Presumed Innocent Season-Finale Recap: It’s Not About the Truth
After all the twists and turns, I have to admit: They got me.
In my recap for Presumed Innocent’s first episode, I wrote that legal thrillers tend to center on one of two kinds of lawyers: the idealistic and the disillusioned. As an example of the latter, I brought up Paul Newman’s Frank Galvin, the protagonist of the 1982 movie from which “The Verdict” takes its title. At the end of that movie, Galvin — who does ultimately win the case — delivers a stirring speech to the jury. Having had his most damning evidence ruled as inadmissible, he appeals to the jury’s personal sense of honor. He looks at them pleadingly and argues, “If we are to have faith in justice, we need only believe in ourselves and act with justice.”
Though nothing about Rusty Sabich comes close to the inherent dependability telegraphed by Galvin, alcoholism and all, we have to admit he does a compelling job making the exact same point in his closing argument. After discussing whether or not Barbara should testify in Rusty’s defense (a pretty sturdy no from Mya, whose counsel is finally taken seriously once Raymond is back in the room), Rusty announces he will deliver the summation as the defense team prepares to rest their case. At first, no one thinks it’s a good idea — we saw what destruction Rusty is capable of if left to his own devices in the courtroom during his cross-examination of Michael, perhaps his most deranged moment — but ultimately, because he always gets what he wants no matter how he has behaved, they let him do it.
Unlike Rusty, Tommy, or Nico, I am able to access humility, so I will be the first to admit that his closing argument absolutely smoked Tommy’s. Galvin and Rusty are both right that, when push comes to shove, whatever was presented or left out of the courtroom, true condemning power lies with the jury to act according to their human instinct; to draw the kind of judgment that is free of personal bias but filled with the compassion necessary to determine what is just. Though there is not much else that he can understand, this much, at least, Rusty knows. He admits to the jury that the damage he has done to his family is likely irreparable; he admits to his wrongdoings and the fact that he looks guilty, even if he isn’t. As he speaks to the audience, his voice breaks, the music swells, and the camera unnecessarily hikes up to his face. It’s a great argument and a rare moment of humanity and truth from Rusty; they should have just let it ride. By the time he points out that Tommy Molto is a politician with a burden to satisfy the public and a personal, irrational vendetta against Rusty, I am on his side, wishing to swat away the violin’s annoying sound.
Tommy, by comparison, seems erratic. He’s been going through a lot since the fire poker materialized in his kitchen; when “The Verdict” opens, he clutches his cat and tells the truth when Nico asks if he’s okay. “No,” he replies as he takes the cat upstairs. Later, in a meeting with Judge Lyttle in which all attorneys are trying to figure out just what to do with the fire poker, scrubbed clean of any DNA or fingerprints and therefore useless as a piece of evidence, Tommy admits that he routinely leaves the side door of his house unlocked so that his neighbor can check in on his cat while he is away catching bad guys and avenging his own pettiness. He bounces back the next day at trial, though; when Raymond brings in another medical expert witness to testify that Carolyn’s stomach was empty at the time of death (miscalculated by Kumagai), Tommy counter-argues that since she only ever works as a defense witness, it is impossible to trust any opinion she has to offer at all. Touché. He should have kept to bulletproof logic until the end.
When the time comes for Tommy to rest his own case, he’s become that petulant child again. But Rusty was there the night of the murder! His fingerprints were all over her house! They were having an affair! After Rusty’s speech, there is nothing he can say. No amount of charm that can be elicited from his quite endearing use of a bolo tie can undo the undeniable fact that he hasn’t proved Rusty’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and that those are the bare minimum standards by which to convict a person to spend the rest of their lives in jail. Tommy’s voice rises repeatedly; he points at Rusty wildly; he accuses him of being a murderer, as simply and as directly as Rusty waved his own crooked finger around when he made the regrettable decision to represent himself while Raymond was away recovering.
