By Johnny Loftus for Decider
“If the cartel wanted me dead, I’d be dead. We’d all be dead.” While the crew at Haller & Associates isn’t swayed by Mickey’s blasé attitude about the home invasion that turned his sweet pad upside down and deposited a chattering rattlesnake in his bedroom, he has a point about Hector “La Culebra” Moya and the cartel.
The stunt was meant to scare him, not kill him. Scare him right off the Glory Days murder case. Which probably also means Julian La Cosse, the guy arrested for her murder, is somehow being framed. Mickey’s using his lawyer brain to visualize the long game. Which is the same thing he does later, in court on a different case. As a criminal defense attorney, there are ways to finagle a workable result, even if you’re defending a terrible person. Like inspiring your client, an avowed criminal, to attack you in the middle of a hearing. Mickey will take a few punches to the face and ruin his dress shirt if it gets him the mistrial that he wanted.
“The bloody flag.” That’s what Mickey’s crafty old mentor David “Legal” Siegel (Elliott Gould) calls the tactic when Mickey and Eddie Rojas pick him up from the hospital. And get this, Mickey even had blood capsules in his mouth ready to burst. Hearing this from the driver’s seat, Eddie is incredulous. But it’s a hardball move from way back when Legal was still working with Mickey’s lawyer father, a famously hardball guy. “If you want to represent outlaws,” Siegel says to Eddie, “sometimes you gotta be one, too.”
It’s one thing he couldn’t plan, but Mickey running into prosecutor Andrea “Andy” Freeman (Yaya DaCosta) outside the courthouse with his shirt all bloody is one way to make a new impression. “Why do so many people wanna take a swing at that face?” Andy asks with a smile, and it’s a nice continuation of the sparring that marked their interactions last season, during the Lisa Trammell case. Freeman recommends to Haller her personal bad day lifehack, which is a French dip and negroni from DTLA mainstay Cole’s. The Lincoln Lawyer just loves its reference points to the Los Angeles restaurant scene.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.