Summary
Suits LA gets everyone on the same page in Episode 5, which is good, but it still has some questionable inclusions.
If you squint a little, Suits LA almost resembles a proper legal drama in Episode 5. It has been obvious from the jump that Lester’s murder trial is significantly more interesting than the silly celebrity cameos that cropped up in Episode 3 and then again in Episode 4, and “You’re on Your Own” lends much more focus to this than previous episodes have. It gives Amanda and Kevin more to do, gets Erica and Rick singing from the same hymn sheet, and uses the twists and turns of the case to create some organic drama without the need for faux-funny B-lister embellishment.
Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t all good. The episode opens with Ted having a sex dream about Amanda and Samantha that is intentionally ridiculous but feels misguided on other levels too, and we still have to put up with the flashbacks, which at this point don’t seem like they’re going to provide enough payoff to justify this much build-up.
Lester’s Trial Begins
Suits LA doesn’t have a “villain”, per se; one of its strengths is that all of its core characters seem to be more or less on the same page but are just divided by differences in approach or petty long-ago squabbles. Episode 5, though, introduces the closest thing, not to mention another potential candidate in the bad guy arena, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
In the meantime, Elizabeth Smith – yikes. Not only a legal eagle but, apparently, willing to flout ethics entirely if it means winning an argument, which is perhaps just as well since Ted is very much the same. This means it’s a little difficult to swallow his performative outrage when Elizabeth beats him at his own game; between his hypocrisy and stuff like the sex dream, he’s not the most likable character in general.
Here’s the gist of it: Elizabeth interrupts Ted’s opening statement to announce she plans to subpoena Lester’s divorce transcripts in light of the Los Angeles Times running a story from Lester’s wife about how great of a guy he is (for which, you’ll recall from the previous episode, she was rewarded with a role in her dream movie.) Amanda deduces more or less immediately that Elizabeth planted the story so she could subpoena the evidence, a tactic she has used before, so Ted has to find proof of this before they’re due back in court.
Things Are Not Going Well for Ted Pt. 1
Luckily, they’re granted an additional 24-hour reprieve when Lester suddenly goes missing, with it later being revealed that Ted was deliberately sheltering him to give Kevin time to find the phone records proving Elizabeth was responsible for the story. Despite Kevin procuring a signed affidavit proving that Elizabeth coerced a journalist into writing the story, she’s nonetheless allowed access to the divorce transcripts, meaning the whole thing was largely for naught. She also figures out immediately that Ted was hiding Lester to buy time, so they’re both as bad as each other, really.
However, this isn’t what Amanda signed up for. Ted didn’t tell her – or Kevin, to be fair – about the fact he was hiding Lester, and since he was putting Amanda’s reputation on the line by doing so, she immediately steps down as his second chair. The title of Suits LA Episode 5, “You’re On Your Own”, is what she says to Ted when she resigns.
To make matters worse Ted had already reflexively blamed Stuart for the leak and socked him in the mouth in his office, burning even more bridges with him and Samantha, it turns out entirely misguidedly. Professionally and personally, he’s on the back foot now. And things are only going to get worse.
Josh McDermitt and Stephen Amell in Suits LA | Image via NBC
Things Are Not Going Well for Ted Pt. 2
While all this is going on, Kevin – who you’ll recall was suspicious of Lester in the first place – realizes that the statement he gave to the police is too similar to the version he gave his legal team, right down to tiny embellishments. It feels very rehearsed, like he’s, say… reading from a script. Fancy that.
Because she’s the head of entertainment, despite knowing nothing about entertainment, Kevin goes to Erica for help. Erica goes to Leah, who generally knows what she’s talking about, but Leah points Erica in the direction of Rick, who also worked closely with Lester. If he stole the story from a script, perhaps an unpublished one, he’d be the guy to know.
This, of course, gives Erica and Rick the opportunity for plenty of flirting, but it also gets everyone in the cast on the same page, more or less, and Suits LA seems to work much better when everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet. And the team-up also yields another breakthrough in the case. Rick recalls the statement from one of Lester’s un-optioned screenplays. It’s all a fiction.
Kevin immediately and angrily confronts Lester with this, and he confesses to killing his partner. The question now is what the precise circumstances of that killing were, because if Lester opted to lie in the first place, the implication is that he’s much more guilty than he first seemed. And you know how Ted feels about lawyers who knowingly defend guilty clients.
Past Is Prologue
There are, of course, some flashback sequences in Suits LA Episode 5, and typically they’re not great. I really don’t think anyone cares enough about this backstory to justify how longwinded it’s becoming, but if nothing else it does crack a window into some of the show’s longstanding relationships. In last week’s flashbacks, we saw a lot of Ted’s early relationship with Stuart, and here, Kevin factors in much more heavily.
This might add a little necessary texture, but I still think it’s pointless, especially because the whole mob boss angle feels very generic. It also doesn’t really tell us much we didn’t already know about Ted, who continues to be reckless and self-serving in the present. Sure, it’s a shame that Pellegrini having Samantha’s comedian client murdered scuppered his proposal plans, but that’s kinda what mob bosses do.
I can’t be sure, but I think I know where all these flashbacks are going. And so, I suspect, does everyone else.
