‘Bates Motel’ Begins Its Final Season Tonight with Special Guest Rihanna

Published Feb. 20, 2017, 10:00 a.m. ET

Photo: YouTube ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Where to Stream:

Bates Motel

Bates Motel helped usher in our current age of prequel television (Gotham, Better Call Saul, Fear the Walking Dead) when it premiered on A&E in March 2013. From day one, viewers have speculated exactly how creators Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin and Anthony Cipriano would tee up the events depicted in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece, Psycho, the American Film Institute’s choice for most thrilling film in U.S. history. All will soon be revealed as Bates Motel returns tonight for its fifth and final season.

Until recently, the show unraveled the co-dependent and borderline lustful mother-son relationship between inn owner Norma Bates (co-executive producer Vera Farmiga, in an Emmy-nominated role) and her teenage son, Norman (Finding Neverland‘s Freddie Highmore). With age, Norman became increasingly mentally unstable and blackout-prone. He’s also a taxidermist who enjoys dressing up as his mother. In the course of the series thus far, he’s killed six people, beginning with his father, who he clocked with a blender; this is why Norma sought a new life for them in Oregon. Last season, in the penultimate episode, Norman poisoned his mother with carbon monoxide, a half-successful murder-suicide.

Ehrin told Entertainment Weekly that season five will commence 18 months post-matricide (at San Diego Comic-Con last summer, the creators confirmed that Farmiga would reprise her role, presumably in flashbacks). But Comic Con’s big Bates Motel news was that Rihanna will play Marion Crane, Janet Leigh’s part in the Hitchhock film.

Crane steals $40,000 from her boss, trades in her car, crosses state lines and hides out in the Bates Motel while waiting for her boyfriend to join her. She then perishes in one of cinema’s most famous and iconic scenes, when Norman Bates—posing as Norma—stabs her multiple times as she showers, an act made more frightening by anguished violins and Hitchock’s omissions (suggesting that the violence is too gruesome for our eyes).

Rihanna first fangirled over Bates Motel in a November 2015 Vanity Fair cover story. This will be the eight-time Grammy winner’s largest onscreen role to date (according to IMDB, she’s featured in three episodes; Ehrin said of the Psycho narrative, “We’re taking threads of that story and definitely using them so it’s recognizable, it’s just where we go with it is very different”). She previously co-starred in This Is The End and appeared for a few seconds in the 2014 remake of Annie; next year, she’ll join Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway and more in the all-female Ocean’s Eight.