‘Bates Motel’ To Open With Norman Holding Norma’s Life In His Hands

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Bates Motel.

It seems Bates Motel is going to get even more intense as Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) descends further into the darkness, something only hinted at in the season finale. When Bates Motel returns, fans will see Norman go full psychopath, a condition first revealed when, upon escaping from Norma (Vera Farmiga), he slipped into his mother’s persona and brutalized Bradley.

The Bates Motel executive producer Kerry Ehrin hinted that Norma’s ways of protecting her son may have contributed to Norman’s madness, since her actions would have had a different effect on one with dissociative disorder than they might have had on a more rational mind.

“So in many ways, ‘Mother’ is that for Norman. It’s somebody that he can call on when he feels out of control. The other side of that is, he has this whole warped, psychosexual, frustrated, messed-up psychology with his mother which also feeds into it. So it’s just created this being that lives in him.”

Even with the way Bates Motel left off, it seems there’s much more to play out between Norma and Norman, when the new season of Bates Motel premieres. Ehrin warns fans not to make any assumptions, especially where Vera Farmiga’s Bates Motel character is concerned.

“I feel like that could happen, honestly, at any point. It could happen in any episode from now until the end of the series,” Kerry warned, when faced with the idea that Norma Bates’ death would foretell the end of the series.

Kerry also revealed that even the way in which the new season of Bates Motel picks up will be different, since, unlike previous seasons, there will be no time jump.

“Bradley (Nicola Peltz) had just been killed, Norman thinks his mother did it, the actual Norma has no idea where her son is, Emma’s (Olivia Cooke) going in for a lung transplant. So there are a lot of threads we [wanted] to pick up immediately.”

How this plays out for Norma Bates remains to be seen. While Norman may pose an immediate danger to her, Norma still loves her son and wants what’s best for him. Currently, that may translate into sending him back to Pineview sanitarium, but, as Ms. Ehrin explains, real world problems may make that difficult.

“Those places are insanely expensive, and if you don’t have health insurance — and even if you do –they’re crazy expensive. So where that money is going to come from, what Norma Bates will have to do…what pretzel she will tie herself into, I don’t know yet,” Ehrin said. “But she wants, more than anything in the world, to fix things for her son and to be there for him.”

Bates Motel will debut in March 2016 on A&E.

[Featured image courtesy of A&E/Bates Motel]