Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie Review

Who's the Crazy One?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 22, 2014

Warning: The following review assumes that the reader is familiar with Season One of Bates Motel. If you have not seen Season One and proceed past this point, you will encounter spoilers.

Bates Motel's executive producer Carlton Cuse has said that he and fellow showrunner Kerry Ehrin like to paint themselves into corners, then "climb the walls" to get out of them. At the conclusion of Bates Motel's first season, they seemed to be stuck in a particularly tight corner as Norman's English teacher, Miss Watson (Keegan Connor Tracy), was revealed on the floor of her home, her throat slashed after trying to seduce her prize student, Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore). It seemed that the infamous serial killer whose split personality dispatched any woman who aroused him sexually had just emerged. All that remained was the inevitable, fatal confrontation between Norman and the physical incarnation of his possessive mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), whose essence was already camped out inside Norman's fevered brain, emerging whenever he felt threatened or frightened.

But not so fast. Cuse and Ehrin planted a clue that Miss Watson's life was a troubled one, when Norman overheard her arguing with someone on the phone. As Season Two opens, that tiny seed flowers into doubts about whether Norman caused the secretive teacher's death. Those doubts, and Miss Watson's life itself, wind intricately through the vast criminal underground that makes the Oregon town of White Pine Bay such a unique and treacherous locale hiding behind a scenic exterior. Miss Watson, it turns out, associated with people more conventionally dangerous than her troubled teenage student. As we discover who they are, Cuse and Ehrin dig deeper into the twisted history of the Bates family and introduce intriguing new characters, who may or may not play long-term roles. The pair has also retained their knack for the unexpected, as they demonstrate in the Season Two opener, which caught fans completely off-guard.

The story of Norma Bates in Season One was dominated by her efforts to start a new life as the owner of a motel business that turned out to have more problems than Norma's real estate broker disclosed. Season Two finds the Bates Motel apparently thriving but still threatened by the planned bypass that, as we know from Hitchcock's Psycho, will eventually render the establishment effectively derelict. Norma's efforts to fight this development will lead her into local politics, courtesy of a new and well-connected friend, Christine Heldens (Rebecca Kreskoff), and an unexpected, wealthy patron named Nick Ford (Michael O'Neill). Unfortunately for Norma, wealthy patrons in White Pine Bay are rarely legitimate, and they usually expect a quid pro quo for the help they provide. Norma's political entanglements bring her a new romantic interest in the person of Christine's handsome and accomplished brother, George (Michael Vartan), but they also draw her deeper into the town's dangerous underworld.

Norman's elder half-brother, Dylan (Max Thieriot), is already deeply enmeshed in that underworld, and in Season Two, he and his partner, Remo (Ian Tracey), acquire a new boss named Zane (Michael Eklund). Recently released from prison, trigger-happy and a great believer in peace through superior fire power, Zane prefers warring with rival drug operations to conducting business. Zane's style puts Dylan directly in the crossfire between their distant and invisible boss, on the one hand, and Nick Ford's rival operations on the other. Given Nick Ford's new relationship with Norma (and other secrets revealed over the course of the season), Dylan's position becomes increasingly perilous.

Adding to the tension within the Bates household is the appearance in White Pine Bay of Norma's brother, Caleb (Kenny Johnson), who makes his first contact with Dylan, the only member of the family who doesn't know of the sexually abusive relationship between Norma and her brother when they were teenagers. When Norma finds Caleb sitting with Dylan in her kitchen, the resulting confrontation permanently alters the relationship between Dylan and his mother.

Even after Norman is cleared as a suspect in Miss Watson's murder, Norma locks her overprotective embrace ever more tightly around him, because Norma herself isn't convinced. She alone knows of Norman's periodic blackouts. Not even Norman's friend and classmate, Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke), has ever spotted that there's something "off" about Norman, despite her longstanding crush, which in Season Two, she begins to accept is hopeless. Indeed, Emma's proximity to the Bates family during her daily work at the motel ultimately becomes intolerable, as she realizes that the friendship she thinks she shares with them is almost entirely one-sided. The family is obsessed by its secrets, and outsiders are not welcome. By the end of the season, having taken a few halting steps into a different world, Emma is considering leaving her job at the Bates Motel. (She'd probably be wise to do so.)

In Season Two, Norman encounters a new love interest in the person of Cody Brennan (Paloma Kwiatkowski), a wild girl from a bad home whose rebellious nature gives Norman a brief experience of freedom. But Cody also puts him in situations that trigger his psychological defenses, and it is Cody who first tells him about his blackouts, prompting Norman to confront his mother and sowing the seeds of mistrust between them. (Norma spots Cody instantly as a threat and tries unsuccessfully to prevent Norman from seeing her.)

What Cuse and Ehrin manage with particular skill is overlapping these various plots so that they intersect at just the right moments. Norma's political machinations and Dylan's efforts to avert a drug war keep bumping up against each other, but at a few key points, both of these story lines cut across the gradual revelation of Norman's true nature. Season Two concludes with an unexpected but satisfyingly creepy quotation from Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece that marks the latest stage in the emergence of the character whom we meet when he's fully formed in Psycho. We won't know until Season Three how much further Norman has to go before his journey to self-sufficiency is complete, but there is no doubt that, by the end of Season Two, he is well on his way.

