The Bridge 2.1: What Motivates Sonya?

The Bridge was back for its second season last night, replete with that just perfect song under the opening credits (by Ryan Bingham, who sounds just like Demian Bichir), and as moody and compelling and nearly weird throughout as it was last time.

What interested me most in this second season debut is Sonya - and, in her particular, her sleeping with the brother of her sister's killer.   The brother understandably feels increasingly uncomfortable in this situation, but Sonya's charms are unsurprisingly more than enough to win him over.   Still, he leaves as soon as he can after the act.

But what is ultimately motivating Sonya?  Her Aspergers always makes her sexual encounters awkward - which translates to interesting, funny, moving, heart-rending, even profound at some points - but this was something different and more.   As by-the-book as she is, I couldn't help feeling that at some point she might produce a knife or a gun and kill her lover, in retribution for what his brother did to her sister. But, ironically, that's what a more normal person might do in a fit of illogical rage in this situation, and Sonya is if nothing else refreshingly not normal.   Indeed, in the scenes last night with Sonya and the guy, the most normal aspect of Sonya's behavior is her beautiful smile (thanks to Diane Kruger) - which more than anything else is what ultimately gets him in bed.

Marco, on the other hand, is normal from head to toe, which makes him more predictable, but therefore far more dangerous that Sonya, since Marco is out to settle scores without Sonya's complex overlay.   In a series peopled with some of the most serious nut cases to come down the road - headed by Linder, whom I still can't figure out, including his connection to the main plot lines - Marco, along with Hank (who, as I mentioned last year, has ample cross-series experience working with good police with troubled mentalities, given actor Tad Levine's work on Monk), serve as the necessary bedrocks of sanity in this dark and darker but realistic world.

Good to be back on The Bridge!

See also The Bridge Opens Brooding and Valent ... The Bridge 1.2: A Tale of Two Beds ... The Bridge 1.6: Revelations ... The Bridge 1.7: A Killer and a Reluctant Professor ... The Bridge 1.8: Some Dark Poetic Justice ... The Bridge 1.9: Trade-Off ... The Bridge 1.10: Charlotte's Evolution ... The Bridge 1.11: Put to the Test ... The Bridge Season 1 Finale: Marco Joins Mackey and Agnew

 
another kind of crime story

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Bridge 1.2: A Tale of Two Beds

An excellent second episode of The Bridge last night, in which we get a vivid rendition of just how different Sonya and Marco are, which is a large part of what makes this such a compelling drama.

Sonya's in the mood for love.  So she goes to a bar and picks up a guy - in her own inimitable, awkward and socially clueless way.   More of this continues back in her bed, where she sleeps with the confused guy, promptly falls asleep herself, then awakens and gets promptly back to work - which in her case entails looking at the gruesome images from the case.  The guy leaves, understandably uneasy and not quite getting that she has Asperger's or whatever equivalent syndrome.   But we get it, and can see that the syndrome has the dual quality of making her a uniquely focused detective as well as someone who sails through her personal life largely oblivious to the subtleties that go on all around her - in other words, a refreshingly unusual and interesting character, the likes of which we haven't encountered before on television, except perhaps in Monk (which I should have realized in last week's review, when I said how good it was to see Ted Levine back on television).

And Sonya is well complemented by Marco, who is her opposite in crucial respects.  He's as hard working as Sonya, but is enmeshed in the social matrix of his police work, which therefore makes him an astute worker of political angles to get the job done.   And his bed is very different.  He's thoroughly tuned into his wife, and celebrates the news that they're having another baby, surprising but apparently not impossible in view of his recent vasectomy.

This unlikely detective team will need all the complementary qualities they can muster to solve the murders before them, which in effect are increasing daily as Mexicans are murdered by some group as they make it over the border.   The Bridge thus combines high political relevance with unconventional characters, and is much welcome.

