Over the clunky first two episodes of the new season, Your Honor has been groaning through the difficult work of redefining itself as a show, in addition to the more standard work of weaving the previous season’s plot threads into a narrative arc for this one. It cannot be about a good judge’s fall from grace any longer. So instead, it’s a New Orleans crime show, with warring gangsters, corrupt public officials, and the (relatively) innocent people caught up in their machinations. The third episode makes solid progress for the series in setting compelling new terms for itself. And it does so, in part, with a powerful reminder of where this byzantine drama started.
The most important scene in “Part Thirteen†comes toward the end when Michael is alone having a drink at the Baxters’ hotel bar, and Jimmy comes down to join him. Jimmy is in a hostile mood for many reasons unrelated to Michael, but he’s undoubtedly wondering how the former judge got out of prison so fast and why he’s been talking to his daughter, Fia. But Jimmy is not inclined to express his fury in a public space — he has to appear like a respectable leader of the community, lest someone voice concerns about a gangster buying up acres of valuable public land — and so he listens patiently to the man whose son killed his boy and keep the threats below a whisper. And he ends up landing on a key insight about Michael that suggests he has a future recapping Your Honor episodes.
While sipping and sulking at the bar, Michael reflects on his original sin, when he drove Adam to the police station, intending to do the right thing, and turned back when he realized that his son had killed a member of the Baxter family. He wonders what would have happened had he come forward as planned and told the truth, and Jimmy mocks offense at the question. “This was an accident,†says Jimmy. “If you and Adam had come to me with honesty and contrition, how could I have responded with violence?†We learn shortly after that Jimmy is telling a lie here — “I would have killed [Adam] with my own hands,†he says to his goon — but he has an interesting read on Michael’s true motives. In his view, Michael didn’t leave the police station because he was afraid for his son’s life. He left because this gave him an excuse to do what he wanted: cover up the incident and make it go away.
Though it’s in character for Jimmy to admit afterward that he would have killed Adam, it lets Michael off the moral hook, which somewhat undermines the scene’s effectiveness. After all, this would not be the first time that a privileged person has used his power and influence to maintain his social station, and Michael has proven himself to be corruptible under the right circumstances, despite his reputation for dispensing justice. Then again, he would have never driven Adam to the police station if his first instinct was to cover up the hit-and-run. He seemed to have every intention to follow through on turning Adam over to the authorities until spotting the Baxters in the hallway. That’s not the same as, say, a bond trader covering for his mistress’s hit-and-run in The Bonfire of the Vanities.
But now, Michael is unquestionably at the bottom of the hill, having lost his integrity along with his only son. The episode opens with him mumbling “no, no, no†to no one on the streets because now he has a grandson and thus a reason to continue a life that he’s ruined. “Inch by inch, I will get you where you need to go,†assures his new handler, Olivia Delmont, who’s roped him into the extremely unpromising mission to take down the Baxter family — and perhaps a string of other East Coast mob operations in the process. She is laying out a path to redemption that he can’t quite see yet, but going after the Baxters surely speaks to his self-destructive mood right now.
The good news is that the Baxters themselves are in disarray. Fia still lives out of the hotel with little Rocco, and she’s currently at loggerheads with her mother about baptizing the baby. Fia is a nonbeliever, but Gina must know that “one day, both Roccos will be together.†She also tells a loaded story about breastfeeding that Hope Davis turns into a meal, as she’s done all season: “I could never get you to latch on properly. Carlo and Rocco? No problem. But you, every feeding was a battle. And I thought it was my fault, but it wasn’t. We do the best we can.†Fia isn’t having her mother’s sour milk as an adult, either, though Michael, of all people, suggests to her that some battles aren’t worth fighting. There may be more important ones for both of them ahead.
Mom and dad aren’t getting along, either. Jimmy sees himself as an empire-builder, eager to bestow legitimacy on the Baxter name by offering the Crescent City a waterside complex with a gentrifier’s bounty of retail, residential, and entertainment options, including a casino, high-end stores, luxury condos, and a theater space. This means greasing the wheels with the new mayor and keeping his dispute with Big Mo on the back burner. Gina prefers the stick to the carrot. She wants action on the Eugene matter now, and she wants to show the mayor that refusing to hand over no-bid contracts to the family will have ugly consequences. Jimmy and Gina get into a physical altercation, but Gina doesn’t bow to her husband’s brute strength. She understands him as weak and will continue to twist his arm.
One point in Gina’s favor: She knows that the mayor helping to force the nightclub sale to Big Mo for a piece of the Quarter makes him look like a hypocrite. He cannot be high-minded about one criminal organization while also doing favors for another. And so out comes the stick: The Baxters enter a higher bid on the club, forcing Big Mo to call back the massive bag full of cash that Little Mo took to get supply from a new distributor. That deal was always going to go bad, but by the time Big Mo makes the call, Little Mo and his buddy Trey have been arrested, and Eugene is all alone with the money, not taking any calls.
Your Honor is not the show it was in the first season, but the labor of patching together a second is finally starting to pay off in the plotting. Consider it a spinoff.
Beignets
• Should “The Baxter District†ever get built, Jimmy will have to mend fences with Fia, but Carlo is a henchman type, like a dumber version of James Caan in The Godfather.
• The episode makes a big deal of Little Mo scanning the papers for the nightclub and then telling Big Mo’s estranged sister about it. None of that seems accidental, especially now that Eugene has the cash.
• Olivia hasn’t deployed Michael in any official capacity, but he nonetheless sows chaos within the Baxter family by mentioning the name “Henry Hook†to Carlo when they have a confrontation in the park. An internet search tells Carlo that double jeopardy on a murder case didn’t apply when it was revealed that the judge was bought. And now Carlo has questions about whether his self-defense argument was really as persuasive as it seemed.
• The good news for the nightclub owner? He’s got two high bids for his business. The bad news? Whoever doesn’t get it will kill him.