Your Honor 2.1: Scorching

Your Honor returned for its second and final season on Showtime yesterday, and it was about as brutal, wrenching, and ugly as it comes.  Even more so than the first season?  Yeah, especially with the judge being force-fed in prison.

[Probably some spoilers ahead ... ]

One thing I didn't particularly like was the jumping between the future (when the judge is in prison) and the present, which picks up right where season one left off.  The jumping makes the searing story, already complex and multi-faceted, a little difficult to follow.

But that said, both stories, of course interconnected, are riveting.  Rosie Perez plays a new character, Detective Delmont, who gets Desiato out of prison in return for his cooperation in her attempt to put Jimmy Baxter behind bars.  As we increasingly saw in season one, it's Baxter's wife Gina who is truest villain in this story.  Hope Davis as Gina and Michael Stuhlbarg as Jimmy are excellent, as they were last year.

In the part of the story that is close to the present, it was good to see Eugene escape, even though I of course hate what he did to Adam.  But that was an accident.  The interaction among the various members of that rival crime family is an important counterpart and contributor to the battle between the judge and the Baxters.

But Eugene escaping is not quite the biggest surprise in this first episode of the second season.  That would be Fia being pregnant with Adam's baby.  This of course means that when this second season concludes, the Desiastos and the Baxters will be literally bound together, in the best way possible.  Given the deep grim gravity of this story, the smile of a baby would be much welcome.

See also Your Honor 1.1: Taut Set-Up ... Your Honor 1.2: "Today Is Yesterday" ... Your Honor 1.3: The Weak Link ... Your Honor 1.4: The Dinner ... Your Honor 1.5: The Vice Tightens ... Your Honor 1.6: Exquisite Chess Game ...Your Honor 1.7: Cranston and Stuhlbarg Approaching Pacino and De Niro ... Your Honor 1.8: Nothing More Important ... Your Honor 1.9: Screeching Up to the Last Stop Before Next Week's Finale ... Your Honor 1.10: Final Irony

Your Honor 1.8: Nothing More Important

Your Honor 1.8 was a relatively quiet, highly cerebral episode, in which we see the judge struggle to preside over a fair trial for the brutal murder of Kobe by Carlo.   His problem, as he states to a juror he's getting thrown off the jury, because she's a sure bet to convict Carlo, is nothing is more important than protecting his son Adam -- not conscience, not devotion to justice, not even plain decency.   Although Jimmy Baxter thinks Judge Michael Desiato killed Rocco, Michael knows that it won't be long until Baxter realizes that Adam was behind the wheel.   (Frankly, the best thing Michael can do to protect himself and Adam is to have Jimmy Baxter and his wife killed.  Surely Michael knows that Jimmy will kill him even if Michael keeps Carlo out of prison.)

Meanwhile, Adam is falling so hard for Fia Baxter that he no longer wants to go to NYU, where he's just been admitted.  This creates more potential problems for the judge.  He wants his son out of of New Orleans, as far away from the Baxter family as possible.  Fortunately, Adam's godfather Charlie is beginning to realize what's going on with Adam -- that there's a girlfriend involved -- which with any luck should help Adam and therefore Michael out of this part of the mess.

A word about the acting.  I already said how superb Bryan Cranston and Michael Stuhlbarg are.  The truth is that every single performance of every single actor is brilliant in this series.  Episode 1.8 features Maura Tierney in the courtroom as prosecutor.   What a performance!  I haven't seen her since The Affair, and she is as reliably memorable in her role as ever.

Episode 1.8 was also the first episode that acknowledged COVID-19, unless I missed it in an earlier hour.  But tonight saw some masks in the courtroom, and words about COVID from the bench.  Interestingly, though, we also saw people crowded in restaurants with no masks.  This corresponds to what we've seen in NBC's Chicago shows, and Law and Order in New York City.  The inconsistency almost suggests that the COVID-aware scenes were put in after the main action was recorded at an earlier time.

But back to the plot of Your Honor: just two episodes left, in which anything can happen, and which I'm very much awaiting.

See also Your Honor 1.1: Taut Set-Up ... Your Honor 1.2: "Today Is Yesterday" ... Your Honor 1.3: The Weak Link ... Your Honor 1.4: The Dinner ... Your Honor 1.5: The Vice Tightens ... Your Honor 1.6: Exquisite Chess Game ...Your Honor 1.7: Cranston and Stuhlbarg Approaching Pacino and De Niro

Your Honor 1.7: Cranston and Stuhlbarg Approaching Pacino and De Niro

Let me start off my review of Your Honor 1.7 by saying the scenes between Cranston and Stuhlbarg -- the Judge and the mobster -- were so good, they could have been between Pacino and De Niro.  Two outstanding actors acting their hearts and souls out in this one-of-a-kind drama, playing two fathers, one who wants at all costs to protect his son, the other wanting both revenge for the son who died and protection for the one who has just been arrested for murder.

