Harm Reduction
Season 2
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS
Let us now sing the praises of TV casting directors, who at their best know how to add just the right notes — sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant — to an already tight ensemble. Justina Machado has worked with Matlock creator Jennie Snyder Urman before, on Urman’s Jane the Virgin. But it still takes a certain amount of vision to imagine how an actor with as strong a screen presence as Machado’s can fit into a show like this — and possibly keep the main cast on their toes.
In the case of Machado’s Eva Muñoz, a Jacobson-Moore partner and Senior’s vindictive ex-wife, her aggressiveness adds a jolt of energy to this show. Eva has the ability to throw Olympia and Matty off their games. She’s their ally, sure, in that she too wants to ruin Senior. But Olympia and Matty can’t trust that Eva has their best interests at heart … or even in mind, at all.
We met Eva briefly in this season’s third episode, after Senior became aware of the New York Times Wellbrexa story and called an emergency partners’ meeting. By the end of that episode, Eva had let a wary Olympia know she was game for a coup. In this week’s “Harm Reduction,” she says she’s ready to follow through. Eva knows that two Jacobson-Moore offices (Miami and Washington, D.C.) will back her, and two (Chicago and Dallas) are “senior country.” They’ll need to sway the New York partners to, as Eva puts it, “deep-fry the devil.”
This isn’t a no-brainer play. Their window is narrow. The vote will be in six weeks, and will require 21 of the 40 partners to back Eva. And the potential repercussions are terrible. If the coup works, Olympia and Matty will have freer access to the Jacobson-Moore files. If it fails, they’re probably done with this mission, permanently.
Matty and Olympia are facing a formidable opponent in Senior, who in this episode starts working behind their back, recruiting Sarah to spy on Julian. But it’s also unclear if Eva’s on their wavelength. Even though she’s never met Matty, Eva is suspiciously well-informed about Olympia’s star associate. (“Loved your hardscrabble story,” she says. “Super relatable. To juries, not to me. I come from money.”) Eva unnerves these women. She doesn’t share their rapport.
As cover for being in New York and consulting with Olympia, Eva has brought the team a case. A local convent in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood has come under fire from their newer, richer neighbors — and from their own diocese — because the nuns provide a safe space for junkies, with clean needles and Narcan. They testify that they’re following not just the biblical command for compassion, along with the most up-to-date medical advice about “harm reduction.”
This is a dramatically strong Matlock case, and not just because it feeds into the main storyline in a few ways. The history of American TV legal dramas — The Defenders, Owen Marshall, L.A. Law, Law & Order, The Practice, The Good Wife, etc. — is the history of U.S. social policy being debated on the small screen, with an implicit acknowledgment that no answers are ever easy. The nuns are clearly the heroes here, for taking care of the needy and saving lives. But there are children in this neighborhood too, and attracting addicts to the church makes the block more chaotic.
The court seems inclined to side with the neighborhood’s moneyed families and hip businesses, especially after the plaintiffs show a video of a woman ODing and screaming, right outside the church, in full public view. But then Matty has the bright idea to find this woman, Alyssa Lombardi (Whitney Bacon) so she can testify about how she grew up in this neighborhood, how the nuns saved her life, and how she’s been in rehab. “This is someone’s child too,” Matty explains to Olympia. “The judge needs to see that.”
This whole case is a tough assignment for Matty, because nearly everything about it reminds her of her daughter Ellie — like so much does lately. She even imagines Ellie on the stand, during Alyssa’s testimony, explaining how she hit rock bottom but got a second chance. When the hearing begins, Matty is at a medium-to-high boil, because she actually doesn’t think a harm-reduction policy helps junkies get clean. But she keeps working for the clients anyway. Gradually, she begins to develop a more nuanced take on the subject.
Olympia helps. Matty’s trying really hard in this episode to patch things up with her boss, to the point where she actually decides she needs to step away from the office for a little while, because her over-eagerness to please is a kind of unhealthy, addict-like behavior. For her part, Olympia realizes that her anger at Matty’s lies stems in part from how her rigidly moral father raised her, and that maybe she should also be more understanding.
Like I said: None of this is easy. In this episode’s other main storyline, as Matty tries to win votes for Eva’s coup from the New York partners, her folksy charm and subtle subterfuge gets under Olympia’s skin, reminding her yet again of the year her supposed friend spent lying to her. Sometimes the greater good is messy as hell.
In the end, the ladies have mixed success with the nuns’ case. The judge allows the convent to keep feeding the poor, but orders them to cut it out with the clean needles and Narcan. (In response, the nuns pledge to take their mission out into the streets.) But in looking for help wherever they can find it, Olympia calls on a Jacobson-Moore partner emeritus: Pat Cassidy (Phil Buckman), who left the law and became a priest. “After 30 years of working for the devil I thought I’d give God a try,” he says … with Senior in the room. Father Pat can’t persuade the diocese to back the nuns, but his return to the Jacobson-Moore offices gives Matty an idea. Pat is, technically, still a partner, which means he can vote on Eva’s coup, delivering “a good Old Testament smiting.”
Eva may end up being trouble for our heroes eventually — and I kind of hope she is, because Machado can play those impish notes with an entertaining vigor. But Father Pat? What could possibly go wrong for Matty and Olympia now, with God on their side?
• The structure of this episode is unusual for Matlock, in that at least two weeks pass during the running time. Usually this show’s cases are introduced and dispatched in a day or two, but here time jumps ahead twice, to account for the time it takes for Matty to whip votes and for Olympia to give Matty another chance. I like this, because it feels more realistic all around — and also because it moves the larger story much more quickly toward the big partner vote, now only a few weeks away.
• The Billy subplot this week is … whatever. But the Sarah subplot? It’s the best she’s had this season. While shadowing Julian on Senior’s orders, she finds that she has a lot in common with him, and also that he has no plans to poach any Jacobson-Moore clients. She assumes that Senior will be happy to hear that his son’s a good guy, but instead he insists that she do what he originally asked and surreptitiously take pictures of Julian’s datebook. She does — and she feels awful about it.
• We also get a very slight Alfie subplot, when Edward and Matty discover that he’s been faking some correspondence with his father, so that the grandparents won’t think that Joey is failing at rehab. This ends up plugging into the main storyline too, as Matty realizes from the nun trial that she shouldn’t put so much pressure on Joey and Alfie.
• Matty, trying to make some awkwardly friendly conversation with Olympia at the start of the episode, asks if she’s “an every Sunday Christian.” I liked Olympia’s response: “I’m a ‘talk about work at work’ Christian.”
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