Last week I wrote about the importance of the final song in a series final with Breaking Bad and Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” and this week’s choice comes from a season, not series finale and so the tone is very different. Yo La Tengo’s “Nowhere Near” plays in a long sequence that brings season 1 of The Bridge to a close and there is a hopeful and sad quality to the song. Spoilers ahead.
The song begins as Sonya puts her sister’s tape into her new car (I guess she changed cars as she complained her new one didn’t have a tape deck) and as this song is from 1993 it makes sense that it is on this mixtape. It’s a beautiful and haunting track mirroring the tone of the pensive faces that we see in this montage; Daniel Frye at his desk, Charlotte smoking on her porch and Sonya driving. It’s also incredibly heartbreaking as Adriana’s mother waits for her youngest daughter to get off the bus and she doesn’t turn up; vanishing like many other Juárez girls. This allows for a momentary truce between Adriana and her mother as personal differences are put aside in a story that is part of the longer narrative that connects both sides of the bridge. Steven Linder is a part of this and in this sequence he visits Eva; the woman he helped save by not giving up on finding her. What of Marco? The music fades as he enters his destination and makes a deal with the devil (ok Fausto) so he can get his revenge on David Tate.
TV Ate My Wardrobe 