
“It’s what friends do,” she said.
“We’re not friends Sonya,” Marco replies from his own hospital bed. “We were partners. Now that’s over.”
The other change was in Emily Rios, the fellow journalist of Frye’s who checked up on him at the hospital. Turns out she might have a little feeling for him after all, even if it’s only collegial.