Much to her fans' delight, Rihanna returned to A&E's "Bates Motel" on Monday night (March 27), where the pop titan appeared as Marion Crane, the real estate office worker who gets infamously stabbed and murdered in the original Alfred Hitchcock's Pyscho. However, Rih's shower scene brought a huge twist to the iconic storyline.
Similar to the 1960 horror flick, Norman Bates eerily watches the modern-day Marion as she takes it all off and hops in the shower. They add the fitting music. They cue up the perfect shadowy figure in front of the curtain. However, viewers were left in awe when she abruptly leaves the shower unbruised. "Screw this sh*t," she says after waiting for Sam Loomis (played by Austin Nichols), the cheating man she thought was her lover but has a wife. It's a revelation that Norman warned Marion about beforehand.
Nonetheless, horror fans received their share of the classic storyline when Sam heads to Bates Motel to meet Marion and ends up getting stabbed by Norman for the infamous shower scene.
Speaking with Variety, executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse spoke about their decision to let this version of Marion walk away with her life.
"We worked a long time on those two episodes and breaking that story. We tried out every possible scenario," he explained. "We landed on the one that got us the most excited in the room and had the most impact, and both honored 'Psycho' and pushed the story we were telling in 'Bates Motel.' It's telling the story of Norman and what's going on inside of him and pushed it to a great place by having him kill Sam, who in many ways is a psychological stand-in for his own father."
"There was no way to redefine Marion Crane as a modern empowered woman if we killed her in the shower," added Cuse of the season 5 episode.
Photo: A&E