Summary
“Part Five” and “Part Six” only sees things get worse for Michael and Adam, as a blackmailer emerges with proof of what happened, while the Baxters commit to figuring out who really killed their son.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, or at least that’s how the saying goes. But Your Honor seems determined the prove the old adage false. The only thing that Michael Desiato really has, his connections, are also the thing that has caused his admittedly hare-brained cover-up scheme to unravel. He ends Season 1 Episode 5 not just in dire straits, but not even realizing the extent to which his various attempts at protecting Adam have given him away.
Your Honor Season 1 Episode 5 Recap
There has always been a morbidly funny streak to how Michael enlisting the best possible people for various tasks – Nancy Costello to look into the “theft” of Robin’s car; Lee Delamere to defend Kofi Jones in court after being picked up for it – has continuously backfired.
At first, the idea of a well-to-do white man using his influence to wipe away his son’s misdeeds was just the setup for a drama, but by now it’s a commentary on enduring values of morality and loyalty as well. Lee and Nancy, both serious about their jobs and the reasons they do them, are doing a thorough enough job that Michael’s ill-thought-out efforts to sweep everything under the rug are only incriminating him.
Desire, the street gang to whom Kofi belonged and for whose protection he pled guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, is willing to go to war for the deaths of Kofi and now his mother and three siblings. Doing the right thing, and avenging the wrong thing, are more powerful than simply calling in favors.
All of this happens without Michael’s knowledge. His thoughts are occupied in “Part Five” with a new development, which is the mysterious arrival of a cell phone that receives messages explaining the sender knows what Adam did, want a hefty ransom of $220,000 – a peculiarly specific sum – not to reveal it, and have the proof they need to make the accusation stick if that’s what it comes to.
This and a break-in and an epileptic dog send Michael increasingly frantic until he’s eventually making quite a scene trying to withdraw money from the bank and getting jostled around in a parade crowd while trying to call the blackmailer’s bluff.
The list of people who have seen Michael behave in a deeply suspicious way continues to increase, and most damningly of all, it includes the gas station attendant whom Michael got pally with when he finessed a way to erase the CCTV footage.
Bryan Cranston in Your Honor Season 1 (Credit – Showtime)
So, who’s the blackmailer? From what we see in the episode, it isn’t a representative of Baxter or Desire, which only leaves, realistically, the car that was waiting behind the Volvo when Adam filled it up (the fact Michael took a photo of this vehicle before deleting the surveillance footage reads as a bit too convenient, for my tastes, but you can justify it easily enough that I’m not hung up on it.)
That presumably suggests less danger than is represented by the under- and over-world criminal syndicates that both have a vested interest in exposing what really happened, so Michael is probably wasting his time, if not yet his money, though that’s not for a lack of trying.
I’d argue he’s wasting his time anyway, since Adam so clearly wants to get caught, or at least be made to pay for his crimes, that he’s inevitably going to void all of his father’s efforts anyway. Everything he has done so far, rooted in understandable guilt or not, has been ludicrously silly for a person even remotely interested in self-preservation.
The only logical conclusion is that he isn’t interested in that at all, and believes that the only reasonable way of atoning for his role in Rocco and now Kofi and co.’s deaths is to behave so stupidly and obviously that someone makes him by force. His bizarre decision last week to attend a candlelight vigil in Rocco’s honor leads to him sitting down and having a flirty chat with Fia Baxter this week.
This is one thread that puzzles me since Your Honor has gone to some lengths thus far to portray Fia as somewhat apart from the rest of the family. Carlo returns home from prison in this episode, and she only reluctantly embraces him; it’s a visual metaphor for the idea that she’s only close to these murderous gangsters by blood and expectation.
She hasn’t embraced the lifestyle in the way that the men and Gina have. You have to wonder, then, if her burgeoning relationship with Michael is genuine, and if it’ll perhaps prove genuine enough for her to turn against her family in order to protect him.
Either way, he’s going to need protection of some kind, since everyone else seems to have it, even Kofi’s little brother Eugene, who spends “Part Five” being adopted by the Desire gang, put up in his own bedroom for the first time in his life and stuck on a corner as a worker.
He’s obviously being exploited, but the upsides of his loyalty, at least for now, outweigh the risks. That’s more than can be said for the Desiatos, who at the moment don’t seem to have any upsides at all.
Your Honor Season 1 Episode 6 Recap
Your Honor Season 1 (Credit – Showtime)
The more you do something, the better you’re supposed to get at it. This is not true for Michael Desiato, though, whose continued attempts to deceive and con everyone he meets finally catch up to him here in Your Honor episode 6.
