By Johnny Loftus for Decider
With Izzy’s promotion and the position of Lincoln Lawyer driver once again open — maybe don’t put in the ad what happened to the last guy — Mickey Haller has time to think while he drives himself between the house, the office, and the hospital where Julian La Cosse is recovering from getting shivved in prison.
What would the people he has lost tell him? “You took your eye off the ball,” Glory Days tells Mickey from the empty backseat. “You’re doing that thing again Mr. Haller,” Eddie Rojas says. “Where you blame yourself for everything that happens to the other people in your life.” And when his father appears, it’s with a whiskey tumbler in hand. “If you really wanna be as good as I was,” says the ghost of Mickey Haller Sr. (Jon Tenney, returning from season 1), “better than I was, you need to do whatever it takes to get that ‘not guilty.’ Your client expects nothing less.”
This “I see dead people” conceit is a nice addition to a Lincoln Lawyer Season 3 that’s featured a few other interesting wrinkles, like the time jump that set up Mickey and Andrea’s romance or the wakeup call of Eddie’s startling kill-off. But with Julian’s stabbing, the immediate challenge is to block DA Forsythe’s angling for a mistrial. “He knows our story is landing with the jury,” Mickey tells the team, “and he’s going to use this to try and get a do-over. That’s what I’d do.” And so Haller and Lorna get to work convincing Judge Turner to keep the trial alive as Julian fights for his life and Cisco works his contacts to figure out who tried to take it. As Mickey, like all of us, assumes that DeMarco orchestrated Julian’s attack, who walks into the courthouse but the bent DEA agent himself. He’s responding to their subpoena, conveniently offering his testimony where a suspended jury can’t hear.
It’s a tense situation. DeMarco’s lies on the stand are so smooth, even Mickey’s surprised. But he still presses. Did DeMarco know Hector Moya, shot caller for the Tijuana cartel? Does he know anyone in the courtroom, like Forsythe or Neil Bishop? As the latter looks on with an increasingly grim expression, Mickey pushes DeMarco right up to the edge of where the Glory Days murder case converges with the dirty DEA agent’s underhanded moves and his dealings with Bishop. But the judge sustains the DA’s objections, and with a final slithering glare for Mickey, DeMarco walks.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.