After appearing to have gone off the tracks only a few weeks ago, “The Bridge” turned around again last week in a perfectly realized episode, returning focus on the central dilemma of the series – the missing girls of Juarez.
With the other story lines in the freshman drama heating up as well, the season finale for The Bridge Wednesday built some quiet suspense, setting the stage for the recently announced second season without overt cliffhangers, but by certainly whetting out appetite for more.
The episode began with a cop from the Juarez force driving a battered and abused Eva in his car. He’s told to “take care of it” and kill the object of obsession for Steven Linder, who has been leafleting the streets looking for her.
Sonya announces her intention to look into the missing women to Hank, who tells her it’s fraught with complication and danger.
Even Marco is back to help her, concerned about information from someone in his office, Celia, that the cops have been regularly holding kidnapped women in their jail, drug them and then take them out to parties for abuse.
He covers for Sonya as she goes through surveillance tapes for the station with Celia – indeed the latest woman brought in was Eva.
Marco beats the information out of the cop that had been driving Eva around. He and Sonya later go to a desert monastery to rescue her, taking her to Hank’s house.
But to find who did this will take some careful navigating.
Marco’s whole tough attitude is attributed to his losing his son and seeing the killer David Tate, at a trial. He wants him dead, wants to kill him instead and in the end asks the cartel kingpin Fausto to help him.
Before the season ends with that steady look of determination in Marco’s eyes, there’s plenty of action on the other front.
Charlotte Millwright is going further with her drug running tunnel, incorporating it as a business with the very interested Texas lawyer Monte Flagman, played by Lyle Lovett, making just his second (very welcome) appearance on the show.
Making his debut, though, is Timothy Bottoms, as a DEA agent who not only watches over Ray and Cesar as they take deliveries in a horse trailer, he confronts Charlotte in a grocery store as the first overture toward trying to get her cooperation.
Elsewhere, it’s disheveled reporter Daniel Frye’s first day back at work after somehow surviving a fall from the bridge. With one arm in a cast and using a wheelchair, he’s given a puff assignment, interviewing someone who is turning 100, when he and Adriana find a caretaker there dead and one room stacked to the ceiling with cash — $40 million in U.S. cash; another 20 million in Euros.
There’s a beautiful montage as all the characters consider the fate, accompanied by the tape Sonya fished out of her late sister’s totaled truck. After spending so much time in that episode trying to untangle the tape and reeling it up in the cassette, we learn what it is: Amazingly, the dreamy and twangy “Nowhere Near” from a 1993 Yo La Tengo album, “Painful.” Hip sister.
But there’s concern at its end when Adriana finds that her young sister Daniela has failed to come off the factory bus one night, a sure sign that she may be the next victim of the missing women of Juarez, who we may assume will still be missing when the show returns next year.