See also The Bridge Opens Brooding and Valent

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The Bridge Opens Brooding and Valent

A good opening of The Bridge on FX tonight, with its story of a body stretched out dead across the Juarez - El Paso border on the bridge between Mexico and the US, making it a case in the jurisdiction of both countries and their police, except it turns out to be two bodies - the upper torso of one woman and the lower torso of another - which makes the murder case even more interesting.

Demian Bichir - of Esteban fame on Weeds - plays the Mexican detective Marco Ruiz, and he does it with customary style.  When an El Paso detective wishes him "buenos dias," he responds with "howdy partner" in a perfect Texan accent.   He has hands full not only with his lethargic boss in Juarez but his Amercian counterpart Sonya North, played by Diane Kruger.

Sonya's a strange piece of work for a detective - by the book, wound tight, but with the same kind of irrepressible energy as Barbara Havers on the British Inspector Linley Mysteries (how's that for a stretch).   I'm not sure if I like her, but based on the first episode she may be the most memorably peculiar female detective to come along on television since Sarah Linden in The Killing.

Speaking of which, The Bridge feels to some extent like a southern version of The Killing, which takes place in Seattle.   But what The Bridge also has going for it is its Mexican component, and the obvious relevance of this series to the immigration issues that currently beset our country (because of Republican intransigence, but I'll try to keep politics out of this).

Ted Levine of the late great Monk is back as police lieutenant (ok, he was a captain on Monk), and Annabeth Gish from Brotherhood lends her appeal and intensity as someone whose husband drops dead after he tells her he wants out of their marriage and who must have something to do with the murders.

Brooding, smoky, philosophic, politically valent - The Bridge may be just the thing for a hot summer's evening.

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Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty

"I'm shot, I'm pretty," Hannah tells Booth in the resumption of Bones with episode 6.5 tonight - after the World Series, and, here in New York, after greedy Cablevision and Fox finally settled their dispute which led to no Fox on our screens.   Regarding Hannah, what she tells Booth is true enough - her boss will now definitely keep her on the reportorial job in Washington given her looks plus affinity for bullets back home.

But the deeper truth of this scene is what happens when Bones enters the hospital room, with news that Hannah, who's intending on getting back on the job in the morning, has an "avulsion" fracture.   This could make Hannah not only pretty and shot but dead, because the tendon if unduly exercised could pull the fractured part of the bone way out into severing an artery.

Now this might well make some/many Bones fans happy, but Bones herself cannot be one of them, because she's after all inside the story, not watching it from the outside.   So she's happy to save Hannah's life, and so are Booth and Hannah, who both deeply appreciate that Bones has done this, and we've got almost one big happy family.

How do I feel about this?  Well, short of a menage a trois resolution,  I don't particularly like it, especially the additional bonding between Bones and Hannah that happens at the end of the episode.  I guess it makes sense on some level - Bones and Hanna both love Booth (though on very different levels of awareness) so they are already bonded.   But I'd be happier if they two were in open battle.

On a brighter note - and what gets the cake for the funniest scene tonight - we have a bronze Shakespeare who turns out to be one of those human statues.  There was an hilarious episode of Monk a few years back which featured a silvered dude standing outside of a bank (where there was a robbery), who maintained a steely silence.  The bronze on Bones does the same - but Sweets diagnoses his "dissociative disorder" - he can only converse in Shakespearean, literally.   And Sweets is then able to have a witty, useful, and satisfying interrogation of the bronze Bard.   "Brush up yer Shakespeare, start quoting him now..."

Good special effects tonight, too, with the murder victim being not even bones but an impression of bones.  And come to think of it, Bones is also able to use her knowledge of bones not just to solve a murder but save a life.   And if the life was Hannah's?   Well, there's that bone to pick, but it was still an episode that cut to the bone on many levels and, ok, I'll become one of those silent statues now.

Nah ... "Just declaim a few lines from Otella, and she'll think you're a hell of a fella ..."



See also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ... Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ... Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution

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