Summary
The Rainmaker reaches an obvious tipping point for Rudy and Sarah in Episode 4, but the case itself remains interesting and surprisingly dangerous.
I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but it only took until Episode 4 for The Rainmaker to prove me right about Rudy and Sarah. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? I’m not sure their breakup is necessarily official just yet, but we’re definitely heading that way, especially after Sarah’s slip of the tongue is used against her, making her look stupid in front of Leo and Noonan. Rudy, at least, has a rebound lined up in the form of Kelly, but that’s assuming her husband hasn’t killed her after discovering her money stash, which is the cliffhanger ending this episode leaves us with.
Aside from all this, which admittedly seems like quite a lot, The Rainmaker continues to circle the same conflict – Rudy and co. believe Donny Ray was murdered, while Leo and co. know that he probably was, but nonetheless need to prove he wasn’t. When you factor in the wildcard, which is Melvin being absolutely bonkers, you have a pretty compelling framework, and based on the state of Jane Allen by episode’s end, things are only going to get more dangerous as they go.
Anyway, about Sarah. When she stops off at the bar Rudy’s working to pay his rent until the outcome of this case, the two of them naturally bicker about the details, despite having an agreement not to mention it. Sarah gets wound up defending Jackie when he implies that she might have killed Donny, and uses her membership of the so-called “Tissue Committee” to prove she was good people. This is a new term for Rudy. As we later discover, it refers to a group within the hospital, of which Jackie was indeed a member, that looks into deaths and complications. Jackie had reported suspicions about Donny’s death and Melvin injecting something into his IV bag, and was subsequently fired for it. If word of that gets out, there’ll be hell to pay.
I’m still not buying any of the Rudy and Sarah drama. The show’s doing a really poor job of validating Sarah’s point of view as anything other than self-serving, willing delusion. After Rudy bumps into Melvin in the elevator on the way to his preliminary hearing, Melvin asks him outright if Rudy killed his mother, since he was told that he did. But was he told that Rudy did it, or that a lawyer did it? If Melvin didn’t kill his mother – and this seems to confirm he didn’t, no matter how many other people he has murdered since then – then someone else did, and since Melvin had been reported, it was in the hospital’s best interests to want him gone. The hospital works with Tinley Britt. It shouldn’t be hard for someone, especially Sarah, to figure out that something is badly amiss here.
This is why Rudy feels okay sharing the information about the Tissue Committee, despite the fact that pursuing it will reveal it was Sarah who gave him that information. She’s pretending not to know right from wrong – not to know anything, she says when Rudy argues with her about it later – to keep living in her swanky house and pulling in her hefty paycheck. She deserves the comeuppance.
This also goes some way towards explaining why Rudy is so keen on interfering in Kelly’s life – this and the fact he’s basically waging a one-man crusade against domestic abusers at the best of times. She’s like the antithesis of Sarah, an honest woman trapped in terrible circumstances through no fault of her own. Things don’t look good for her at the end of The Rainmaker Episode 4, and I suspect this is where Rudy will intervene, since he hasn’t been constantly asking to help for no reason. As if Sarah needs another reason to be annoyed with him, sniffing around another woman, even one who badly needs his help, will probably do it.
This is technically one of two cliffhangers. The other involves Jane Allen, Tinley Britt’s resident private investigator, who ends the episode on death’s door after being stabbed by Melvin, whose reign of terror continues here, even if he hasn’t quite gotten around to killing Jackie yet. Jackie has a file that is important to Melvin – I assume it’s the one detailing Jackie’s claims about him injecting Donny Ray – and one assumes he would quite like to destroy it, which should hopefully keep Jackie alive long enough for her to be rescued. Jane might not be so lucky, though. And since we’re only halfway through the season, who else might Melvin feel he needs to get rid of before the case is closed?
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