Here, in its third episode, the courtroom side of this courtroom drama is more complex than it was in the first two episodes, with a stronger focus on actual legal strategy. For the first time, the case of the week serves a larger narrative function than just giving Matty an excuse to interact with witnesses and be disarmingly charming.
In fact, much to Matty’s chagrin — and despite a lot of contrary machinations — she gets stuck in court for most of this episode, ordered to serve as Olympia’s second chair on what Matty believes is an iffy wrongful-termination case. The added responsibility raises the level of tension in this week’s “Matty tries to bring down Jacobson Moore from within†story since she has to squeeze in her sleuthing between the long working hours she spends doing a job she never really wanted: arguing on behalf of a plaintiff in front of a jury. The lawyering part of working at a law firm was never a major part of Matty’s master plan.
I don’t want to gush too much about the improved quality of the trial scenes this week because we’re still not at a Good Wife/Good Fight level of moral ambiguity and real-world complexity. We’re still in a very “network TV†world when it comes to how courtrooms work, and the story’s resolution is a bit pat. But there’s some real resonance to the way the plot unfolds, which may have ramifications beyond the verdict.
So, the lawsuit. The plaintiff is a young woman named Alex Ramos (Danielle Larracuente), who was fired from her job after some poor performance reviews, attendance problems, and an accusation of sexual assault against one of her bosses, Jeremy Stone (Chad Coe). Alex says Jeremy groped her in the coat closet at the office holiday party. Jeremy says she was drunk — which she admits — and that he was helping her. HR exonerated him after a cursory investigation. After the incident, Alex tried to avoid Jeremy, but lingering trauma impacted her ability to work.
What makes this case a “stinker†— according to Matty — is that Alex is no angel. She dresses provocatively. She had a fling with someone who later became her superior at work, and they made a sex tape together (admitted into evidence!) where he role-played as a boss and she role-played as the submissive underling. Olympia explains to Matty that she took this case because Alex is “messy.†Sexual harassment, she says, demands a reckoning regardless of the target. But Matty struggles with this. Back in her day, women expected to endure a little grab-ass at work.
The case itself plays out with some dramatic twists and turns and with more of an emphasis on the legal nuts and bolts than usual. We first see how Olympia constructs an argument for the jury: eliciting testimony from Alex’s co-workers that she felt pressured to go to the holiday party and get drunk with her co-workers and that her performance issues emerged afterward. But because the jurors seem bored by Olympia — and fascinated by Matty — a jury consultant named Shae Banfield (Yael Grobglas) suggests a switch between the first and second chair.
Shae is trouble waiting to happen. Beyond forcing Matty into an uncomfortable role, Shae has a reputation as “a human lie detector†who can tell right away when someone is hiding something — like, you know, a certain Madeline Kingston who is pretending to be Madeline Matlock. Fortunately, Matty has a reasonable explanation for her squirminess when Shae confronts her about it: She just hates Alex’s case.
This brings us to the patness I mentioned above. Matty’s ultimate change of heart is simplistic. She reflects more deeply on her own work experiences and suddenly realizes that ignoring all the handsy jerks in her old law firm — in particular, one “guy named Greg†— meant curtailing her career plans. She says all this to the jury and gets through to them. (It also helps that Matty lays a trap for Jeremy during her questioning and gets his previous sexual assault on the record.) The jury awards Alex $9 million, prompting Matty and Olympia to find a private place in the courthouse to do a dance of joy — though Olympia quickly reminds her that they are not friends, just “colleagues who occasionally dance.â€
While the conclusion is tidy, the steps that get us there are much rockier — giving the actors a lot more to work with. We see the mock trial Matty endures, with Olympia, Julian, and Elijah prepping her for court by criticizing every imprecisely worded question. We hear Olympia admit to Matty that the only reason she’s been given so much responsibility on this case is because Olympia didn’t want the jurors to think she was being mean to the sweet little old white lady. In a clever montage that leads into Matty’s closing statement, we get an idea of how she sees the world of modern young people, where the women are flirting constantly while wearing revealing clothing. Matty Matlock’s whole shtick is being a down-to-earth old person who rolls her eyes at the youths. It’s not entirely an act.
In terms of Matlock’s main ongoing story, all of this just reemphasizes how hard it will be for Matty to execute her whole undercover operation without becoming close to her targets. But it sure is fun to watch her try. This week, she only has a narrow window to be sneaky, to make use of the cell-phone passcode she and her grandson Alfie nabbed from Olympia in last week’s episode. She tricks the judge on the Ramos case into banning cell phones from the courtroom, then uses Olympia’s left-behind phone to unlock her laptop, which she then swaps out with a dummy so that she can take the computer home to Alfie.
The episode ends before Matty and Alfie can extract any dirt from the purloined computer. All they’ve found so far — in a special file, not saved to the company’s cloud server — is an old voice message from Olympia’s late father, using the same words of encouragement that Olympia gave Matty before her closing statement. (“Don’t just give ’em hell, give ’em the damn heavens, limbo, and everything in between.â€) It pulls Matty up short for a moment, wondering if she’s trying to take down a good person.
But she quickly regains her chill and remembers some other words Olympia said to her. The episode ends with her coldly muttering, “We’re not friends.â€
Hot Doggin’
• Julian calls Shae “the Meerkat,†but no one else does because, Olympia says, Julian’s nicknames “don’t stick.†That could be a good thing, given that he’s taken to calling Elijah “Big E,†apparently not hearing how much it sounds like “Biggie.â€
• Speaking of Julian and Shae, he pitches her services to Olympia by saying, “She owes the firm pro bono hours.†But Shae later confesses to Olympia that Julian paid her full fee. There’s apparently some history between these three, stemming in part from Olympia blocking Shae from joining the firm years ago. (I suspect we haven’t seen the last of this character, given that Grobglas is a Jennie Snyder Urman fave, dating back to her superb series-long supporting performance in Jane the Virgin.)
• When Billy worries that he’s being overshadowed in Olympia’s eyes by Sarah’s Googling skills, Matty says to him, “Research is her thing. We all have our thing.†It turns out that Billy’s thing — or at least one of his things — is that his mom and sister are cops, who help him confirm that Jeremy had been busted before for sexual assault. But Matty also thinks Billy should be proud that he got a job at one of New York’s top firms after attending City College, not Harvard. She sees humility as an advantage.
• Conversely, a lack of humility may be stymieing Sarah, who is hyper-attuned to the varying levels of Olympia’s praise. This week, she’s certain Olympia is mad at her, and when she tries to smooth things over by confessing to various mistakes, her boss lets her know her real problem: She’s too much of a careerist to be trusted.