The Judge again shows himself adept and quick-witted when the situation calls for it.  Why didn't you turn yourself in, Baxter asks the Judge.  I was going to, I was at the police station, the Judge replies, and then I saw you.  The best lies are the ones closest to the truth in these one-on-one situations, and the Judge was indeed in that police station, ready to bring in his son Adam.

I don't get Baxter's strategy in another scene, though,  Why not give Big Mo her $150,000 back?  Why say she has to eat it, and risk a war, right when he's trying to get his son Carlo out of justice's way, and get back to making the Judge pay?  He doesn't want to appear weak, I know, but he's not as smart as any of the lead mobsters in the Godfather or Goodfellas.

Adam, however, is as sharp as his father.   He doesn't believe the Judge's story.  He wisely has not told him that he and Fia are falling in love, and you know that's going to have a decisive role in how this brilliant series ends.  The Judge is a master strategist.  He managed to get Sarah off the Carlo case by feeding her single malts in the bar.  But he can't control everything, and it's still an open question of who will be left alive, who will be left out of prison, when this series concludes.

I'm very glad there are three more episodes.

See also Your Honor 1.1: Taut Set-Up ... Your Honor 1.2: "Today Is Yesterday" ... Your Honor 1.3: The Weak Link ... Your Honor 1.4: The Dinner ... Your Honor 1.5: The Vice Tightens ... Your Honor 1.6: Exquisite Chess Game

Your Honor 1.1: Taut Set-up

Your Honor debuted on Showtime on Sunday, with about as tight a set up as you're likely to find in a limited (ten-episode) cable TV series.

Here's what that is: Bryan Cranston plays a tough judge in New Orleans, a widower, with an asthmatic teenage son who goes off to lay a wreath at the site of his mother's death a year earlier.  He's upset, takes his eyes off the road to get his inhaler, and hits another teenage boy riding on the new motorcycle his parents bought him for his birthday.   Adam Desiato (the judge's son) tries unsuccessfully to revive the motorcyclist.  He leaves without calling the police, tells his father (Judge Michael Desiato) what happened, and the judge decides the best thing to do is to bring his son into the police.   Until the judge discovers that the slain boy is the son of one of the most vicious mobsters in the ward (or whatever exactly they call boroughs in the New Orleans).  Not only that, but this boy's father is played by Michael  Stuhlbarg.

So, we not only have a confrontation of good vs. evil -- or maybe, morally ambiguous vs. evil -- but the two sides are portrayed by two powerful actors.  Hunter Doohan as Adam is impressive too, as is just about everyone who opens their mouth in this taut, provocative start of a story.  The best kinds of conflicts, from a narrative standpoint, are those in which the two sides are evenly matched in terms of passion and justification for their position.   The judge wants to save his son.  The mobster wants to avenge his son.  Both are determined their goal will be achieved.  Nothing will stand in the way of either.

In one sense, Jimmy Baxter the mobster has the upper hand.  He's already a killer, and accustomed in the ways of doing this.   In contrast, His Honor, Judge Desiato, is used to following and interpreting the law.  But he'll do anything to save his son, and that no doubt is exactly what he'll have to do.

An excellent set-up, as I said, and I'll be back here next week a report on how it goes.

 

Traitors: Britain in the Middle

I streamed the first season (six episodes) of Traitors (2019) on Netflix last night.  The territory has been often and well mined - Britain right after World War II, struggling with Soviet infestation of secret services in London, American sense of entitlement to the point of bullying the Brits, and the shift from the conservative Torys to the leftist Labor Party in power.   Probably the best of these shows was Michael Kitchen's long running (2002-2015) Foyle's War.  Traitors is the best I've seen of a new kind of rendition of this story, probably truer to actual history, with far more violence and deaths at hand, in expected and unexpected places.

Emma Appleton does a great job as Feef Symonds, "A British civil servant [who] agrees to spy on her own government for the Americans in the aftermath of WWII".  She's in bed and in love with an American officer (married) and recruited by his boss, ruthless spy-master Rowe, who couldn't be better played by Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire).   Actually, he's not quite yet a spy-master.  His goal is to create from the wartime American OSS the CIA, with eyes and ears everywhere in the world, to report on and deal with the burgeoning Soviet menace, which he sees as the main threat to democracy with the Nazis now vanquished.

He's not wrong.  In both real history and Traitors, Soviet sympathizers and out-right spies already abound in British government - e.g., Kim Darby - and don't hesitate to mete out death to not just enemies but inconveniences.  Rowe is pretty much the same, and this tension between two cunning and brutal adversaries, with Britain and thus Feef in the middle, is the platform, ambience, and essence of Traitors.

The narrative is animated by current events, ranging from Truman dropping the A-bomb, to the British midwifing the state of Israel, and they're all shown with the familiar British bristling to American arrogance, which often comes from the mouth of Rowe.  The dialogue is sharp and funny when it needs to be.  Even the secondary characters are memorable (especially good work by Keeley Hawes), and when you catch your breath after the last episode you'll be glad if not happy you saw this.