This big chunk of the episode, before the two big reveals — the verdict and the killer — is mercifully free of flashbacks, dreams, and interjections. Apart from a few memories of Carolyn in bed, the place she is wont to live forevermore in Rusty’s imagination, we stick to the chronological timeline of the trial. By the time Eugenia comes into Tommy’s office to announce the jury has come to a verdict, the narrative has picked up a propulsive momentum. They even spare us much suspense as the clerk reads from the jury’s newly opened envelope: in the case of the People of the State of Illinois vs. Rozat K. Sabich, the jury finds the defendant not guilty. Cheers and cries erupt in the courtroom. I can’t figure out who is cheering for the life of me. Apart from his family, his defense team, and maybe Rigo and Eugenia, who have seemed pretty on the fence about Rusty’s innocence, we never knew anyone was rooting for his acquittal. The press seemed out to get him, as did every other character that spoke more than even one line in this show. But never mind. Rusty is innocent! Everyone is smiling but him!
Rusty speaks briefly to the press and dunks one more time on Tommy for good measure. Next, we see him in his bedroom wearing a crewneck sweatshirt similar to the one worn by Harrison Ford’s Rusty in the movie adaptation, a sign — or, more accurately, a red herring — that the show will acknowledge the source material’s outcome. In his room, he sees a packed suitcase and goes to look for Barbara, who is taking a turn stress-exercising now that it has dawned on her that the downside of Rusty being found innocent is that she will continue to have to deal with him on a daily basis. Rusty is still wearing the stoic expression with which he welcomed the news of his freedom: it becomes clear that something is eating at him.
For the sake of readers who haven’t seen or don’t remember the movie, let’s quickly go over what happens after Rusty is found innocent. He goes back to his idyllic home life, and after doing some work on his literal white picket fence, he finds the murder weapon, still smudged with blood and remaining pieces of hair, in his basement. This is when Barbara reveals that she killed Carolyn in a calculated, ruthless act of passion and rage. It’s a good twist — you never see it coming — but it’s also frustrating. I don’t always find satisfaction in the kind of conniving that it takes to spend the entire narrative pointing the audience one way just so you can pounce from the other; I like it when characters surprise me with the depths of their motivations rather than obscuring them as a way to manufacture my shock. It’s an ending of its era for sure. Just like Beth’s murder of Alex in Fatal Attraction, Barbara’s rageful act has an ideological undercurrent: The family unit must thrive over the selfish career bitch.
As a show, Presumed Innocent was uniquely positioned to challenge that conclusion. In a way, it did. When Rusty finds Barbara on the stationary bike in the garage, he assumes Tommy’s condescending tone to accuse his own wife of murder. That fateful night, Rusty went back to Carolyn’s for reasons that remain mysterious, and upon entering, he found her body already bludgeoned and cold on the floor. Somehow intuiting that his wife was behind the murder, he tied up Carolyn’s body to look like Bunny Davis’s — this is some truly perverted acuity. How he thought up the whole thing — pretty much framing Reynolds or anyone who might have come into contact with that case — so fast and in such shocking circumstances, as well as the ease with which he admits that “false confessions are easy to extract, we do it all the time,” can only be explained by his undeniable sociopathic tendencies (I’ll give Tommy that one).
Looking Barbara in the eye and accusing her of killing Carolyn with the same arbitrary confidence shown by Tommy in the courtroom, Rusty rehashes his nemesis’s talking points, now redirected at his wronged and irreparably messed up wife: She wasn’t herself when she did it. She just snapped (can you believe this?). And he, ever the hero, stepped up when he had to in order to protect his family; to protect her. Somehow, after all this poor woman has been through, Rusty finds a way to make himself look like the venerable hero, deserving of forgiveness and gratitude. This sick and twisted move has a name in our current moment: It’s called gaslighting.
Barbara, reasonably, looks like she is actually about to explode under the weight of this accusation. As she gasps for breath and Rusty looks at her with a maddeningly forthright expression, Jaden walks in. “It was me,” she says, straight up. She admits, first, to having planted the fire poker in Tommy’s house after Rusty’s testimony, afraid that her father had incriminated himself beyond repair. Why, exactly, it seemed like planting that poker there would have helped his case is knowledge that Jaden will take to her grave. The droning music (thankfully) halts. Finally, the only flashback sequence I cared to see all along: the actual truth of what went on that night. The whole thing is cut with close-ups of Barbara’s desperate reaction, which are hard to watch.
