Oh no... poor Harvey. That's my main takeaway with this episode, even though Harvey is straight up breaking the law and I probably shouldn't be sympathizing with him quite this much. But still. Poor Harvey. In all, this may have been the weakest installment of the season thus far, but there was still a lot to enjoy.
Cons:
I've been complimenting the speed of the central plot for the past few weeks, but this week I noticed that we're getting a lot of repetition. Harvey shows up at the prison, Mike is surprised to see him, Harvey tells Mike a new piece of information, Mike still has nothing to report back about Kevin. Cahill and Harvey collude, it looks like Sutter might win anyway, Harvey has to do what he can to make it look like he's supporting Sutter while undermining him all the while... I feel like the events of this episode basically recapped what we already knew was going on. Of course, things did move forward, and they moved forward in a few really big ways. But in terms of the pacing and the structure of this episode, I sort of feel like we're getting more of the same.
I'd say my least favorite part of this current plot thread is Mike's characterization. There's this moment where Kevin accuses Mike of regretting taking a deal to save Harvey. Kevin says that he doesn't regret the deal that he took, because he did it to protect his wife, who he loves. It was an interesting moment, and I feel like maybe we're supposed to get the idea that Mike does resent Harvey a little bit for being out and about while he's trapped inside. He even admits something like that to Kevin. But if that's what they're going for, they're just not doing enough to flesh out Mike's character and his motivations. Why is he acting so short and testy with Harvey? Shouldn't he be just a tiny bit grateful that Harvey has been working so hard to rescue him? As tired as I am of seeing Mike in prison, I'm starting to wish we could spend more time with him just in prison, dealing with the daily challenges and maybe learning something about himself from his awful experiences. That doesn't seem to be what's happening, and it's a shame.
Frank Gallow pokes his head in to the plot to remind us that he's still a bad guy and that Harvey is supposed to be helping him get out of prison. He figures out that Mike is informing on Kevin, and threatens to spill the beans unless Harvey gets him out. Frank Gallow went from being such a sinister threat at the beginning of the season to being such a non-entity now. The brief moments we had with him were mostly a waste of time, which is a shame since he had such a promising start.
Louis' plot continues to infuriate me... he spends the whole episode trying to come up with a way to impress Tara on their upcoming date. Donna refuses to help him at first because she has more important things to do, but in the end she swoops in with the perfect solution, as always, and tells Louis he's good enough. Except that given his recent behavior, Louis isn't good enough. I'm not really jiving with this whole "Donna helps Louis with his self-confidence" thing, because it relegates Donna to the perpetual assistant. Once again, she acts so tough and bad-ass, yet still seems to exist just to help Louis with his personal problems.
Speaking of that, there was this great moment where Mike and Donna talk on the phone, and it reinforces their friendship, and in many ways I loved it, but there was one small thing that rubs me the wrong way. Donna knows that Mike called her to ask a favor, because otherwise he would have called Harvey. It seems like Donna knows her only job is to be there to do things for her friends without any return on that investment. It's a small thing, but what with Donna and Louis' ongoing saga, I've been extra sensitive about Donna's characterization lately.
And then finally, as long as I'm ranting about the butchering of Donna Paulson's character, we learn in a very brief moment tagged to the end of a conversation with Louis that Donna has been seeing somebody for the last few months, and she just broke it off with him. Okay, what? Why is it that every other character gets to have sufficient screen-time to deal with both their personal and professional lives in great detail, but Donna's only job is to be emotionally supportive of everybody else? And then she does get a relationship outside of the firm, and we don't get to see a speck of it? We don't even get to know it existed until it's over? What kind of bullshit is that?! The only way I can see any of this working out is if there's some sort of subtle and slow-building commentary here about how nobody fully appreciates Donna as her own unique human being, and eventually they will be forced to confront that. But it doesn't seem like that's what's happening, since we've already seen many instances of Donna demanding respect, and then capitulating and helping everybody else anyway. It's exhausting!
Pros:
Let's start with Rachel and Jessica teaming up for the subplot. Leonard Bailey's execution date has been set, and Rachel and Jessica tell a distraught Leonard. The two women go to a judge and try to get the execution delayed, and they are given one week to find Leonard's alibi witness and officially reopen the case, or Bailey's execution date is set in stone. Rachel goes to her father to help find Maria Gomez, the missing alibi witness. Then, the father of one of Leonard Bailey's supposed victims comes to the firm and yells at Rachel for using this case to "make a name for herself" by trying to free the man that he firmly believes murdered his daughter. Gretchen defends Rachel from the man's verbal attacks, but Rachel is shaken. Jessica talks to her and the two decide to go get a drink, but Robert shows up and tells them some horrible news: the missing witness Maria Gomez died three years ago.
