Summary
As The Rainmaker enters the home stretch, the courtroom drama occupies most of the focus, pitting Rudy against Sarah more directly than ever.
That excitable, itchy feeling of a penultimate episode definitely creeps into The Rainmaker here, and it’s perhaps just as well, since it hasn’t always been a smooth ride getting to this point. We’ve been diverted by subplots at every turn, not all of them strictly related to the overarching case, and it has sometimes felt frustrating to see Rudy’s one step forward, two steps back approach to both evidence-gathering and in-court lawyering. There’s a bit of that here in Episode 9, by design, but the evidence in his favour is now so obvious and overwhelming that small matters like established protocols of the law itself seem like small affairs.
Part of the frustration for the audience and Rudy himself has been the obviousness of Melvin’s guilt – which was never treated as a secret – and the Tinley Britt cover-up, and yet the difficulty of proving that in court, thanks to oodles of red tape and arcane procedure that big, expensive law firms have gotten down to a fine art. At its heart, this is a David vs Goliath story; that was true was Rudy was still working with J. Lyman Stone, but after tactically parting ways with Bruiser, it’s more true than ever, since his “law firm” now consists of just him and Deck.
It’s Rudy and Deck who have to go toe-to-toe with Leo and Sarah in court. And initially, there’s a bit of push-pull tension about whether Rudy will be forced to side with a winnable argument or tell the riskier truth. It doesn’t last long, though, since we already know what Rudy is going to do. He goes off-script in his opening statement and lays out his real argument, which is that Great Benefit, with the help of Tinley Britt, covered up not just a wrongful death but a string of fifteen murders by a crazy serial killer who was on their payroll. That, predictably, sets the cat amongst the pigeons right from the off.
After a bit of back and forth, Rudy is allowed 24 hours to prove his claim, for which he talks Jackie Lemanczyk into testifying. It seems like a big deal, since her evidence is very compelling. But none of it is admissible since the evidence was acquired illegally, which is bad news for Rudy since his entire argument is based on it.
Deck comes up with a solid idea to represent the families of all Melvin’s victims in order to prove a pattern of behaviour, but every relative they call reveals they have already been approached and bought off by a representative of Tinley Britt. At least one of those bribes was organised by Sarah, who has unambiguously turned to the dark side at this point. She learned in the previous episode that Keeley knew what was going on and decided that getting him off the hook was somehow a moral imperative since he also likes literature, which is a very flimsy way of justifying advancing her own career. What she doesn’t seem to realise is that Leo’s near-obsessive fondness for her is all part of a plan to shut Noonan out, since if Tinley Britt loses the case, Leo clearly plans to fit him up for all the illegal stuff he instructed him to do on the firm’s behalf.
Bruiser’s contribution to the case, in between dealing with her father and the Feds, is suggesting putting Jackie back on the stand and quizzing her about the Narpans machine. There are clear records of Melvin ordering morphine from the medical dispensation machine and then cancelling that order, leaving three seconds for him to take the drugs off-record. Records that Wilfred Keeley claimed were summarily erased as a matter of course turn out to be stored indefinitely unless an instruction to delete them is made from one of a very small number of in-the-know higher-ups, virtually proving he destroyed evidence and then misled the court. However, Sarah viciously assassinates Jackie’s character, mostly in terms of her private romantic life, which doesn’t have anything to do with any of the claims being made, but might be enough to sway a jury.
That subplot about Bruiser’s dad finally pays off for the main case in The Rainmaker Episode 9, albeit somewhat indirectly. Bruiser’s main concern was whether her dad killed Rosalie or organised it through Prince, but neither of those things happened. He’s a crooked guy, but he’s not a murderer. Since he and Prince are leaving town to evade arrest by the Feds, this might very well allow Bruiser to get back involved in the case against Melvin, which should make for a big, crowd-pleasing finale.
And it’ll certainly be easier to do now since Prince leaves Rudy a parting gift – Melvin, chained up in the basement.
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