Summary
Suits LA goes way off the rails in Episode 3, with weird cameos and the dreaded return of Ted’s dead brother.
Bad news – the dead brother is back. And this is no offense to Carson Egan, who plays Eddie Black perfectly well. But I’m now using his presence to chart how lazy the storytelling of Suits LA is being. In the premiere, I got it. In Episode 2, I was relieved that the show didn’t continue to lean against the crutch. But Eddie’s reappearance in Episode 3 is indicative of a script that’s uninterested in depth and subtlety. “He Knew” is the weakest episode thus far, the one that feels the most like a lazy, valueless spin-off instead of a fresh new idea.
There’s another subplot that involves Samantha testing Rick’s ability to be the new Head of Entertainment by giving him a box full of all the firm’s employment records and instructing him to fire three people arbitrarily. Suits LA buys into the cliché that being successful in business means being an unnecessarily amoral pr*ck. Later, when Rick has made his choices with very little effort, Samantha reveals that it was all just a test to see if he had the cajónes to make the tough calls. It’s the equivalent of some undercover action hero being handed a gun to shoot a prisoner or some such, only to pull the trigger and discover the weapon’s empty. Snooze. The difference there would be the action hero would have been able to tell he was being played by the weight of the gun or something. Rick has no idea.
Hey, It’s Kevin Malone
As if to remind us that Ted Black is an entertainment lawyer, Erica’s story in Suits LA Episode 3 involves her being handed one of Ted’s oldest clients, who she has to deal with because he’s busy trying to prove Lester didn’t murder his business partner. The joke from Episode 2 about Erica not having a clue about the film and TV industry crops up again, but now she seems to know a bit more than she was letting on, so I’m not sure what the point of all that was other than to keep Leah around.
Speaking of Leah, she assembles a dossier on the client, who turns out to be Brian Baumgartner, aka Kevin Malone from The Office. He wants to transition from comedic work and become a serious, Oscar-level actor and would like Erica to facilitate a meeting with Tom Hanks – whom Ted supposedly represents – so that he can ask him how he did it. Since Tom Hanks wouldn’t be seen dead in an NBC show, Leah instead brings in Patton Oswalt. Almost immediately, Brian and Patton start arguing and attacking each other’s careers.
This is all so strange and out of nowhere that it feels like a transplant from a completely different show. You’ve still got the murder case going on in the midst of all this, by the way, not to mention a lot of wannabe-deep introspection when Ted has to think about his dead dad again. Is this a Suits spin-off or a weirdly meta Hollywood circle jerk? It can’t seem to decide.
Even more ridiculously, this argument turns out to have been pre-planned; it was all a ploy to get Patton to berate Brian so that he would be angry enough to make the bold leap into Oscar dramas himself. Nonsense – absolute nonsense.
Former BFFs
The Ted stuff is a bit better, but not by much. The obvious objective of “He Knew” is to emphasize how much Ted and Stuart were inseparable best bros before their recent falling out, so we get a bunch of flashbacks where they say things like “You’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother,” which is pretty unsubtle. And then, in the present day, a comical amount of stuff keeps happening that makes it seem like Stuart is relentlessly stabbing Ted in the back when he’s mostly just trying to get on with things and be left alone.
Bryan Greenberg in Suits LA | Image via NBC
For instance, Lester’s wife, the one his murdered business partner was having an affair with, is now being represented by Stuart, which makes a degree of sense in legal terms but is, to Ted, just another betrayal. It also turns out that Ted’s dead dad made Stuart the executor of his will; more spiteful even than that, there’s a clause in the will that mandates he be buried next to Eddie, whose death he knows Ted blames him for, and Stuart has to enforce that.
Ted’s dad crops up in the flashbacks, too. He was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, in deep with the mob, which reflects so badly on Ted that Stuart heroically volunteers to risk his own career to obscure the connection. In all this, I mostly felt bad for Stuart. You can tell that he’s really fed up with the whole thing, and frankly, I know how he feels.
Unhappily Married
All of the above adds important context to Lester’s divorce, which itself has an impact on his murder charge since part of what’s being negotiated is his now ex-wife’s assurance that he didn’t know about the affair – and thus it can’t be considered a motive – and endorsement that he probably isn’t a murderer. She gets half of everything in exchange, which seems fair.
In a really weird turn, what eventually results in an amicable settlement is a really insincere apology from Lester and him securing his wife a role in a new film. She’s an actor whose career was waylaid by the attention being paid to her producer husband, so all she has ever really wanted is to forge her own path to stardom, and luckily this is a show about entertainment lawyers, so Ted can make that happen.
Barely, though. Ted’s whole deal in these negotiations is that he can barely restrain himself from ripping Stuart’s head off, so he once again makes an idiot of himself for the most part, especially when a photo turns up of Lester standing feet away from his wife and his business partner, implying that he knew about their affair all along. He didn’t though because – I kid you not, this is a genuine plot point – he wasn’t wearing his glasses and couldn’t see them.
Anyway, after all this, Eddie’s ghost arrives to stand with Stuart and Ted as they both silently bury the latter’s father, and it’s such a ridiculous slice of needless melodrama that I blush even to reproduce the key detail, which is that Eddie’s ghost grabs Stuart’s hand in solidarity. I certainly hope that forgiveness doesn’t come that quickly from Ted, since we won’t have a show if it does. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
