

"The Bridge" tends to be at its strongest when it's also at its strangest, and "Sorrowsworm" feels like the creative team looked at the season's first two episodes and thought, "Yeah, not weird enough. We can do better."

So we get the return of the show's quintessential oddball, Steven Linder — only he's reintroduced in a scene where he encounters a roadside salesman with an even more unsettling affect than Linder himself. As we follow Eleanor Nacht on her journey to dispose of Kyle's body, Heisenberg-style, we see that she takes great pleasure in inflicting pain on herself, and Joe from the DEA explains that she's a shunned Mennonite. Charlotte, Ray and Cesar also make their first appearances of the season, and while they don't tend to be on the weirder (or more interesting) end of the show's spectrum, Ray and Cesar do get held up by a bunch of kids in animal and devil masks, and Ray has to liberate their drug supply from the back end of their horse. When we catch up with Fausto Galvan, he's spending time on a speedboat inside a warehouse(*), and when a hitman takes out Frye and Adriana's drag queen informant, the hitman is taken aback by the reflection of Jesus on the cross in the victim's pool of blood.

(*) Which makes it a shame that Brian Van Holt isn't just playing Bobby Cobb, given that a speedboat in a warehouse isn't that different from a fishing boat in a parking lot.

Yeah, "Sorrowsworm" does not lack for oddities, but it also finds some emotional grounding. While I would prefer to never hear David Tate's name again on this show, the scene where Marco and Sonya bond over their respective tragedies was about the best way to approach it, and the sort of thing that makes this pairing matter beyond the way the plot keeps placing them alongside each other. And Linder's a genuine character who just happens to carry himself strangely; he moves and speaks at his own rhythms, but you can also see him torn between his desire to be a good person and his desire to harshly punish all the men who hurt Eva. It's a pleasure to have Thomas M. Wright back on the show.

I'm still undecided on Eleanor, though. Franka Potente is always an interesting screen presence, and we still don't know much about what is motivating her strange and violent journey through El Paso and its environs. But I hope that she, like Linder, turns out to be an actual person and not just a collection of skewed, violent tics.

What did everybody else think?

NOTE: My plan is to take next week off. Hopefully I'll be back with a review of episode 5 two weeks from tonight.