Suits: To Trouble (6x01)

Yayyyy! My favorite show is back! I love Suits with an unreasonably amount of fervor, but how can I help it? Great acting, awesome script writing, and a general story that actually pushes things forward instead of getting entrenched in boring and familiar patterns? I'm all in!

Cons:

I don't really have any complaints, but I do have one potential concern. In Mike's side of the episode, which I'll talk about more in a moment, we learn that there's a prisoner who is in there thanks to Harvey. He wants to take revenge on Harvey, and plans on using Mike to do it. I love, love, love the potential here, but I also feel slightly worried that Mike going to prison is going to end up being about Harvey, rather than about Mike. Last season we got a lot of focus on Harvey's character development, and I want this plot thread, with Mike being in prison, to teach us about Mike's character, too. But like I said... that's not a complaint. It's a concern about the trajectory of the season, and I'm more than excited to see where they take it.

Pros:

The two parallel stories worked very well. I'll start with Mike:

He gets thrown in to the prison system, meeting Malcolm Jamal Warner, who is playing a prison counselor. This counselor basically warns Mike to shape up and stop being a smart-ass, and we start to get our first hint of Mike's biggest challenge in this new environment. His sharp wit is going to get him into trouble, and garner all the wrong kinds of attention in prison. This character, whose name I didn't quite catch, has a lot of promise. In a way, he reminds me of how Harvey was with Mike at the beginning of the show. He wants to teach him a lesson, and he's willing to be a hard-ass about it. I think that this character will end up being an ally to Mike, even though there won't be much in the way of a good relationship between them.

Mike then gets taken to his cell, and meets his roommate: Frank. Frank tells Mike his story about insider trading, and Mike  tells his story as well. Turns out, Frank has an illegal cellphone, and Mike uses it to text Rachel and let her know that he's okay. Later, the guard who brought Mike to his cell earlier comes in, and we learn that he and Frank are working together: Frank isn't actually Mike's roommate. He had the guard sneak him in to learn about Mike, because Harvey Specter is the one who put him in prison, and he wants to get back at him. Now, he knows all about Mike, and he has Rachel's phone number to boot! Like I mentioned above, this plot thread has a lot of delicious potential. Particularly, I love the idea of Mike being used to hurt Harvey: even somebody who has never seem them interact knows that Mike can be used against Harvey. And Mike confirmed the whole thing to Frank, talking about how he would never turn on Harvey, and how much he owed Harvey for everything.

What I love about this stuff with Mike is that all of the things that have made him such a strong and good character over the years, all the reasons we love him despite his crimes, are now being turned against him. His big brain will get him attention, as the prison counselor warned him. And his soft and trusting heart will let others take advantage of him, just as his new friend Frank proved. This setup succinctly demonstrates exactly what Mike is going to be in for, and how his particular personality will make his stay in prison a challenge.

Then, we've got the rest of our characters.

The plot is basic, and pretty depressing: the firm has been totally gutted of all its employees, and a class action suit is coming down on them for every case Mike was involved with. The three name partners have their squabbles, but by the end of the episode they commit to trying to save the firm against all odds. It's down to the final few: Jessica, Harvey, Louis, Donna, Rachel, and Benjamin the IT guy.

What I liked about this plot is that it felt more similar to previous seasons of the show, while Mike's plot takes off in a new direction. This core group of characters are having to band together against the world, and despite the fact that they're tired and discouraged, you get the sense from watching that if anybody could pull off a victory against such immense odds, it would be Jessica, Harvey, and Louis. All of these characters have such unique and interesting relationships with each other, and so many of them were showcased in this episode.

I want to start with Benjamin, the unexpected MVP of the PSL team. He stuck around while everybody else fled, keeping the servers up so that they still look like a functioning law firm. He tries to help Louis serve papers to all of the partners who broke their contracts and fled, and he alerts the name partners to the fact that their records are being hacked. The end result is that thanks to him, the name partners have an idea to use the other partners' buy-ins to pay off the class action suits, and avoid the poaching of their clients and the censure from their fleeing partners. Ben saves the day! I like this character, and have always enjoyed his short appearances in the past. He reminds me a bit of Mike with his snarky attitude, but he's more of a "loan wolf" than Mike is, which adds some depth.

Donna played the expected role of no-nonsense ass-kicker and cheerleader. She comforted Rachel upon learning that Rachel won't be able to see Mike for at least a month, and she knocked some sense into Harvey when he got frustrated with Louis and almost left. That was a great speech - she reminded Harvey that Mike was in prison to save all of them from the same fate... if Harvey walked out on his family, then what did Mike save them all for? I do wonder what sort of role Donna will have moving forward - her support is more valuable than ever, given that everybody else has left the firm, but she doesn't have money to contribute to keep things afloat, and her entire life isn't on the line the way that the others' are. I think that could make for some interesting tension moving forward.

