Mr. Mercedes season 2 episode 3 review: Brace yourselves! it's going to be a bumpy ride
If there was any doubt as to the ability of the sophomore season of 'Mr. Mercedes' to transition smoothly from the hard-boiled detective genre to an outright supernatural thriller, episode 3 of the new season, titled 'You Can Go Home Now' dispells most, if not all of those doubts. After laying sufficient groundwork for the new season to unfold, episode three finally gets the ball rolling as Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson) starts to get a hint that Brady Hartsfield (Harry Treadaway) might not be completely out of action after all.
[Spoiler Alert: The following review discusses key plot details from episode 3 of Mr. Mercedes. If you haven't watched the episode yet, proceed at your own risk!]
Episode three opens yet again with one of the shows many tasteful montages. As usual, it starts with Hodges grumpily getting up and about his day, this time to the tune of 'I Had A Dream' by John Prine. The montage also cuts to Brady, who lies in bed like every other day being put through the routine by doctors and nurses, while Hodges continues to visit his nemesis every day, patiently waiting for him to awake. Meanwhile, in Brady's 'mind-cave', we get to see some dark revelations of Brady's past. He's starting to see his dead kid brother crawling around and playing with his toy firetruck. There's a particularly morose scene when his brother asks Brady, "Did you kill mother too?". The "too" in this context might imply that it was Brady who killed his brother as a child, adding yet another dark layer to the homegrown mass murderer's backstory.