The alert reader will notice that I have not referred to Bradley Martin (Nicola Peltz), Norman's beautiful blonde classmate, who seduced and then rejected him in Season One and whose prom date beat him up in that season's finale. The reason for the omission is because it is impossible to say anything about Bradley without spoilers. Anyone familiar with Season Two will understand when I say that Bradley is the character who is most changed from how we have previously seen her.

Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Blu-ray image for Season Two of Bates Motel is comparable to that of Season One, with a few differences. First, the two 1080p discs for Season Two have been encoded with AVC instead of VC-1. Second, the average bitrate on the discs for Season Two is lower (approximately 17.99 Mbps for Season Two vs. 22.02 Mbps for Season One). The difference is probably attributable to the fact that all of the extras for Season Two are in hi-def, thus requiring additional space on the disc. Although Bates Motel is shot digitally, the additional compression does result in some minor artifacting here and there, which will probably not be noticeable except when the image is projected at large sizes or viewed at close range.

Compression issues aside, the image is otherwise sharp and detailed, the blacks are deep and solid, and the colors range from the occasional flash of bright cheer (e.g., at the party thrown by Christine Heldens where Norma meets Nick Ford and George) to the dim, even dingy interior of the Bates household and the perpetually overcast skies of the Pacific Northwest. The forests where the rival drug families grow their fields of marijuana remain as vividly green as ever. Cinematographer John S. Bartley (Lost), who shot half of Season One, returned to shoot all of Season Two, ensuring a continuity of style.

Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bates Motel continues to have a rich and involving 5.1 soundtrack, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA. The bass extension for such effects as the neon sign that switches on for the brief title sequence remains impressive for a TV show. Gunshots, slamming doors and physical battles also register forcefully. The sound mixers also make effective use of subtle environmental cues in varied locales in and around White Pine Bay, including the forest, the Municipal Building, the docks (where Nick Ford meets Norma on his yacht), at the remote marijuana processing plant where Dylan works and in the Sheriff's office. A complex layering of subjective and objective sounds (I can't be more specific without spoilers) provides an especially memorably demonstration of sonic storytelling in episode 9, "The Box".

Dialogue is beautifully rendered, and the thriller score by Chris Bacon (Source Code) continues to be one of Bates Motel's best assets.

Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bates Motel: After Hours—Season 2 Premiere (Disc 1) (1080i; 1.78:1; 21:15): Hosted by Carrie Keegan, this "talk back" with the lead actors played live on the A&E Network immediately after Season Two debuted.



• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1): The scenes are identified by episode title. A "play all" function is included with each group.


• Disc 1 (4:01)
• Gone but Not Forgotten (ep. 1)
• Shadow of a Doubt (ep. 2)
• Check-Out (ep. 4)


• Disc 2 (10:42)
• Plunge (ep. 6)
• Presumed Innocent (ep. 7)
• The Box (ep. 9)
• The Immutable Truth (ep. 10)



• Origins of a Psycho: Inside Bates Motel (Disc 2) (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:32): Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin, Tucker Gates,Vera Farmiga, Freddie Highmore, Max Thieriot, Olivia Cooke and Nestor Carbonell discuss Season Two and its place in the larger universe of Bates Motel and Psycho.



• Bates Motel: After Hours—Season Finale (Disc 2) (1080i; 1.78:1; 21:02): This is the fan broadcast hosted by Dave Holmes that ran on A&E immediately after the Season Two finale, backed by a huge social media campaign. Carlton Cuse and the principal cast are interviewed (with Highmore joining by satellite from the U.K.). The highlight is a short blooper reel shown near the end.



• Previews (Disc 1): In addition to the previews listed below, at startup Disc 1 plays previews for Dracula (the TV series), the Universal Classic Monsters Collection, the Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection and Continuum. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.
• The Hollow Crown
• House M.D.
• Chicago Fire
• Grimm

Bates Motel: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Season Two of Bates Motel delivers more of what initially drew fans to the show, without falling into repetition. Showrunners Cuse and Ehrin continue to find rich and unexpected corners of both the Bates family history and White Pine Bay to explore and exploit for high drama. The further they progress, however, the more they appear to be (in Cuse's phrase) painting themselves into the tightest possible corner. As Cuse has frequently acknowledged, the story of Norma Bates and her rapidly maturing son has an outcome that is already known, even if the back story was so sparely related in Hitchcock's Psycho that Cuse and Ehrin have felt free to embroider it as ornately as possible. At some point, however, they will have to tie up all their dangling threads in a bundle that's neat enough to leave Norman more or less where a contemporary version of Marion Crane might find him, tending his empty motel, preparing Cabin 1 for the next pretty woman who happens to take a wrong turn off the main highway. Especially after the finale of Season Two, the two writer/producers have built themselves a steep wall to climb. It's going to be fascinating to watch how they do it. Highly recommended.