Admittedly, I’m not sure if Rihanna was really the best choice to play Ms. Crane in this adaptation, but it was surely a move made to generate headlines and bring in viewers. I’m not opposed to a very left-field casting choice for the role, it’s merely that Rihanna is simply doing a fine job at this point. Let’s see what she brings to the shower—I mean table—in the coming installments where she really gets something to chew on.

This entry starts off with Sheriff Green suspicious of Norman all of a sudden on the topic of Romero’s recent prison break, with Norman getting all sorts of twitchy accordingly. Green’s chat with Norman isn’t entirely to place blame; she also seems to be genuinely concerned that Romero might break into Norman’s home and kill him in his sleep. This scene between the two of them is their first exchange that really pops and begins to hint at the cat-and-mouse game that the back-end of this season could become for the two of them. Green has mostly been a figurehead up until now, but she’s finally tugging on Norman’s thread and is going to end up discovering the colossal ball of yarn that he’s hiding. It’s going to be awfully shady if White Pine Bay loses two Sheriffs back-to-back.

The show returns to Dylan and Emma this episode too and while their stories haven’t been pressing enough at this point to justify weekly appearances, checking in with them bi-weekly feels about right. It’s still a very reliable release valve to the pressure cooker that is everything inside Motel Crazy. That being said, it’s a little depressing to see how quickly Dylan and Emma’s marriage is beginning to sour.

It’s far too melodramatic that Emma is pushing Dylan towards going back home—a decision that would ultimately kill them—or him snapping at his wife and becoming a brute of a husband whenever his family is brought up. Things do improve some when Dylan comes clean to Emma about Norman’s questionable history (including what happened to her mother), with her reaction just being heartbreaking. Every scene with their baby has me dreading that he’s going to end up an orphan. Or maybe that’d be a good thing?

On the topic of snapping at people, Norman is going through much of the same motions in his pseudo-relationship with Madeleine. The episode taps into another bittersweet vein as Madeleine continually tries to insert herself into Norman’s life, with her only crime being that she’s just lonely. In any other situation she’d be doing the right sort of thing and be entering a bright new stage of her life, she’s just happened to end up getting a crush on the worst person imaginable.