But then you have the Norma and Norman story, which is very fun stuff. If you haven t seen it, Vultu

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Really, ccni tracking I couldn t have put it any better myself. It s time for a second ccni tracking season ccni tracking of kooky shenanigans and good times in White Pine Bay, Oregon, home of approximately 15 million serial murderers, numerous Hitchcock homages, and a bunch of spare Twin Peaks parts everybody had laying around. Since I covered season one , I ve grown more charitable toward Bates Motel , not in the sense where I think it s some sort of underrated gem, but in the sense where I m much more on board with whatever it s trying to do, mostly because it s a weekly vehicle for pure, unadulterated Vera Farmiga, and that s something I m more than happy to indulge in on a week-to-week basis. Everything else from the wooden line readings of Nicola ccni tracking Peltz to all of the bizarre subplots that the show abandons at the drop of the hat is immaterial. We are here to watch Farmiga sink her teeth into the mother of all Freudian dilemmas, and she is oh so good at what she does.
To be fair, Freddie Highmore is often at her level as well. I wasn t so into Highmore in season one, but the more I ve thought about it, the more he seems like the kind of guileless blank slate that would balance ccni tracking perfectly off of his mother, all the while soaking up her various bits of wisdom like a sponge. Bates Motel has also realized that its bread is buttered on this side, as the season two premiere features ccni tracking any number of wacky scenes between the two, whether ccni tracking it s Norma trying to teach her son to drive or the scene toward ccni tracking the end, when she realizes ccni tracking that her son very well may have killed Miss Watson but tries to keep that fact from him, lest it cause his carefully sectioned-off mental state to splinter even further. Oh, also, Norma goes to a city council meeting in hopes of shutting down the highway bypass, and it s unexpectedly one of the most glorious things on television this week. A city council ccni tracking meeting! About a highway bypass!
Gone But Not Forgotten is mostly a table-setter for whatever s to come in season two, which is fine. That s to be expected. The biggest cliffhanger involves Bradley shooting the guy she suspects killed her dad, then going to Norman to get his help (since he said he would always be there for her). This is not particularly interesting, since I doubt too many people in the show s audience give a good goddamn what happens to Bradley. But that s mostly beside the point. What we need to know is that even though its four months later and the summer ccni tracking helpfully indicated for us by Norma wandering around, smiling, in a sundress while Haim s The Wire plays on the soundtrack is here, things ccni tracking are not going to get better for the Bates family. They never get better. And they never get better for us as an audience, either, because do you know how much Emma Decody we get? We get, like, 30 seconds. ccni tracking I guess Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin forgot the true most important character ccni tracking of this show during one of his Previously on Bates Motel recording sessions.
There are two stories in this episode (if we can call anything on Bates Motel a story ), and one is much more successful than the other. ccni tracking I ve hinted a bit about how uninvolving I found the Bradley stuff, but I guess I ll expand those thoughts ccni tracking a bit. If there was a story hanging over the show from season one that I was really curious ccni tracking about, it certainly wasn t whether Bradley would discover the identity of her father s killer and/or his illicit lover B. It s good of Bates to immediately answer the latter, since most fans had noticed Miss Watson was wearing ccni tracking that B necklace at the end of season one (as we panned over her corpse), but Bradley s investigations to get to the truth were more than a little tedious. Dylan s a character who tends to work with his family ccni tracking and not work with just about anybody else, so roping him into Bradley s story made it feel as if he were kind of off in the hinterlands. On the other hand, pulling Norman into all of this could make it become more interesting, so the very last scene has me cautiously optimistic.
But then you have the Norma and Norman story, which is very fun stuff. If you haven t seen it, Vulture has a great interview with the series executive producer Carlton Cuse on how he and fellow EP Kerry Ehrin view the series ccni tracking as a kind of tragedy, seeing it as how Norma Bates efforts ccni tracking to help her son only succeed intractably in making him the killer he eventually becomes. That was fitfully present in season one, but it got swallowed up by a lot of other plot points that ultimately didn t matter (or were actively loathsome). The second season premiere is much more focused on this aspect of the show, and that makes it all the sharper and reflects well on the series as well. Norma and Norman s trust in each other has been tested so many times, and what I find interesting about this is that we re waiting for both of them to realize maybe they shouldn t put so much stock in each other. They re both emotionally needy people, trying to find the answers in