The Lincoln Lawyer (Recap) | Mystery Man (S3 E8)

By Johnny Loftus for Decider

With Julian La Cosse’s trial in the Glory Days case still some time away, Mickey Haller and his team are fixated on using the advance hearings on allowable witnesses to construct their framework, specifically designed to implicate bent DEA agent James DeMarco.

The footage from the sting set up by Cisco and Izzy in The Lincoln Lawyer Episode 7, which caught DeMarco and Neil Bishop breaking into a house and planting drugs inside, is definitely an inadmissible “time bomb.” Mickey says it’s no game-changer at all if he and Lorna, as his now-official second attorney, can’t get Judge Turner to “un-nix” DeMarco’s potential testimony. Which is how we enter another contentious meeting in the judge’s chambers between them and DA Forsythe. If they can illustrate how Neil Bishop is relevant as a witness, then the next domino to fall would likely be DeMarco. Leave it to Lorna! Fresh from passing the bar exam, the newly-minted attorney makes acres of case law smoke that ultimately helps persuade Judge Turner.

In that terrific scene, Mickey Haller barely says a thing. He looks between Forsythe and Lorna as they trade barbs before the judge, but he looks mostly at Lorna, and he’s beaming. It’s not like she wasn’t extremely competent before, but as a fully-vested attorney, she’s become truly formidable. A further nice touch: last episode, we saw Lorna working through her draft of this very argument, which pivots on the verb form “to thwart.”

We’re only two episodes from the conclusion of Lincoln Lawyer Season 3. There will be some kind of resolution in the twisty, turny Glory Days murder case – there’s another twist of the knife on that front, so to speak, which we’ll get to that in a second – but in the meantime, this is a good place to highlight this season’s increased comfort level, and the confidence and chemistry displayed by its core cast. For all his charm and magic-making in the courtroom, Mickey Haller knows he’d be nowhere without Lorna, Cisco, and Izzy. (Well, and Eddie Rojas, too. Remember him in your comments on Crochet TikTok.) And this season, we’ve loved how that understanding from Mickey has manifested in the team’s actions. Like with Lorna, running things in the judge’s chambers. Or another moment here in episode 9, when Cisco knows he only has to plant the seed that will get someone to speak. Angus Sampson plays this moment perfectly, with just Cisco’s features and temperament.

Read the rest of the recap, HERE.