Summary
Michael can’t help but take evidence of his sins home in “Part Seven”, as he has no choice but to make even further deals with the devil.
This recap of Your Honor season 1, episode 7, “Part Seven”, contains spoilers.
Following on rather directly from the previous episode, “Part Seven” pushes Michael to cross even more sacred personal and moral lines, which at this point should scarcely warrant a mention. Michael’s increasing proximity to Jimmy, though, is the theme of the episode, a bizarre and faintly pathetic power struggle in which a man who has spent two decades wielding the ultimate authority of the American justice system is suddenly cowed by a small, unassuming-looking man who does have a gun in his pocket and isn’t pleased to see him. As we’ll see, after spending just one episode in subservience to Jimmy, Michael will take any opportunity, however small, to regain some power for himself.
But it takes a while to get there. First, we see Jimmy racing through traffic, trying and failing to warn Carlo of the police sting that’ll catch him red-handed at the hotel and put him on trial for the murder of Kofi Jones, while Michael and Frankie dispose of Trevor’s corpse. Michael has had blood on his hands throughout Your Honor, but for the first time literally here. The trauma reduces him to tears.
More straight-faced is Carlo, who is picked up by Nancy — in full view of Fia, who immediately goes to Adam to tell him that “the wrong brother died” — and warned of the horrors of the lethal injection since he’s facing the death penalty. He remains unmoved. Nancy, to her credit, realizes quickly that Jimmy knew in advance of the police’s operation, which raises plenty of questions that remain unanswered for her in Your Honor episode 7 but will doubtlessly be important as we go.
It’s really the dynamic between Michael and Jimmy that we should be most concerned with here. They argue about fatherhood, about loss, about what kind of men they really are — as the series has progressed, of course, we’ve learned along with them that they’re not so different from each other, even if both would like to pretend so. When Michael gets assigned Carlo’s arraignment, that’s where he believes he can, surrounded quite literally by the legal system, recoup some of his lost power under the guise of making the process look “believable”. Jimmy swears at him during the hearing and Michael threatens to hold him in contempt; after, they argue in the lobby in full view of everyone, the closest they come to an even playing field.
But it’s Jimmy who has the power, really, and Michael knows it. When he returns home in Your Honor episode 7 he trails a part of Trevor’s blown-apart skull and brain on his clothing, and he has to pretend to a perplexed Adam that it’s a treat for Django. But later, at a surprise birthday party — “to an honorable man,” is the toast — for himself, he gags at the sight of Django having eaten the offal on his dining room floor. And when Michael doesn’t get assigned Carlo’s case, he has to grovel to Jimmy, insisting he has another plan.
He does, but it requires even more compromise. The judge who got the case instead of him, Sara LeBlanc (Lorraine Toussaint), ends up being pulled over thanks to Michael’s setup and held at gunpoint by the police, a black woman in a position of extreme power instantaneously reduced to a potential victim. And Michael, a white man, ready to benefit in her place. At least Your Honor season 1, episode 7 makes no secret of who the villain is.
