After the tumultuous events of last week’s premiere, the friction in Norman and Norma’s relationship is already being felt. Norma seems more frightened of Norman than anything else, with her pleasant behavior towards him not coming from a genuine place, but rather the necessary steps being taken to keep her son pacified. The last thing that she wants is for him to have another freak out.

On the other side of this, Norman is beginning to remember his recent murders, however he’s remembering them as Norma. Him believing that Norma’s responsible for his crimes is a great new dynamic for the show to explore, as well as a nice way for him to be just as suspicious of her as she is of him. It’s a brilliant shift in their power dynamic. Norman is constantly needling Norma after everything she says, determined to catch her in her bullshitting, while she is simultaneously trying to catch him in his own culpability.

This even culminates in Norman showing her the corpse and his crime, but blaming her for it, as the ultimate testament to his crazy. The intervention scene where Norman accuses his mother of all of these murders is twisted stuff thats a different dimension than anything offered up in the movies, and it’s a smart extra layer to heap ontop of everything. It’s heartbreaking to see Norman tell Norma, “I’m afraid of you, and I love you. And that’s a bad combination.” Farmiga does inspired work here, not only in terms of Norma’s realization of what’s finally going on with her son, but also her pained reaction to it all.

Accordingly, seeing Norman beginning to call the shots is kind of great, and I like where this material seems to be heading with Norma getting Stockholmed into passivity. This power shift allows Norman more time for independence and seeing him flourish and talk to people is consistently eerie. Anxiety mounts as you worry over what might end up getting said or be done. Just the presence of a child on screen now is upsetting due to the inevitable thoughts that something might happen to it. I’m never not nervous by Norman now, and that’s kind of amazing. Highmore is destroying it.

With Norma and Norman going back and forth, the episode ends up hinging on Norman needing to sign his admittance papers, but of course he doesn’t want to leave Norma alone, lest she might murder everyone (in his opinion). It’s an inspired setup and one that keeps things endlessly intricate. We even get a glimpse of Norman communicating with his father in his head now too, as he acts as the prime figure in this war against Norma. It’s not something that fully worked for me, but I can appreciate the extra dimension that it adds and how Norman’s sense of history continues to get warped more and more.