Before I get to a review of this week’s The Bridge, can I just talk about how much, as a parent, this episode completely freaked me out.
Please don’t let me raise my children to be as gullible as poor, doomed, stupid Kyle. With the promise of some sort of sexual relations with Eleanor Nacht, Kyle brings her to his home, lets her wear his mom’s clothes, ditches school and takes her to a deserted storage facility. He is privy to multiple signs that Eleanor is bad news—she tells him to say goodbye to his brother and he still doesn’t flinch. But still, there he is in the storage facility getting stabbed to death at the end of the hour. Of course, he also willingly told Eleanor exactly where his friend lived before she killed him. Kyle, Kyle, Kyle . . . what is wrong with you? Are pre-pubescent boys really so desperate for sex that they would ignore all warnings? I mean, when Kyle found Eleanor she was covered in blood. Even if this story line was a tad unbelievable, it gave viewers more insight into Eleanor’s skewed religious view (“Can you see it? The light coming off him?”). But I spent the entire episode with a pit in my stomach waiting for Kyle’s inevitable demise.
Okay, on to the rest of the episode. Sonya and Hank continue to investigate the dead man found in the car and quickly realize he’s one of Fausto Galvan’s men. The DEA gets involved because the stuffed dog belonged to a DEA agent and the dead guy they discovered at the taxidermist was an undercover DEA agent. Agent Joe McKenzie (Adam Benrubi) says he wants to investigate with the El Paso PD but it is clear (at least to the audience) that he’s holding back information. When Sonya tells Joe there was a woman in the car with the dead guy, Joe and his partner pass it off as maybe a girlfriend. But later we learn that Joe knows that it’s Eleanor—he wants the El Paso PD to track her down to keep the CIA from getting involved. He wants “Fausto Galvan arrested in the U.S., convicted in the U.S. and locked up in one of our prisons.”
Hank is having none of this Jack Dobbs business. “One thing this job teaches you is that bad doesn’t just happen, it’s bred in,” he tells Jack, and then advises him to bury his brother and get the heck out of town. I can’t quite figure out where the show is going with this story line or if it really needs it. Right now, it plays like an unnecessary distraction.