Todd Williams shows up for the first scene—he’s top-billed Simone Missick’s husband who’s been MIA most episodes—and gets her off to work. They still don’t have much chemistry together. Even if Missick and Wilson Bethel don’t have romantic chemistry together, they’ve got something. Missick and Williams haven’t got anything. They’re kind of ludicrously mismatched. Sure, the show hasn’t hit the guest star casting peaks of the pilot but it hasn’t been bad. Williams isn’t bad, but he’s not an inspired choice.
And him being an FBI agent is just kind of weird. Especially given how willing the show is to get “political,” but apparently the FBI is above reproach. It’s very weird.
The episode does near that inspired guest star casting—not in terms of name or experience, but quality—with defendant Jacob Gibson. He’s the college-going young Black man who still hangs out with his… urban friends and one of them killed someone then had Gibson drive away. The big deal of the first half of the episode is when judge Missick agrees to take the jury to the crime scene. Field trip! Only then there’s an active shooter situation and Missick’s got to worry about whether she prejudiced them because they’re worried it’s Gibson’s friends who were trying to intimidate the jury. Jessica Camacho’s Gibson’s lawyer so of course she’s worrying about it too. Suzanne Cryer’s the shockingly obviously racist district attorney who wants to humiliate Gibson before his conviction. It’s tense stuff, even pasteurized into CBS appropriate milk.
You can tell it doesn’t work right because J. Alex Brinson is hanging around Camacho and Gibson the whole time but he doesn’t actually get to reflect on how white people treat Black men they suspect of being dangerous, even though the episode opens with a “previously on” recapping bailiff Brinson getting cuffed up by the white sheriff deputies.
Meanwhile Bethel’s going up against previously established not corrupt but dirty cop Erin Cummings. He’s suspicious of her evidence and does a full investigation; strangely the show doesn’t bring up Cummings’s “support me because I’m a woman” thing she tried using on Missick a few episodes ago, which might not be standards and practices but the show just showing its lack of self-awareness. But Richard Brooks is back for a scene and it’s awesome to have Brooks back for a scene. It gives Bethel a lot to do and he’s great at it but you’re still sitting there thinking… that’s Bullseye, he can do a lot more.
At least the episode ends on a reassuring montage sequence and not another “let’s work together” speech from Brinson. And he and Camacho are getting cute together. It’s hard to see Brinson as cute, given he’s son of a bitch abusive cop husband Jeff from “Travelers” but it’s starting to work.
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