Netflix’s “Bloodline” has returned for a third and final season, and like the two previous seasons it simmers with the hot, Florida Keys temperature, boiling over with intrigue, duplicity and a noirish delving into the depths of humanity’s despair.
The Rayburns are a family dealing with a lot of skeletons in their closet. The influence of Danny Rayburn’s (Ben Mendelsohn) actions in the past as well as those of brothers John (Kyle Chandler), Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz), sister Meg (Linda Cardellini), and mother Sally (Sissy Spacek), are constantly being felt, adding an undeniable heaviness and moroseness to every present day situation.
Danny isn’t present much in this most recent season (he’s dead), but his spectre hangs over everything and he occasionally appears as figments of certain characters’s imaginations and remembrances.
John Rayburn is the established centre-piece and heart of the Rayburn family. His murder of Danny weighs on his soul constantly and threatens to pull him under the riptide of lies and guilt. Kevin, at the end of the second season, had brutally murdered Marco Diaz (Enrique Murciano), Meg’s boyfriend, but Kevin’s problems with drugs, alcohol, organized crime and self-delusion demonstrate that he doesn’t bear as much guilt for the consequences of his enormous transgressions. This makes him an extremely unsympathetic character although the series does demonstrate sympathy for him in the development of his tenuous sobriety and the birth of a son.
What I like about “Bloodline” in this third season is the way it continues to makes the Florida heat palpable. The climate seems to be a character itself, threatening to engulf the characters’ grips on sanity. Similarly, the Rayburn hotel is threatened by the rising waters of the Florida Keys coast. Sally, by the season’s end, is hurriedly trying to sell the hotel to anyone who is sucker enough to purchase a piece of property that will, in ten years time, be submerged in water.
The water in this series is a highly symbolic motif. It is a place where one of the Rayburn children (a girl) died at a young age from drowning. It is a place where John nearly drowns himself in a later episode. The water seems to represent an unknowable force of nature that not only threatens to engulf the Rayburn’s livelihood, but is also the only definite, constant thing in their lives, a place where death is palpable and tangible. It is a locale where much of the actions of the past that haunt the present and future seem to be focused and meet.
You are constantly wondering through this third season just how each member of the family will get out of the deep mire of shit that they find themselves in. In the end, certain members evade a cruel fate while others become engrossed in the consequences of their past actions. No clear cut resolution is offered in the last episode. You are left with the proposal that John may be able to atone for his past sins via the confession to Danny’s son, Nolan (Owen Teague), of his involvement of the murder of his father, but the answer is not clear and the viewer is left hanging.
Thanks to some great acting and interesting dynamics between characters and environment, the third and final season of “Bloodline” is a riveting, neo-noir paen to the twisted, dysfunctional and bruised psyche that characterizes a certain, but at the same time, universal family of the early 21st century.