How did Norman Bates become THE Norman Bates? That’s what the first season of ambitious, fog drenched, highly stylized Bates Motel set out to answer. We have some clues: An overbearing and emotionally manipulative mother, an abusive father, teenage girls, rain, you get the picture. We don’t see what happened prior to the scope of the show with his father, suffice to say ‘twas not good. That’s why the killing of Miss Watson in this episode was so revelatory. It’s the “a-ha” moment where we see Norman have a psychotic break whereby he thinks his “mother” is instructing him to kill her. We don’t see the knife, but we don’t need to. That’s right: darling Norman offed sweet Miss Watson in the finale, which also included a high school dance (how fitting)
After 10 highly ambitious episodes, we had a lot of space in which to play. Dylan grew closer to Bradley and Norma; Norman pulled away from Dylan as a result. Romero revealed more about himself. Norma also revealed some darkness and insight into her crazy – we found out she was molested by her brother growing up. Least of all was most everything to do with Norman and Miss Watson, whose untimely death was not totally out of the blue.
Did Miss Watson have it coming? She was trying something odd – bringing Norman home and changing in front of him after cleaning him up from a fight with Bradley’s boyfriend. The shows shining characters – the utterly necessary ballast as it were may in fact be Emma Decody. She will die of her CF before anyone else can kill her. Her emotional suffering makes Norman’s look laughable and yet provides the perfect contrast to his freak-outs. Their emotional entanglements only highlight the subtle beauty of the shows’ writing.
In a nice bookending of themes we see another arc come to a close similarly to it’s first: Norma is near someone who is tormenting her when they are shot dead. Here, it was “Jake”/Joe, who faced off against Sheriff Romero. This show has the potential to become as iconic as Twin Peaks – let’s hope it goes that way.
Check out the highlights and some behind the scenes discussion by the producers of Bates Motel from the finale “Midnight”