Jaden went over to Carolyn’s to confront her. She asked Carolyn to quit her job and stay away from her family, and Carolyn reassured her that she would stay away, though their lives would remain “intertwined a little” since she was pregnant with Rusty’s child. We don’t know Carolyn very well — she is foremost a sexual fantasy in every version of this story that has ever existed — so it’s impossible to say what compelled her to be so cruel. I find it hard to believe she would’ve said this to Jaden. For what reason, apart from being truly vile, which I guess maybe she was, would she disclose this information to Rusty’s teenage daughter, a girl who is suffering from the consequences of mistakes that have absolutely nothing to do with her, before she disclosed it to him? In a split second, Jaden decided to one-up Carolyn’s cruelty and bonked her in the head repeatedly with the fire poker. The next day, she scrubbed the car clean and buried the murder weapon — the rest, as they say, is history.
“Listen to me,” Rusty says, “We will never speak of this again.” Just as quickly as he provided Barbara with a motive for murder, he comes up with one for his own daughter: “This is something that came out of you in the form of self defense, in defense of this family. It was put in motion by me. This is my doing. We will survive as a family, okay?” In that sense, Presumed Innocent’s original underlying message — that the traditional family unit must isolate and protect itself from the threat of “unconventionality” and passion — remains present, killer swap and all. The show gets away with slightly more nuance as the episode closes on the intact family at Thanksgiving, laughing and passing turkey and mashed potatoes at the table like any other all-American household. The implication is that darkness lurks beneath apple-pie suburbia.
But even then, I have to admit I’m not totally satisfied. It still feels like the reveal intends to shock the audience more than to emerge from robust character development. That said, there is no such character development to speak of apart from Rusty’s and maybe Barbara’s. The show tries to break free of the source material’s manipulative twist and ends up writing itself into a corner: The only people plausibly capable of committing the murder are the obvious, trite choices. In my recap for last week’s episode, I posited the opposite theory: Because Kyle had pretty much stayed a mystery to the audience, if he turned out to be a murderer we would be shocked but not that surprised. I am surprised that Jaden turned out to be the killer; once again, it’s a good twist. We could feel the scope and depth of her suffering as she tried to come to terms with the disaster plaguing her family’s life, all testament to Chase Infiniti’s deft performance. A courtroom drama operates somewhat like a sports match: The defense and prosecution teams are looking to score points against each other. Even Tommy puts it in those terms. “He beat me,” he tells Nico as his friend urges him to move on from this one defeat. However, there is another, higher level of competition in the legal-thriller industry. The story’s actors, writers, producers, and directors aim to outscore the audience, our theories and instincts. And regardless of how artfully it was done, I will say this: They got me.
Addendum
• We might know who killed Carolyn, but I still left the finale with a series of lingering questions. What happened to Dr. Rush and her pack of cigarettes? What about Kyle’s bicycle, which Rusty hid away in the trunk of his car? What about the photograph, anyway, which we never saw again? And Rusty’s Ritalin addiction? Did Clifton ever text Barbara again? What about Ratzer? Did he ever know anything? And whatever happened to Rigo?
• In this episode, we learn that Raymond is from Maine, a totally inconsequential detail that I nevertheless found delightful.
• Speaking of Raymond, I was struck in this episode by how many times Rusty calls him his “best friend.” Before Rusty delivers his summation, Lorraine encourages Raymond to withdraw from the case altogether, which he refuses to do. But I was left wondering if Rusty and Raymond’s friendship could survive this trial. All’s well that ends well, I guess, but I recognize the mad glint in the eye of a woman determined to ruin a friendship forever.
• Shortly after agreeing that they will leave the fire poker out of the trial, Rusty keeps bringing up “Caldwell,” which drove me kind of crazy. Of course, he means Michael Caldwell, Carolyn’s son, but why suddenly start calling him, a teenager, by his last name? Just felt weird, like he was doing a messed-up impression of the crazed principal in The Breakfast Club.
• We get one last, short snippet of insight into Tommy Molto’s elusive inner life in the form of a question from Nico. Right before the verdict comes out, Nico asks: “How much did you love her? Really?” Tommy rolls his eyes but doesn’t answer.
• Many readers brought up the fact that Presumed Innocent’s confirmed second season is likely to follow an anthology style, with a new case, new attorneys, and hopefully more freaks. But I would be happy to follow Raymond and Lorraine in their retirement journey, perhaps even on a trip to Florida … murder on a cruise ship? I’d watch it.