Rachel encapsulated one of the key themes of this show this week: family. She's devastated over losing Mike for two years, but she holds it together enough to yell at Harvey, Jessica, and Louis for fighting with each other instead of coming together in this time of stress. Mike went to prison so that none of them would have to. Rachel says that Jessica, Harvey, et. al. are her family, and she wanted to be with them on such a stressful night. This was a lovely way to help knock some sense back into people. It might take Harvey and Louis a bit longer to get on board, but Rachel knows the only way to survive is to stick together.

The most heartbreaking moment for Rachel was when she called the prison to ask about Mike, and learned that because she's not his immediate family, she'll have to wait to see him. She tells the person on the phone that Mike has no immediate family. Rachel and Harvey are the closest people in the world to him, and neither one of them will be able to see him for his full first month in prison. That sucks. I'm looking forward to seeing Rachel grow as a character and take on some dimension of her own without Mike around. I've always loved her character, but it's impossible to deny that she's been in Mike's shadow in terms of characterization. With Mike existing in his own sphere, maybe we'll see even more of the strong, loving Rachel Zane that we saw tonight. She can be ruthless when she needs to be, but she's also a kind soul.

One of the best moments in the whole episode was a conversation between Jessica and Rachel. Jessica talks about how hard it was for her to survive in this high pressure career path, and how the rules are different for women. If you are kind, then you are perceived as soft. And if you're hardcore enough to do the job, your personal relationships fall by the wayside. Rachel tells Jessica that she knows she's not a cold and emotionless person - Jessica was the one to make Robert go to the would-be wedding, and Rachel knows that Jessica did that just because she cares. This scene was perfect. These two strong amazing women. I love them. I want more scenes of the two of them. I want more of this vulnerable side to Jessica. Yes, yes, yes.

The meat of this episode was in the relationship between Louis, Jessica, and Harvey. We got a lot of drama, and we also got a lot of humor. They fight, and get on each other's nerves, but it's just like Rachel said: they're family. Louis yells at Harvey and tells him the whole thing is his fault, Jessica admits to Louis that she's too tired to keep fighting like this, and Harvey and Jessica argue over how to handle the Louis situation... and then they decide the solution to their problem is to get high. Actually, it sort of works. Once they're all mellow, they actually band together, and things seem to go a lot better for them.

As an added bonus, these scenes are absolutely hilarious. You've got Louis arguing with Norma's ashes, Jessica lying on the reception table and staring at the ceiling, Harvey quoting movies, and then each of them revealing their monetary worth. Jessica and Harvey are both smug about the money they've accrued over the years... until Louis puts down his much larger sum. Harvey, still high, asks "are you a King?" and Louis asks what the two of them have been doing with their money. He's just responsible, that's all! This is so perfect and in-character for Louis. Of course he'd have an ungodly sum saved up. These scenes made me really excited to see the relationship between these three partners grow even closer over the course of the season. Hopefully we can be done with Louis doing something stupid just to shake things up. I want them all on equal footing, for once.

I almost always end my Suits reviews with a look at the Harvey/Mike dynamic. As excited as I've been about the new Mike-is-in-prison development, I sort of thought maybe they'd do a time jump or something. Now I see that we're playing this out, and that Mike is going to be isolated from the rest of our main characters at least for a while. It made me a bit upset, because I figured that we wouldn't get very much in the way of Harvey and Mike material. But if this premiere is anything to go by, I was so wrong, and so very happy to be wrong.

The first scene with Harvey shows him at Rachel's place, where he came by to let Rachel know he'd dropped Mike off, and that he seemed as okay as it's possible for him to be. Rachel says that Harvey could have said that over the phone, and Harvey fesses up his real reason for going over there: "I miss him." Let me re-emphasize this... he literally just dropped Mike off. This isn't something he's saying grudgingly after months have gone by. It's been like an hour. Harvey and Rachel then go inside and have drinks, and discuss their first impressions of Mike. Basically, it was just the two people who love Mike most in the world being together and talking about him. The best part is when Rachel says she knew from the first day of meeting Mike that she was in trouble. Harvey lifts his drink and says "to trouble," and they toast to Mike. This was an acknowledgment that Harvey was changed by Mike just as profoundly as Rachel was, and that they'd both put up with any amount of trouble for the privilege of keeping Mike Ross in their lives. It was glorious, and much more than I ever would have expected. I knew we'd get some stuff about Harvey's guilt and pain about Mike, and I was looking forward to it. But to show the bond between Harvey and Rachel is to confirm what we all knew, but wanted to hear anyway: Harvey cares about Mike just as much as Rachel does. I'm very happy about this, indeed.

A final note before I bow out and wait eagerly for next week: the promo for the next episode shows Mike getting attacked. It looks like Frank is trying to stab him with a knife! I have to say I'm beyond anxious to see what happens with that. But I was looking at my review of last season's finale, and I said this: "I don't know... I'm still sitting here thinking that a white collar prison is going to be okay. I can't imagine next season featuring Mike in prison getting shanked by hardened criminals." Yikes. Maybe I should have held my tongue?

9/10