Warning: Full spoilers for the final episode of Bates Motel follow...
With Bates Motel closing its doors, taking a brutal bow after five seasons of love and murder, I spoke to show creators Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin about how everything went down right at the end of the series finale, "The Cord," between Norman and Dylan. It was an emotional ride, and one that ended with Norman dead, at peace with the knowledge that he was heading off to, perhaps, see Norma again.
IGN: There were other characters who Norman could have shared his final moments with. How did it come down to, after five seasons, the two brothers?
Ehrin: The heart of the show has always been about family and this felt like the richest pairing in the story right at the end. And Norman, and this was a really fabulous performance from Freddie [Highmore] -- you can really see that Norman doesn't know what he's doing in that scene. You can see that he's lost and scared and he's trying to stop the pain that's racing through him. And he's trying to figure it out throughout the entire scene. He's asking Dylan to do it and then he's mad that Dylan won't do it and it's all very instinctual. It's all very messy. I don't think either one of them meant for that end to happen. Like, if they had to recreate what happened on paper, probably neither of them could. It's one of those operatic, super emotionally-charged scenes where people are in such altered and heightened emotional states that they're not really dealing with reason anymore.
Carlton Cuse: The maturation of Dylan across the scope of the show, from being sort of a drifter and a bad boy to someone who really feels this intense obligation to help solve Norman's situation at the end of this series - that's his arc. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the way he helps solve the problem is in a way that he never could have predicted [laughs], but he feels this incredible need to do something, he just doesn't know what to do. As with most of us, we fumble through many of the most serious and tragic things in our lives searching for the best path and that's what Dylan does. He does solve the problem, ultimately, but not in the way he really wanted to.
IGN: In Emma's final moments with Norman, from last week's "Visiting Hours," did she wind up forgiving him at all?
Ehrin: When she saw him, he wasn't really there. The person she was talking to was this other incarnation. And in some ways too, this helped her realize how f***ed up and mentally gone Norman really was. At the same time, looking into the face of someone who at one time was her close friend, I think the combination of all those things changed her in that moment. It allowed her to have more sympathy for him, and to remember the person in him who was lost.
I think the hardest relationships in a way -- and this is taking the murder aspect out of it, which is a whole different horrifying thing -- but I think sometimes the death of a parent you are not close to is much harder than the death of a parent you were close to because you know that you can't ever find that thing you wanted with them. That's so much of what she was experiencing. Her anger is not only the injustice of her mother being murdered, which is awful, but also the anger at her mother for f***ing up and not being present in her life.
IGN: Something the Hitchcock film couldn't do that you guys could was turn the motel itself into a symbol of hope. A symbol of Norma and Norman trying to live a better life. In "The Cord," Norman's mind is so wounded that he thinks he's back at the start of the series. Was this a way to bring everything back to the start?
Cuse: I feel like in a series finale you want to give the audience some reminder of the journey, and to me there was this circularity to the finale that was really poignant. Norman's mind takes you back to the point where you got to see, again, how this whole thing started. We were able to go back to the initial excitement and enthusiasm and all the hope that came with them when they moved to White Pine Bay. It was important for us to convey just how epic this love story was across the whole fifty episodes of the show.
IGN: Romero seemed doomed to die this season, just due to his obsession for revenge. Was it sort of the point that he was always headed toward his end?
Cuse: I think for us it was really just about showing the other love story. Because on one hand you've got this huge love story between Norman and Norma, but on the other hand we had sort of the same thing going with Romero too. He loved this woman so much wand we wanted to make sure that the illustration of that was really dramatic.
IGN: Now that the series has come to a close, what's your favorite Norman moment?
Cuse: That's, like, an impossible question.
Ehrin: I mean, I do like the scene where [laughs] he tells him mom he's attracted to her and she talks him out of it. That's definitely one of my favorite Norman moments.
Cuse: The scene for me, and I guess it was really early on, but Kerry, in the pilot, wrote the scene where Norma and Norman were in a rowboat and it really told you and showed you how much these two characters loved each other and Norma says, in the scene, that there was a cord between their hearts. And that became a callback for the title of the finale. In a way, although there were so many amazing Norman scenes that followed, maybe more dramatically complex, I remember watching that scene when we went into editing and remembering how it just vividly cemented the idea that this was an incredible romance between two people who just have no business being that in love with each other. That scene was so momentous that it sticks out for me.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.
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