Author Kim Moritsugu's Blog. Once About Food, Now About TV Recaps.

In which Harvey becomes everyone’s attorney, Jessica helps Rachel not give up on fighting injustice, and people lie like mad to get other people to trust them.

I blanked out from boredom with legal matters during some conversations between Sean Cahill and Harvey about the smoking gun deal, but I think what’s happening is this:

Mike’s prison cellmate Kevin Miller is the son-in-law of William Sutter, the investment fund guy who is soon to be indicted by Cahill. Harvey thinks Sutter is a dirty criminal, which is why he refused to represent him when Sutter asked a few weeks ago. However, Sutter craftily got Kevin to protect Mike in jail as a way to make Harvey owe him.

Cahill’s deal is still in place to have Mike freed if he can get Kevin to cough up some damning info that will ensure Sutter’s conviction. But for reasons I didn’t quite follow, that plan will only work if Harvey represents both Sutter and Kevin, and defends them to the best of his ability while secretly hoping Mike finds out something from Kevin that will convict Sutter. Otherwise, it will look like Harvey and Cahill colluded, though they’re not colluding! To make the complicated plan more credible, Harvey tells Kevin not to trust anyone in prison, including Mike.

Kevin gets suspicious when he finds out Mike wasn’t in the infirmary the night he got sprung by Harvey to go see Rachel. To allay those suspicions, Mike arranges via Julius the prison counselor to be put in solitary for a night where he meets the warden, who warns him in passing that informing doesn’t always go so well for the informant. The warden then fake-threatens Kevin, so that Kevin will think Mike is trustworthy again.

This ploy makes Kevin open up enough to finally tell Mike why he is in prison (though why couldn’t Harvey or Cahill just tell Mike this?) which is for drunk driving that almost killed someone. Sharp-minded Mike sees immediately that Kevin’s story doesn’t add up – he asks what Kevin was fighting about with his wife before he drove drunk, and why must he keep quiet about his crime to protect his family, but Kevin has confided enough for one day.

On the Gallo threat front, Mike’s attempt to file a motion to get Gallo paroled didn’t work, it has to be done in person by an attorney of record (which Mike would totally have known, come on now), so Harvey has to represent Gallo too. A rather swaggery-of-late Harvey tells Gallo he’ll help him out if Gallo protects Mike in jail, and if he doesn’t want to do that, Harvey will claim Gallo poisoned Mike and have him charged with that crime. Gallo’s not happy, but has no choice but to agree. That’s 3 new criminal clients Harvey has picked up in a week, and at least one of them will pay the firm some legal fees, hurray.

In lighter news, Louis asks Donna to find him a Hamptons house to buy ASAP so he can get Tara the comely architect to remodel it for him. Donna suggests, reasonably, that Louis not lie about having a house, and ask Tara out instead. But he can’t do that, because he is a sad sack, lonely heart fuckup. He is also impatient, and when Donna doesn’t find him a house right away, he gets mad, and she gets mad back. She tells him he can’t ask for her help and advice then ignore it, and he admits how much he misses having her work for him.  All is well when she finds what appears to be a perfect-for-his-needs Hamptons house and and makes an offer for it on his behalf (!) because Presumption is her middle name.

The professor who got Rachel involved in the Innocence Project says Leonard Bailey’s case doesn’t qualify after all because there is no new DNA evidence, so the 3 solid reasons Rachel came up with for an appeal don’t matter. The prof offers to find Rachel a new case, but she wants to work on this one, and turn that frown on Bailey’s mighty disappointed so-now-I-get-to-die? face upside-down She asks Jessica if the firm could do it pro bono, she’d only need one hour of supervision a week. Jessica says no at first because she’s too busy trying to get the firm back on top. Later, after a discouraging day of trying and failing to find new clients (should have tried the prison, Jessica!), the two women have a sleeveless shootout in the hallway of their office building, and Jessica agrees to help out.

Somewhere in there, Harvey needed loose-ethics Stu and his merry band of traders to take on Sutter’s two billion dollar investment fund as a subsidiary company (yeah, right) in order to bypass the punitive move that Cahill slapped Sutter with of suspending his company’s trading license. Louis and Jessica pitch in on this endeavour by Louis coming up with the subsidiary idea, and Jessicca making Stu agree to it.  Go, team!

I’ll close with props (heh) to Neal McDonough, the Irish-named actor who plays the Irish-named Sean Cahill character, for his way with actual props on the Suits sets. In the last few episodes, he has managed to handle all of a baseball, a basketball, and an LP in Harvey’s office, and had fun with a sandwich and some potato chips in his own. Here he enjoys a scotch in Harvey’s office, after they decide they make a good couple of adversaries/allies who are totally not colluding.

Kim Moritsugu is a Toronto novelist and sometime TV show recapper whose latest novel is a suburban comedy of manners called The Oakdale Dinner Club.