Summary
“Chasing Waterfalls” gets lots of narrative and character work done as All Rise rockets towards the end of the season.
This recap of All Rise season 2, episode 12, “Chasing Waterfalls”, contains spoilers.
Well, this was one for the fans, wasn’t it? If splitting Luke and Emily up between seasons seemed like a bad idea at the time, then “Chasing Waterfalls” almost justifies it by delivering their long-awaited reconciliation – though what that means for poor Joaquin, who the show seems to have completely forgotten about, is anyone’s guess. He was a rebound anyway.
Luke ends up at Emily’s place in All Rise season 2, episode 12 after crawling there following his beatdown at the hands of Sheriff Wayne McCarthy’s (Louis Herthum) goons in last week’s cliff-hanger ending. He’s in a bad way, physically and emotionally, and he isn’t the only one. Thanks to Lola’s slip-up, Mark and Amy are also having some relationship woes which lead to Mark temporarily moving into Lola and Robin’s guest house (Robin cutting around in his Pacifier-style super-dad all-in-one gear was hilarious – I wish All Rise did more with him). This is probably just as well since Robin is familiar with the case he’s working on, a murder committed by Sergei Kirilenko (Raphael Corkhill, one of the most evil-looking men ever), who shot the brother of his sister’s husband. Olga, the sister, and Pete Petrovic, the husband, are a Romeo and Juliet-style couple from two warring criminal families who have been killing each other’s relatives forever.
This is the only real case in “Chasing Waterfalls”. The bulk of the episode is much more about continuing ongoing storylines – Mark and Amy, Luke and the Sheriffs, Luke and Emily – so that they can pay off later, which freed up a lot of time for character development. Luke, for instance, is grappling with his old loyalties and his newfound sense of morality, as well as the fact that he’s the one paying the physical price for Mark’s crusade. This is to say nothing of his feelings for Emily, which he never did a great job of suppressing in the first place and which come to the fore here, at least in part because he sees how much she cares for him.
Mark, too, is working through his annoyance with Lola ratting him out – albeit accidentally – and the fact that she was right, his long-term future with Amy, his ongoing battle with corrupt law enforcement, and his current case. It’s a lot.
But since we know these characters so well at this point, All Rise season 2, episode 12 plays really well, giving us fun pairings – Mark and Robin are great together – and long-awaited moments, most of them outside the courtroom, for once. Even Sherri gets a little subplot in which she meets someone and has a little private smooch with him. By the end of “Chasing Waterfalls”, Mark has reconciled with Amy, more or less, Lola is due to head back to work, Luke and Emily are clearly an item again, and not only that, but McCarthy and his goon squad seem likely to be next on the chopping block. That’s plenty of ground to cover in a single episode.
