Summary
Your Honor takes several juicy turns as the second season continues to weave a complex web of criminality.
Your Honor has always been a show about a good man making bad decisions for the right reasons. But it’s really about bad decisions, period. Everyone is making them in Season 2 Episode 5, at a rate it’s honestly difficult to keep up with. Then again, what other kind is there in this setting, a cynical depiction of New Orleans in which the criminals and the government are interchangeable, everyone owes everyone else a favor, and the gap between tremendous success and the loss of everything you hold dear is only as wide as one wrong word.
This hour is built on a few big subplots continuing from Episode 4. Big Mo’s leadership of Desire has been thrown a curveball by the reappearance of Eugene and the fact Lil Mo helped him “disappear” in the first place.
And Michael and Charlie are still dealing with the fallout from Jimmy’s birthday party, in which he made his ties to the mayor and the existence of his grandchild public, to the horror of both men, and indeed Fia, who recognized that her father’s polite invite was really a ruse (and that’s without him holding a gun to Michael’s head.)
Your Honor Season 2 Episode 5 Recap
Why is Lil Mo thrown out of Desire?
We’ll start with Big Mo. The potential problems that might emanate from not being able to pay back Rodrick’s advance notwithstanding, her issues in “Part Fifteen” are all on her own turf, revolving around how she runs Desire even when she’s forced to put the gang over her own family, biological or otherwise.
Lil Mo has, justifiably or not, gone against his aunt’s wishes not just by facilitating Eugene’s escape but also by stashing him at Mo’s sister’s place, straining a sibling relationship that was already frayed, to begin with. This is to say nothing about how exposure of Desire’s involvement with Eugene could earn them the ire of the Baxters.
If any other member of Big Mo’s crew made the same decisions Lil Mo did, everyone, including Lil Mo himself, knows how they would be treated.
So, perhaps in a strange way, Big Mo kicking Lil Mo out of Desire with only a beating could be seen as a mercy. At least she doesn’t blame Eugene, though she does send him back to Houston to be with her sister since remaining in New Orleans would be hazardous to his health and incredibly risky for Desire.
Why does Charlie reconsider the Baxter land deal Your Honor Season 2 Episode 5?
To be fair, though, Jimmy has problems of his own. Before the appointment of Charlie Figaro as mayor, Jimmy had made a cozy deal with the previous office-holder to secure land for the development of the Baxter District, but Charlie has reneged on the deal, which is causing Jimmy all kinds of stress from his overbearing father-in-law, Carmine Conti, whom it becomes very obvious was primarily responsible for his ascent to power in the first place.
This explains a lot of things, not least why Gina is the way she is. She believes Jimmy owes her – or at least her family name – a debt, and she won’t ever allow him to feel like he’s truly in charge. We know Jimmy to be a smart enough man to be fearful of Carmine, which is presumably why he approaches Michael to talk Charlie into reconsidering his proposal.
He claims that Carmine might become a threat to Charlie, which is probably true, but he’s almost certainly also worrying about Carmine becoming a threat to him – and perhaps his own family breaking down.
At one point in this episode, Gina contemplates getting rid of Jimmy with her father, and the tensions between the two of them can’t be lost on Jimmy himself. He knows what’s at stake.
For Michael, he’s just trying to protect his friend. He knows the danger Jimmy represents. But the only way that he can talk Charlie into finalizing the Baxter deal is by confessing that he’s working with the feds against Jimmy and that, in the madness of his grief after Adam’s death, he revealed that Charlie assisted in the initial cover-up.
Charlie has no choice but to give Jimmy the land because otherwise, he’s looking at not only complete reputational ruin but also potentially jail time. While Charlie tries to get Jimmy to make some amendments to his development plans that are more in line with the promises Charlie has made to his constituents, it seems unlikely that any of those demands will be met.
What does Nancy have on Michael now?
And, finally, things aren’t going well for Michael either, although I suppose they haven’t been since the first season premiere. But after his close call with Jimmy last week, Michael wants out. Olivia, though, has other ideas, especially with Carmine Conti being on the scene.
She thinks she can hook every fish in the pond and isn’t willing to let Michael walk away. So, she turns to Nancy Costello, who takes Michael away in handcuffs, sits him down in an interrogation room, and tells him that she has new evidence. She wants to know where he was on the night his wife was murdered.
Your Honor Season 2 Episode 6 Recap
Who killed Robin Desiato?
