Review: The Bridge ‘Calaca’ – Your Bedside Manner Sucks Dog Balls

With bodies, skulls, and water bottles piling up on both sides of the border, ‘Calaca’ continues to build a number of stories in America and Mexico, centered around a pair of St. Mary statues, a bead, and ten immigrants on their first day across the border. Like the pilot, these stories are being introduced with very broad strokes – a double-edged sword for a show in its early-going trying to build out a complex world and narrative.

The most interesting stories naturally take place south of the border: given the visible level of corruption in Mexican government that even the most wild American conspiracy theorists couldn’t dream of, it’s inherently more fascinating to watch Marco navigate that world. Things we’d view as shocking (either the public or most American police) are just every day occurrences for Marco, be it underage girls having sex in public, people charging at police without a care, or a high-ranking policeman who openly omit murders from the public record.

And if that’s not enough, he finds out he had his vasectomy after his wife got pregnant again – adding another mouth to feed and protect in the dangerous world he’s living in. And yet he maintains his calm: one thing ‘Calaca’ suggests to the audience is the importance of companionship in surviving, seen best in Sonya’s inability to understand the concept of wanting to hear the voice of another human being for comfort (we’ll get back to Sonya). Given the world he lives in and the personal stakes of every single bit of police work he does, Marco’s easily been the highlight of the first two episodes, a man who carries such emotional and moral weight around with him, but has just enough charm and conviction to hide it from the world. It does get to him, though – halfway through the episode, a scene of Sonya working in the middle of the night is married with the image of Marco in bed in Mexico, doing the exact same thing (except with better company and worse technology).

Read the full review at Sound on Sight