The Magic Bullet
Episode 2 of The Lincoln Lawyer begins with Izzy losing the car following them and heading back to the office. There, Mickey introduces her to the team. As Mickey dives into the Elliot case, he learns that, apart from a couple of statements, there’s not much to go on. It’s now looking as if whatever was on that laptop last episode, it’s probably a good deal of evidence to help Trevor Elliot’s case. Mickey needs to be in court, given he’s scheduled to defend a guy called Terrell Coleman in a case involving assaulting a police officer. According to Coleman, he’s completely innocent. After hearing Terrell’s side of the story, Mickey decides to push for a continuance. In doing so, he heads back to the Chief Judge and explains what’s going on, including the potential threat to his own life. Mickey wants to hand over a list of possible clients who made threats against Jerry; “red flags” as he puts it. Mickey intends to then hand that over to the LAPD. Although this would ordinarily be a violation of client confidentiality, if the killer is in those files and Mickey is now being threatened, then it gives him reason to pass them along. Cisco does some digging too and learns that the past few weeks before his death, Jerry was acting funny. Could he have known he was being watched? Lorna gains access to Jerry’s business accounts, which seem to reinforce more suspicious behaviour, involving “salary advances” sent over to his personal accounts. Jerry also never sent over the details to a ballistics expert. Mickey heads off and visits Griggs, handing over a list of potential threats to Jerry’s life. In exchange for this, Mickey wants intel on Jerry. He agrees. Griggs confirms that there’s nothing particularly egregious there, given Jerry moves to and fro home and work, but he did visit Athena’s Temple in LA. It would also appear that the yoga instructor wasn’t only sleeping with one married woman (Lara), there could be another angry husband hell-bent on revenge. As the Trevor Elliot case starts to come together, Mickey picks up Hayley from school and brings her to court, where she ends up watching him defending Coleman. Now, it’s a little suspect given Officer Grainger (the one allegedly assaulted) wasn’t wearing his body cam that day. There’s an ATM with a camera though which clears things up. Before Mickey can show this off, the officer gets cold feet and implores them not to. It’s enough to get all charges dropped. As we soon learn, Mickey was bluffing the whole time but did so because he suspected the officer in question was actually a liar. That night, Lorna comes across some crucial intel into this big case. It would seem that the day he died, Jerry actually printed a motion for continuance in the Elliot case. He never filed it though, which seems to hint it was in the laptop files. Mickey however, interprets this as a sign that he “didn’t have sh*t” for this trial. When Mickey asks for a continuance with the judge, Trevor Elliot is not happy. He’s signed a deal for his company to be acquired and as such, he doesn’t want to delay any further. If the case goes on past that time, then this deal will be lost and he’ll lose everything he’s worked on – and so will the investors. Mickey has no choice but to agree. Mickey next turns his attention to Jerry’s assistant, who may well have had a more “personal relationship” with his colleague. According to her, Jerry had found a magic bullet. He definitely had something, and this motivates Mickey to track down and figure out exactly what this is. The trouble is, Mickey’s car has actually been bugged by powerful forces, who listen to his every word. Uh oh!
The Episode Review
The second episode continues to push this Trevor Elliot case forward, drip-feeding more information about Jerry’s murder and how that ties into everything. It’s now clear that there’s a good amount of evidence to help get Elliot off the hook but quite what that is remains a mystery. One thing that is clear, however, is that Mickey is starting to get his life back together and has built his team up to tackle these different cases. The episodic “case of the week” format feels like it’s a little half-baked and I’m not sure if it will continue, with the whole Coleman case feeling like a way of padding out the run-time rather than actually adding anything substantial, especially given how quickly that was wrapped up. Personally, I think the show would work better with shorter episodes focused exclusively on Trevor Elliot. Either way though, the reveal that Mickey is actually being watched and could find his life in danger too is certainly intriguing and leaves everything open for the rest of the season.
