By Johnny Loftus for Decider
One thing we’ve learned about Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) over two seasons of The Lincoln Lawyer: he loves to get chocolate in his peanut butter. Not purely in a foodie sense, though Mickey does remain a renowned epicurean. No, we’re talking about how this guy is always mixing the pleasures of his personal life with the pressures of his professional self.
Remember how Mickey’s Season 2 hookupship with Los Angeles restaurateur Lisa Trammell (Lana Parrilla) coexisted with him helping her beat a murder rap? Not only did they return to sleeping together after she’d been cleared, but Mickey later had Lisa arrested upon his deduction that she actually had killed somebody: her husband, who she buried in her garden. Since Mickey Haller also maintains close relationships with both his former wives – Maggie McPherson (Neve Campbell), who’s also a prosecutor, and Lorna Crane (Becki Newton), his office’s chief legal aide – it’s clear that Mickey doesn’t just mix his chocolate and peanut butter from scratch. It’s part of his original recipe.
The Season 2 finale of Lincoln Lawyer prepared us for this. Sex worker Gloria “Glory Days” Dayton (Fiona Rene) had been a confidante of Mickey’s since the first season. But there she was, dead on a slab down at the LA County morgue, and in the present, Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye) is in custody and accused of her murder. Tech-savvy Julian, who worked as a digital facilitator for Glory’s escort clientele, says she told him to call Mickey if he was ever in trouble. And so the attorney arrives at his usual predicament. Are the details of this case too personal for him to take on? Or does the fact that it is personal inform his interest the most? Lorna’s right. With Mickey Haller, it seems like it’s always personal. And however that plays out in the legal world, well, with his tactical game in the courtroom and support from his staff, a group that also includes the resourceful Izzy Letts (Jazz Raycole) and investigator Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski (Angus Sampson), they should come out in the clear.
As a defense attorney, Mickey’s actually been playing tactics for years. In the opening episode of Lincoln Lawyer Season 3, we also get two interesting flashbacks to 15 years before, when Mickey was still a public defender and still happily married to Maggie. For the series, it’s a means of inserting Neve Campbell back into Lincoln. Campbell is terrific as Maggie, but she also moved full-time to San Diego at the end of last season, and took their daughter Hayley (Krista Warner) with her. The flashbacks show us idealistic bits of their origin story together, from before Mickey went private and escalated his criminal defense lawyer flash factor, when he still had his body board and car seat in the back of a beat-up VW, and they were just a young family making ends meet.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.