Jessica and Rachel teaming up gives me life. I love the fact that Rachel learns from Jessica, and that Jessica is conscious of her role as a mentor for Rachel. The scene where Rachel goes to Robert Zane for help was another highlight. She needs a favor from him, and says she'll owe him one. When Robert tries to insist that she's his daughter and she'll never owe him anything, Rachel pushes back: she's here not as his daughter, but as a lawyer. And Robert respects that, understanding that Rachel needs to stand on her own two feet. He promises he'll collect on that favor someday. Also, I just love to pieces the fact that this plot thread is made up almost entirely of strong black characters. You've got Rachel, Jessica, Robert Zane, Gretchen, even Leonard Bailey. It's just one of those things that you don't see enough of on TV, and I'm always happy to notice when there's a story on a TV show with a couple of white protagonists that deals exclusively with awesome black characters. I'm more and more interested in Leonard Bailey's fate, too. I'll be pretty upset if our heroes can't pull out a win.
So, I complained about Louis' date already, but there were a few things I liked. Louis is trying to come up with ideas for his date with Tara, and his first idea is to "get backstage seats to Hamilton. I love that. I mean, it's like, impossible, for starters. But also I just love it when the things that I love collide like that.
There's one other good-ish thing about the Louis plot. I still hate the way that Louis is behaving, but we do find out something interesting about Tara: she has a boyfriend, but he lives in LA for half the year, and they have an open relationship. The idea of Louis, a pig-headed selfish and entitled baby, learning to enter in to a relationship with a woman who already has a boyfriend is actually kind of wonderful. Maybe this, finally, is what helps him to grow as a person. (Although I still do not see what Tara sees in him, honestly).
In main plot news, I'm going to skim over the specifics and basically say that Harvey and Cahill continue to collude, while Mike doesn't tell Harvey what he learned about Kevin. Then, Harvey (with Louis' help, who gets help from Stu through help from Donna...) finds the man feeding inside information to Sutter, and this man can testify against him. Harvey steers this guy in Cahill's direction. The case apparently won, Harvey goes to Mike and tells him that he's getting out, since Cahill can convince the SEC that Mike played an integral role. Meanwhile, Mike tries to go to Kevin's wife to convince her and Kevin to turn on Sutter, but that doesn't fly. Mike asks Harvey to convince Cahill to cut a deal for Kevin's wife as well, because he doesn't want her going down with her father. Just as Harvey is about to ask Cahill for this last favor, Cahill breaks some terrible news: the SEC pulled Mike's deal, and there's nothing Cahill can do about it. Mike isn't getting out after all.
The details of the plot aside, the basic thing to know is that Harvey came so close to getting Mike out, and then it fell right out of his grasp. That's devastating. I love the way that everybody pitched in to help Mike. Harvey goes to Louis, who needs access to trading records, so Louis goes to Donna so that Donna can convince Stu to help out, which leads to a fresh start between Louis and Stu. This team effort thing is golden. I also think Stu is kind of awesome. He apologizes to Louis and they shake hands, willing to start over again. I think Stu is a character I could really enjoy. It helps that we got a patented Donna-is-a-bad-ass moment when she went in and steamrolled him into helping Louis help Harvey help Mike!
Kevin and Mike's relationship is so deliciously intense. I'd be pissed too if I were Kevin, and I found out that Mike had called my wife and tried to convince her to turn on her father. At the same time, though, the fact that Kevin and Jill are banking on cover-up money from Sutter so they can start their new life is pretty sketchy. Mike's freedom is contingent on Sutter getting caught, but that means the end for Kevin and Jill, and Mike genuinely does not want to see that happen. It's a tangled web, and it's hard to watch, since you can tell that Mike and Kevin do actually consider each other friends.
Harvey is getting more and more desperate. This is my favorite thing about this plot line - even as I'm getting frustrated with Mike's behavior, I'm loving the way that we're seeing Harvey's desperation grow. When he thinks that Mike's deal might be falling through earlier in the episode, he is livid with Cahill. When he realizes that Cahill has it taken care of, he's grateful beyond belief. He's made it clear time and time again that he's in this for Mike. If helping Sutter to win his case could have somehow saved Mike, I think he would have done it. As it is, colluding with Cahill is nothing to Harvey, as long as Mike gets to go free. The moment at the end, when Harvey realizes that Mike's deal has fallen through, was really hard to watch. Harvey begs Cahill to try again, and when Cahill says there's no way, Harvey looks like he's about to start crying. He'd do anything to get Mike out of there, and the fact that he failed is eating him up.
My hope is that the next few episodes can wrap up the "Mike is in prison" story-line in a way that feels satisfying from all angles. What is going to happen to Kevin and Jill, now that it seems Cahill has found a way to get Sutter? What will Harvey do now that he doesn't have Mike as a motivation to screw over his own client? Will he try and win for the sake of his firm? I've really enjoyed Cahill's character this season. The complicity between he and Harvey went beyond shared goals - I think they actually grew to respect one another. Now that everything has fallen apart, what's going to come next for the two of them? Even after a relatively unbalanced episode of Suits, I'm still excited to find out the answers to these questions.
7/10
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