Bates Motel Checks Out With a Strong Series Finale

With finale "The Cord," the series remains an extremely dysfunctional family drama to the very end, with stepson killing stepfather --

Norman shooting revenge-crazed former sheriff Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell) after getting the drop on him while he cried over the body of his beloved, frozen wife -- and brother killing brother (also cousin killing cousin [like I said, dysfunctional]) when Dylan (Max Thieriot) shoots Norman when Norman lungs at him with a knife in a move that's less an attack than a suicide attempt so he can join his mother.

[...] there's also Dylan's act of emotional cruelty against his wife Emma (Olivia Cooke), who's suffered as much as anyone with with Calhoun-Massett-Bates blood, when he tells her "I'll never love anyone else but you" right before he goes to have his final confrontation with Norman, against her reasonable wishes.

Norman's dying vision of running into his mother's arms in the forest, in which some shots he was a little boy, hit the right, complex note of how though their love caused so much death and destruction, it was genuine.

A flash-forward set to Doris Day's "Dream A Little Dream of Me" showed a beaming young couple buying the motel, Dylan and Emily and their daughter as a happy, loving family, and Norman and Norma's shared gravestone, at peace at last.

Bates Motel premiered in March 2013, about six weeks after Netflix's House of Cards started the Peak TV era, and it remains one of the defining shows of the content-deluged era we're living in.

[...] it was sort of a surprise -- an original scripted series on a network better known for its reality programming with A-list talent in front of the camera (Farmiga was just a few years removed from an Oscar nomination for Up In the Air) and behind it (Carlton Cuse was the co-showrunner for Lost and Kerry Ehrin wrote for Friday Night Lights).

[...] it feels like every channel and streaming platform has at least one attempt at