In Your Honor Season 2 Episode 5, Nancy Costello hauled Michael into the station in cuffs and sat him down for a few questions. In this week’s episode, we learn that she has found evidence that Michael wasn’t home on the night his wife died, as he claimed in his original statement, but was in fact confronting the man she had been having an affair with — and not looking best pleased about it if the grainy CCTV still she has is anything to go on. Of course, this isn’t enough to actually book Michael, but it raises some pretty obvious problems for him.
So, Michael and Elizabeth pay the man, a reporter named Kenneth, a little visit. He explains that Costello approached him as a suspect after being tipped off about his affair with Robin by a gang member he used to use as a source, so he revealed Michael visited him as an alibi.
That also means that Kenneth is Michael’s alibi. If they were together that night, neither of them can have killed Robin.
Robin was looking into several very suspiciously clean murders of gang bangers that seemed to have a professional touch about them. On the night she died, she was meeting with a witness named KJ who could verify that cops were carrying out the killings.
Michael and Elizabeth go to see KJ, and after some persuasion from a fabulous Margo Martindale, who’s great here, he explains. At the time, there was a turf war that was brought under control by the sudden murder of lieutenants on both sides. Nobody knows who killed who, and the killings were never solved.
However, KJ was a drug addict and used to trade drugs for information with a local detective who, when the information went dry, continued providing KJ with narcotics in exchange for — it’s very heavily implied — sexual favors. He spilled his own role in corruption and sanctioned murder. And he killed Robin on the night she went to meet KJ.
His name is Detective Walter Beckwith. That’s who killed Robin Desiato.
What does Big Mo do with the drugs?
Your Honor Season 2 (Credit – Showtime)
Things aren’t going well for Big Mo either. She’s still beholden to Roderick, which means she’s still having to move heroin that has been dangerously spliced with fentanyl. Since the product, like young Eugene, needs to be gone sooner rather than later, the plan is to cut it again with baby powder or baking soda so that it hopefully won’t kill anyone, but also to distribute it into the city so that, if it does, nobody knows where it came from.
This, however, backfires considerably. Towards the end of the episode, we learn that the brother of Chris, one of Big Mo’s goons, took one of the heroin balloons and fatally overdosed.
Why doesn’t Eugene kill Carlo?
This might be the least of Big Mo’s problems. When he’s turned down for one of those balloons — remenber, they’re being moved in the city instead of the neighborhood — Joey goes looking for a fix at Big Mo’s place and spots Eugene through the window.
He takes a photo of him and shows it to Carlo, who is supposed to be babysitting Rocco for Fia. He leaves, saddling Angela with childcare duties, and goes after Eugene with Joey.
Joey, true to form, makes a mess of things by T-boning the car Eugene is in, presumably killing himself and leaving Carlo trapped in the wreckage. Eugene is able to wriggle free of his wreckage and retrieve Carlo’s gun from the ground, which he points at him.
Eugene is understandably aghast that Carlo has the temerity to still be trying to kill him after he beat his brother to death for no reason and burned his mother’s house down.
However, Eugene does not shoot Carlo, presumably because he doesn’t want to sink to his level. He is, at the end of the day, still a kid, not a killer, and by killing Carlo, he would be as bad as him.
Why does Jimmy attack Frankie?
Fia is understandably fuming about Carlo abandoning Rocco, and about the family’s concern over Eugene rather than her son. Gina orders Frankie to find Eugene immediately, going over her husband’s head, and Carmine even berates his son-in-law for not being a man and taking matters into his own hands.
So, he does, but by attacking Frankie, both out of sheer frustration and as a way to try and feel like he is regaining some control of a situation that is rapidly eluding his grasp.
Is Eugene dead?
This week’s episode ends with Detective Beckwith* shooting Eugene as he tries to board a bus out of town. Is Eugene dead? Next week’s preview would suggest not. But there will presumably be some ramifications of the shooting since it wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
Beckwith, having found Eugene’s drawings in the crash wreckage earlier, was presumably operating out of desperation, and he’s going to have difficulties covering this up.
*Note: Some helpful folks in the comments have pointed out that the name of the detective who shot Eugene here is Cunningham, according to the IMDb credits, not Beckwith. I just made the assumption it was Beckwith because it tied in with KJ’s revelations earlier.
This might be the same guy with a different name, some kind of red herring, or another cop entirely who is equally corrupt and involved in the same conspiracy. I’m not sure why the show would introduce this guy who isn’t Beckwith to fulfill pretty much the same intended plot function as Beckwith himself, but whatever.
What did you think of Your Honor Season 2 Episodes 5 and 6? Comment below.
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