A quick review of tonight's "The Bridge" coming up just as soon as I leave my gum on your lobby sculpture...

As mentioned last week, I had planned to take a few episodes off from reviewing to see how the season coalesced, but "Harvest of Souls" was such a pivotal hour for so many of this season's story arcs that I wanted to comment on it, even briefly.

Very bad things go down in this one, including the prosecutor's abduction and murder, the CEO taking what is sure to be an unhealthy interest in Adriana, Jack Dobbs using one of his brother's drawings as a map that leads him to a dessicated corpse, a frustrated and scared Eva taking an ax to the imprisoned cop, and Marco executing the two cops who tried to stop him and Sonya from obtaining the copy of Eva's statement.

It's pretty much a Wild West installment of "The Bridge," which has pluses and minuses. On the one hand, all the violence and threatened future violence underlines just how treacherous the waters are that Sonya, Marco, Adriana, Frye and the others are wading into. Given Sonya's black-and-white thinking about what is legal and what is not, it should be interesting to see her wrestle with the knowledge that Marco murdered those two men to protect her, and the probability that he was right to do so. On the other, the threat level now seems so great, and the odds stacked so heavily against our various heroes, heroines and weirdoes that that Elwood Reid and company may have to pull a number of rabbits out of their hats just to keep a majority of the good guys alive, let alone for any sort of victory to occur. That Reid and Meredith Stiehm have both cited "The Wire" as an inspiration for the show suggests that they may just be fine with a downbeat ending to the season, could fit the setting just fine.

What did everybody else think of this one? Were you startled by all the violence? Pleased that various plots started intersecting? What exactly do you think Jack is up to, and is there a chance that he's partly (of even fully) responsible for the crimes Jim was blamed for? And whose immediate safety most concerns you?