Summary
While Lola is on maternity leave in “Almost the Meteor”, Luke and Mark both learn the hard way that sometimes the ideal outcome isn’t the one you get.
This recap of All Rise season 2, episode 7, “Almost the Meteor”, contains spoilers.
Lola is on maternity leave in “Almost the Meteor”, which you’d think would be a good excuse to sideline her and shine some light on other characters. On some level, that’s what this latest episode does, although her home life isn’t left unaddressed. Luckily, the most important question is answered right upfront, preventing the audience from having to agonizingly ponder it. Bailey. The baby’s name is Bailey.
With that out of the way, we can be reminded that having a new baby is hard. Having one early, before you’re properly prepared, is harder still, and when you’re a workaholic for whom justice is a moral imperative rather than just a career, leaving your courtroom to be handled by other people, even ones you trust, only makes matters worse. Luckily, Robin is at home, which means we and Lola see more of him in All Rise season 2, episode 7 than we have for almost the rest of the season combined.
But most of the law business is handled elsewhere in “Almost the Meteor”, especially by a crusading Luke, thoroughly disillusioned with his role as prosecutor and the legal system that is overly punitive when it comes to people who look very much like him, and Mark, whose crusade against law enforcement predictably doesn’t win him any new friends. He expected that, obviously, but Omar himself turning against him was a bit of a blow.
Luke is especially at odds with DDA Driscoll (Tom Gallop), and rather understandably opposed to the idea of charging an 18-year-old Rafael (Bryan Michael Nunez) with a felony, despite him having pulled a knife on another young man named Darius (Coy Stewart). To him, it was a first-time offense over relatively petty reasons, and nobody needed to have the rest of their lives ruined because of it. In large part, this entire subplot existed to bring Luke closer to Emily, which the shippers will be happy about, but it was also making the point that there are other forms of justice than simply prison sentences. For instance, restorative justice. As it turns out, all it really took was getting Rafael and Darius to sit down together with Luke’s new friend August Fox (Rick Fox) and hash out their differences. Or did it?
As is becoming a trend in this second season of All Rise, not all outcomes are necessarily ideal, and some lessons have to be learned. Rafael and Darius have perhaps too stark a difference of opinion to find common ground, and Luke’s efforts to not penalize the perpetrator too harshly had perhaps overlooked the victim’s right to justice. It’s a fine line to walk, and perhaps not one he, as a representative of the prosecutor’s office, should even be walking. It’s Thomas Choi who really hammers the point home to Luke by describing his early career spent actively avoiding cases involving Asian-Americans until one day a Filipino defendant was brought before him and looked relieved to see a face like his own. Choi gave him a decade inside. The point is still justice, at the end of the day.
Mark gets justice of a kind in “Almost the Meteor”, but Deputy Pete Rashel doesn’t receive the same kind that an ordinary member of the public would. His sentence is, frankly, a joke, and that it’s the best Mark could do was telling. It doesn’t satisfy him, and it certainly doesn’t satisfy Omar, who would still prefer that Mark himself pay for the role he played in ruining his life. It was a well-intentioned but idealistic gesture, and nobody really emerged on the other side better off.
Perhaps Lola’s better off on maternity leave, since she’s the only person who actually has a truly positive outcome in All Rise season 2, episode 7. She’s finally able to track down the owner of the backpack that was waylaid during the BLM protest that she got into trouble for earlier in the season, and of course it belonged to a budding young activist named Dionn Richardson (Shanynn Samiyah Covington), whom she had a nice conversation with. Luke and Emily enjoyed each other’s company, too, sat socially distanced on separate benches, and it only seems a matter of time until their relationship is resumed. But if nothing else, this season of All Rise is continuing to prove that sometimes the ideal outcome isn’t the one you have to settle for.
