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Yet even though this season ends with a hugely important change, “Unconscious” is smart to focus on long-anticipated character moments rather than big set pieces. He has always believed that he and his mother to belong together and at the end of the episode, when fake Norma tells Norman not to tell anyone about her/him killing Bradley, Norman responds “I do.” This feels less like a promise of solidarity and more like an unholy marriage of the two sides of Norman’s personality that can only lead to horrible things. The real Norma has disappointed him all season, but this Norma can be whatever Norman wants her or needs her to be. But by the end of “Unconscious,” Norman and the Norma that lives inside of him are now one in the same. By the middle of the season, he was stashing his mother’s favorite dress away and started believing himself to be his mother. We started this season with him creeping on visitors at the motel. Last season, I said that it seemed like Norman finally became the Norman that we know from Psycho in those final moments of the finale, but Season Three has been inching Norman into that final 10% he needed for that process to be complete. In the past, he could stay somewhat tethered to reality through new people, but now that he’s home-schooled, his blackouts have increased and his visions of his mother have become quite frequent. Norman hasn’t had to interact with as many strange people as he had in past seasons and that’s been detrimental to his health. Norman seems to have had much less screen time in this third season, yet his degrading mental issues have been felt through every character. With “Unconscious,” we experience that transformation of Norman into a hybrid of himself and his mother and it’s just as haunting as expected. But what made that moment so frightening in Psycho was the quick fade, where for a split-second, we see Norman turn into the skeleton of his mother, showing that, no matter how much help Norman might get, and no matter how long his mother has been dead, Norma will still live on within him. Last year, we ended with Norman Bates’ knowing smile as he looked directly at the screen-the same one that Anthony Perkins’ Norman gave to the audience in Psycho.

With the Season Two finale, Bates Motel hinted at the transformation that would occur throughout this season.