'The Sinner' Season 3 Episode 1 Review: Ambrose's love for chaos is rivaled only by Burns' self destruction
Spoiler alert for Season 3 Episode 1: 'Dorchester'
Hell can freeze over but detective Harry Ambrose would still not be able to rest easy, thanks to the eerie murders that keep dragging him back to the insidious minds of his arrests.
When we meet him this time, Harry is busy adjusting to his new move to the obscure little fictional town of Dorchester, New York, and rather than offering any remote bit of relaxation, he is catapulted straight into a case, absolutely ruining any scope for a retirement that people might have assumed of him.
Not that Harry would like a retirement any more than the audience would, so off we go thanking Matt Bomers Jamie Burns for bringing Harry back into action after Jamie's reunion with a college buddy goes awfully wrong.
Back in his hometown, Harry is living with his newly divorced daughter and a fragile grandson having a hard time adjusting to his new living situation.
But in the middle of the night, Harry is called into a case which only allows us further insights into the layered, complicated mind of the detective played by Bill Pullman, who has kept us hooked since the first season.
The mystery surrounds Bomer's Jamie and for the first time since 2015's 'American Horror Story: Hotel', we see the actor play a not-so-good guy. There is something off right from the start about this anxiety-ridden school teacher who also seems to be friendlier with his students than he is supposed to.
He is married with a baby on the way as we find out soon, but his itching curiosity to burn his hand on the barbeque grill isn't the only thing off about him.
Within the first few minutes of the episode, Jamie's college friend Nick (Chris Messina) shows up unannounced at his home and once again, it's obvious that there's more than just friendship involved between the two men.
Nick talks to Jamie in a tone and manner that suggest the latter has been living a dual life as a gay partner to Nick and using his trophy wife Leela as an elaborate cover to hide his true identity for whatever speculative reasons one can think of.
However, it could be worse, because such is the show and its twisted ways that we have observed for the last two seasons.
Noticing the tension between the two over dinner, Leela even asks Jamie about a little tryst the two might have indulged in in the past, but while he admits he and Nick did dabble in a little tete a tete, there's no nailing the coffin now.
Especially since right after this, we are taken to a scene where Harry gets a call from the police department, asking him to show up at the scene of a car accident that takes Nick's life.
This is where Harry and Jamie meet, or so they think, as the two had boarded the same train to Dorchester when Harry had moved to the town. In his interrogation, Harry is able to sniff Jamie's partial honesty.
But at the same time, there's the second big lead — an artist called Sonya, the woman who owns the ranch-type land where Nick's accident took place.
On one hand, there's something sketchy about the way Jamie describes watching Nick breathe his last breath, implying that he was very much present there for a good deal of time.
On the other hand, it is Sonya's self-proclaimed expertise in specializing with men and their vulnerability which urges Harry to look into her past too.
It's also clear that Jamie has an issue with his hands — maybe he has done something really terrible in the past and can't seem to forgive himself for the same, thus resorting to getting really close to hurting the hands that committed the crime.
However, when in a zoned-out state he overshares to Leela, he admits about the psychological hold on him that Nick always possessed: more of a sinister, supernatural hold rather than the teasing elements of forbidden fruits.
The premiere episode also revealed that something had gone on between the two men and Sonya as they had trespassed on her private land in Nick's last moments, where Nick had asked Jamie to 'follow his lead'.
There's a possibility of a thread connecting all three of them together, made better by Bomer's cool guy, weed-vaping school teaser and Messina's boyish charm that had the right amount of edge for an evil kid murderer.
And of course, there's Pullman's complex yet suave portrayal of Harry meandering through the twists of the case only makes us cling on to the plot until the next episode comes!
'The Sinner' Season 3 airs on Thursdays at 9 pm only on USA Network.
