Summary
Your Honor makes some serious narrative progress and some drastic turns in a fine, tense outing.
Everyone has bad days, but nobody has as many as Michael Desiato. First, his son accidentally kills the son of a local mobster. Then he covers it up. Through a convoluted series of events his son dies, Michael ends up in prison, his efforts to starve himself don’t work, and his only chance at freedom is to dangerously infiltrate the very crime family with a reputation scary enough to push him into criminality in the first place. He can’t get out of the agreement that he barely made, he’s turning the few remaining friends he has against him, and now he’s a suspect in the murder of his wife, Robin. What else can possibly go wrong?
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.
READ: Will there be a Your Honor Season 3?
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?
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. Thanks to RLB237 and Susan W Evans in the comments for pointing this out to me.
You can catch Your Honor Season 2 Episode 6 exclusively on Showtime.
The cop who comes to the crash scene and who shoots Eugene is named Cunningham according to the IMDb credits. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe we have specifically seen Beckwith yet.
I enjoyed this recap. And I just watched this episode. At the end, the detective who shoots Eugene is listed in the credits as Rudy Cunningham, not Beckwith. There is no Detective Beckwith in the cast. Can you explain that?
Rudy Cunningham, the cop who shoots Eugene, is a dirty cop who had told Baxter that Eugene was dead. If Baxter finds out that Eugene is still alive, Rudy is afraid that Baxter will come after Rudy. So his only desperate hope is to kill Eugene himself.
I’m surprised you guys don’t seem to know who Detective Rudy Cunningham is…he was introduced in season 1 and is the corrupt detective in Desire’s corner that Lee Delamere found out about – remember when Little Mo mentioned ‘Rudy’ and told Eugene he didn’t need to know about that in season 1.
I appreciate you adding that addendum at the end about the detective! Just wanted to add, this isn’t the first time we have seen Detective Cunningham either. He was in a few episodes of the first season, and this season, he was the same cop who Big Mo was going to hand Eugene over to in the first episode. Then in the second episode, he went to the morgue to find a body to say was Eugene.
I am pretty sure we have yet to see Beckwith.
How did Grand Theft Auto guy know that Kenneth (the reporter) was having an affair with Robin–the info he was hoping to leverage into a reduced charge after his arrest? He was a source to Kenneth but I can’t see Kenneth in turn confiding in this gang member about his married girlfriend.
My theory as to why Jimmy attacks Frankie: Frankie had witnessed Jimmy being emasculated by his father-in-law, and Jimmy knew it. Jimmy attacked Frankie as an attempt to erase that humiliation. He didn’t want Frankie around as a reminder of that belittling.
It was Detective Rudy Cunningham (not Beckwith) who shot Eugene at the end, the same detective who arranged for the corpse stand-in for Eugene (and who showed up at the crash scene and found Eugene’s sketch books).
“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.”
Didn’t Eugene kill Adam while trying to kill Carlo??
Eugene heard sirens coming and became scared so he dropped the gun and ran instead of shooting Carlos.
The night of Robin’s murder, why didn’t Beckwith kill KJ instead of Robin? They were all there at the same time & KJ knew all of Beckwith’s secrets & posed a bigger danger to him than Robin did! Or at least, Beckwith could have shot both Robin & KJ & wiped his evidence trail clean!
This episode was a stretch on many levels. Michael and Elizabeth seem like crime-solvers out of Scooby-Doo, trotting around, talking to parties of interest. Note to showrunners: show, don’t tell. And Fia, leaving Rocco with Carlo? Is there a worse childcare bet? And who didn’t expect a bad outcome of Big Mo’s top-notch strategy of pushing adulterated product to the periphery of the Big Easy? At this point, the only character worth rooting for is Eugene. Let’s hope he has nine lives.
Another reason why Jimmy beat up Frankie: in episode 13, when jimmy roughly shoved Gina inside a room (from the hotel lobby), they struggle for a while while jimmy keeps telling her to calm down and Gina tells him ‘ooh, you wanna f**k me?’ Then she says, ‘why don’t you let Frankie take care of that too?’ The look on jimmy’s face after she says that before storming out says a lot!