Things weren’t exactly looking good for him last week, and by the end of “Part Six”, they’re looking worse than ever. With a gun to his head, he offers to break the law even further, this time for the benefit of the gangster trying to kill him. When is he going to realize that he isn’t any good at this stuff?
There’s an episode-long joke in “Part Six”, although it isn’t intended as a joke however funny I happened to find it. See, the episode is divided up almost evenly between scenes of Michael trying to uncover his blackmailer, and scenes of Jimmy and his goon, Frankie, plotting to kill Michael — the payoff is a brief five minutes of Michael really feeling himself when he thinks everything is finally coming together for him. It’s a bleak gag, admittedly, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t chuckling at it all the way through.
So, Michael’s latest scheme is to use the first three license plate numbers of the Toyota Camry he spotted on the gas station CCTV footage to get Nancy to turn up some potential owners. The story he spins to get Nancy to pony up this information is so ridiculously morbid that, again, it’s almost funny.
Michael’s awareness of the fact everything he’s doing is wrong is causing him to cast himself as the altruistic hero of his own made-up fantasies. Depicting him way back in the premiere as basically being a fictional version of that Rhode Island judge who’s always going viral on Facebook and never seems to convict anyone obviously wasn’t an accident. He clearly fancies himself as a selfless hero of a failed American justice system. But the fact he still sees himself that way, despite everything, only makes him seem delusional.
The same idea comes up again a bit later in Your Honor season 1, episode 6, when Michael is tracking down the names of the Camry owners and crossing them off his little list. When he has to blag his way in to see Ed, an elderly man with dementia, can you guess what cover story he cooks up for himself? He poses as a deliveryman for a charitable non-profit delivering groceries to people who need them.
“This is my life,” he says, and he means it, even though it’s complete fiction. When Michael frantically unburdens himself to Ed, knowing that he’s not very likely to remember the exchange anyway, the overwhelming sense we get is of a man who deep down knows he’s not the type to deliver fruit and veg to the needy and hates himself for it.
It’s later, after Michael puts two and two together and figures out that Ed’s son Trevor, a cab driver who fancies himself a luxury yachtsman, is who he’s after, that he goes back home and starts showing out to Adam.
The reason it’s funny is that he has no idea Jimmy has been roaming around his house and using his facilities, or indeed that he and Frankie are parked right outside waiting to whack him. The only reason they don’t is that they see who dropped Adam off — Fia, with whom he spends almost the entirety of Your Honor episode 6, bonding over their mutual lost loved ones and sharing a cheeky smooch.
It’s still hard to get a real sense of Fia. Her rapidly burgeoning romance with Adam seems real enough, and when she spends some quality alone time with Jimmy that night — blimey, that sounds like an innuendo, but I swear it isn’t — nothing she says to him gives the impression she has ulterior motives.
It’s what she says to Adam that’s important, since when Rocco’s death comes up again (don’t they have anything else to talk about other than death?), she’s quick to remind him that whoever killed him didn’t just kill him, but her life with him, too. Blood, it seems, remains thicker than water.
Or does it? This doesn’t seem to be a philosophy that Carlo subscribes to, anyway, since he’s determined to do drug deals with Desire behind the backs of his parents, which might well create an opportunity for the gang to avenge Kofi’s death. Speaking of which, Lee spends the entirety of “Part Six” looking into it and manages to discover Carlo’s involvement, all of which comes to a head in a climactic sequence that gives us an idea of the direction we’re going to be heading in for the back half of the season.
Michael’s plan for dealing with Trevor, it turns out, is to buy him his dream boat on finance and keep making the payments for it just so long as Trevor keeps his mouth shut, which is so ludicrously short-sighted it’s amazing he was so smug about having thought of it.
But he doesn’t remain smug, since when he and Trevor are returning to his car to get the paperwork, Jimmy and Frankie jump them. Jimmy, by the way, thinks it was Michael who ran Rocco over, and he’s not interested in hearing his excuses. But he is interested in hearing the news that Carlo is about to be put on trial for Kofi’s murder, especially once Michael offers to make sure the case ends up in his courtroom so that he can also ensure Carlo goes free.
How many different ways is this going to go wrong? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, RIP to Trevor, who apparently knew “everything”, despite all the evidence suggesting he barely knew anything at all. At least Michael gets to keep the boat.
What did you think of Your Honor Season 1 Episodes 5 and 6? Comment below.
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