Someone drives a car onto the Bridge of The Americas separating El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua in the middle of the night and briefly disables all the lights and cameras. By the time everything comes back on, the car is gone and there's a dead body on the bridge, right on the line that officially separates the United States from Mexico. Obviously cops from both nations show up to check it out. El Paso homicide detective Sonya Cross claims the case, and Chihuahua State Police detective Marco Ruiz is only too happy to let her have it, given how much he's already got on his plate. However, he does let an ambulance cross back into the U.S., infuriating Cross by supposedly compromising the crime scene for the sake of a dying man. But I think we all know that's not going to be the end of it.
Several things soon become apparent. One is that Detective Cross is clearly somewhere on the autism spectrum, with interpersonal skills that are -- to say the least -- lacking polish. Another is that the supposed victim is actually two women: the top half of an American judge spliced onto the legs of a young woman from Juarez. So that means Ruiz is back in the mix, as the body on the bridge was, quite literally, half-Mexican.
Cross is quite keen to hold onto the lead in the case, even as her boss, Lieutenant Hank Wade, warns her that it's not only going to be a jurisdictional hairball, but a potentially soul-scarring experience. Still, she works it doggedly, offending almost everyone she comes in contact with in the process… including the dead judge's husband. It's pretty clear that Wade has been covering for her throughout her career, so she's pretty stressed out when he starts talking about retiring.
Other stuff happens too. Remember that ambulance that crossed the bridge? The man inside it manages to make it to the hospital in time to tell his younger wife Charlotte that he wants a divorce, but then dies on the operating table so presumably she still gets everything. That would seem to not only include their vast ranch, but also his secret cell phone and a hidden key that opens a door in the cellar of an abandoned house on some distant corner of the property. The nature of what's behind that door is one of the few interesting mysteries in the pilot, so of course we don't learn a thing about it.
And then there's also a pretty likely murder suspect; a dude who puts a young woman into the trunk of his car in Juarez, drives her across the border to his trailer in the desert, and does God knows what to her. And she's clearly not the first one.
As for the actual murder investigation, Cross and Ruiz make a little progress as he persistently pursues the impossible task of getting along with her. For instance, the sheriff's department finds the dead judge's car with her legs inside and the blood from them outside. Cross's colleagues also trace the car that dumped the two body-halves to one Daniel Frye, a newspaper reporter who has seen better days. Unfortunately for Frye, he not only knows nothing about what his car was up to the night before, he also doesn't know that it's been wired to a device with an attached timer until he gets in it and finds himself trapped inside.
While the bomb squad makes some piss-poor efforts to save him, Cross manages to raise him on his cell phone and rule him out as a suspect in the last seconds before time runs out. She also somehow manages to calm him down through what they both believe are his final moments, probably drawing on bitter experience gained with her late sister (yeah, all she tells anyone about that is "she died"). But when time runs out, Frye is free and the only bomb is a truth-bomb, in the form of a message asking why the murders of a few white Americans are so much more important than the thousands across the border. The voice promises interesting times ahead, and by God there had better be. Right now this thing is almost entirely character-driven, which is great for just about anything that isn't a police procedural.
Think you've got game? Prove it! Check out Games Without Pity, our new area featuring trivia, puzzle, card, strategy, action and word games -- all free to play and guaranteed to help pass the time until your next show starts.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
In the middle of the night, there's a flat, lit-up cityscape (spoiler: it's El Paso, Texas); a slow, mellow blues guitar on the soundtrack; and a lone, dark car rolling along nearly empty freeways. There's an aerial view as it reaches the head of the line to the border crossing plaza. Once through, and out on the bridge beyond leading into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the unseen driver checks a light-up chronometer held in one gloved hand and squeezes a button on it. At that moment, all the lights go out, both on the bridge and in the surrounding buildings. Must be the Timex EMP model. Inside the Border Patrol station, all the security monitors are snowy as the car's driver rolls to a stop in the middle of the otherwise empty bridge. The driver kills the headlights and drags something heavy out of the trunk. Let's hope it's the body of whoever sold the driver those flood pants and squat reddish boots. While the uniformed American Border Patrol officers in the installation are trying to figure out what happened, the car roars off along the bridge and the lights all come back on. The officers remain confused, and finally one of them operating a remote camera and spotlight locates what will presumably be the cause of most of what happens for the next thirteen episodes: a dead body, lying parallel to the bridge, perfectly centered on the painted white line demarcating the border between the United States and Mexico. "Holy shit. Shut the border!" the officer calls. It's a body on the border. Which raises the age-old question: where do they bury the survivors?
Cue a brief, to-the-point title sequence, featuring Instagrammed images of El Paso, Juarez, and the border crossing station, along with the names of five whole cast members. It's all accompanied by three lines of a theme song warbled by some desert-voiced bluesman who was rousted out of bed at roughly the time the officer in the cold open was saying, "Holy shit." So far this show's pretty damn spare.
An Anglo man grinds out a cigarette on the street in Juarez with a reddish boot and collects the butt, gazing up at the bridge and generally looking nervous and disreputable. The shot of the boot was too tight to tell if they were the same ones worn by the perp on the bridge, but that would probably be too easy. There's quite a lot of activity up there at the moment, obviously. Joining the swarming cops from the southern side is Mexican actor Demián Bichir, currently in theaters as Sandra Bullock's boss in The Heat. Before he can do much more than step out of his car and amble bowlegged over to the scene to silently contemplate the body of the fully dressed woman still lying dead-center on the line, face-up with the top half in Mexico, a blonde woman played by Diane Kruger (who I last saw trying to fool Nazis in Inglourious Basterds) approaches. She pulls out one earbud and asks him rather abruptly, "Who are you?" I think I'm going to need a "rather abruptly" macro for her. He's a bit put off, but he identifies himself as "Marco Ruiz, Chihuahua State Police." He returns the question in kind, and she says, "Sonya Cross, El Paso Homicide." Please to notice her last name stenciled on the "DO NOT CROSS" police barrier in the background of the shot right next to her face, like a subtitle that didn't even have to be added in post-production.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15Next
Television Without Pity • © 2013 Bravo Media LLC • A Division of NBCUniversal •
Comments