We have finally arrived at the zenith of the legal thriller: It’s trial time. The wave of intrigue we’ve been riding is cresting and about to break. Witnesses will be examined, attorneys will object, judges will sustain, and the faceless, characterless jury will decide the fate of our main guy, Rusty Sabich. If just by virtue of being the second act’s off-ramp, the trial raises the tension and the story’s stakes. Presumed Innocent is not slowing down on the drama, either.
“The Elements” starts with Rusty pacing the courtroom, the ambient noise muffled by his booming steps, the light yellow. Dr. Kumagai is on the stand, and Rusty jumps at his neck again — the impact of the motion jerks him back to his real-time place next to Raymond in the courtroom. This is only the first time in this episode that we will see Rusty violently grab someone; more on that later. Right now, I’m thinking about how this show’s constant and constantly annoying speculative interjections serve as a way to defamiliarize this space to Rusty — to render the courtroom, usually his terrain, strange to him. They work most effectively when they’re used with a purpose.
In the last episode, Raymond had a dream in which his head exploded in his office, his brain splattering everywhere. Rusty has had similarly gruesome dreams, though in those the brains that splatter are never his. These sequences all kind of meld together in the greater rhythm of did-this-happen-or-not scenes, but in the case of Raymond’s head explosion, it was clearly a setup: As he is cross-examining Michael, Carolyn’s kid, who was brought back to the stand despite his father’s best efforts, he loses his balance and falls on the floor with a thud. Screaming for him — notably calling him by his nickname, Ray, when he’s mostly called Raymond in the presence of others — Rusty rushes to his side, as does Lorraine, so desperate that a vein in her forehead pops. Even with her hand covering her mouth, you can feel the urgency of her distress.
“The Elements” ends with Raymond’s heart attack, bringing the episode full circle with the themes set up in the cold open: The courtroom becomes even more strange as Raymond loses consciousness and a defibrillator is brought out to revive him. Paired with the payoff from his head-exploding dream, the episode’s ending gives some reason to the interjections that have been punctuating every episode up to here — and creates an expectation that other loose speculations will come together into something as we get closer to the finish line. As the third act rises and the story rushes toward its climax, there is little room to keep turning back; we’re speeding down a one-way lane. In the legal thriller, that’s the function of the trial: It dominates the story by shooting it ahead.
The performative appeal of the trial isn’t lost on the characters, either. Sitting with Mya and Raymond after their first day in the courtroom, the defense team advises Barbara to look more … touched. Or fragile. They suggest Rusty put his arms around her coming in and out of the courthouse in a show of protection. Barbara would rather be hog-tied herself than pretend that Rusty is a “protective husband.” To perform for the jury, Barbara argues, would be to “insult [its] intelligence.” So your husband cheats on you for over a year, you’re subjected to seeing every last detail of his affair under investigation, you find out his mistress was pregnant, and you’re supposed to sit there and cry for him as if he’d been the kind of guy to protect you? “In order to be credible, I need to be truthful,” Barbara says. “This is the darkest hour of my fucking life. I will not pretend otherwise.”
“The Elements” is filled with such moments — the kind of landing that makes you clap your hands and point at the screen and say things like “Let’s get this show on the road” to a completely empty apartment. I was actually up and out of my seat when Mya cross-examined Eugenia. Tommy’s threats worked on Eugenia, the third witness to be called on the stand. She fully turns on Rusty, positing that he didn’t seem like himself in his affair with Carolyn and that he was “becoming a little undone, obsessive.” I’m not sure we can call Eugenia a character — she’s more like a mouthpiece for exposition — but it’s only through her testimony that we get any insight into what Carolyn and Rusty’s relationship was like from outside Rusty’s diseased mind. It seems like it was awful.
When Mya takes a turn at Eugenia, the first thing she establishes is that she didn’t like Carolyn, which took me by surprise. So far, I thought Eugenia had been presented as one of Carolyn’s friends. I’d read Tommy’s theory that she was in love with Rusty as outlandish. Through a series of escalating “Gotcha!” questions, Mya determines that the only person Carolyn had ever filed an HR complaint about was Tommy Molto. The whole courtroom stirs. Raymond struggles to suppress a smile, and in his response, Tommy recovers the tone of a vexed child at recess: I wasn’t the one who started; I swear, ask anyone; this is so unfair. As Tommy scrambles to save face, Raymond shoots Nico a cheeky wink — this witness’s testimony ultimately favors the defense.
Throughout the episode, Raymond and Mya are on full display as law-practice virtuosos; it’s part of the reason why Raymond’s heart attack is so catastrophic. His self-possession is lacking not only in Rusty but in Tommy as well; he dominates the courtroom with perfect precision. Knowing that Tommy’s circumstantial evidence can’t prove as much as he hopes it will, every time the prosecution team brings in another piece of evidence it believes will be damning, Raymond finds a way to reframe it. After Dr. Kumagai’s testimony of the victim’s death, Raymond puts it on the record that from medical evidence, it’s impossible to determine who the murderer is or even to come up with a murder weapon. Despite Nico’s advice, Tommy presses Dr. Kumagai to speak on what Rusty was like the day he attacked him in the morgue. But all Raymond has to do is rile him up, which takes about only five seconds, to demonstrate that Dr. Kumagai’s judgment of another person’s agitation is not exactly the most reliable. Chewing Tommy out in the back of their car, Nico puts it perfectly: Kumagai comes across as “an aggrieved, grudge-bearing disgrunt,” one whose analysis of Rusty’s DNA under Carolyn’s fingernails was suspiciously missing from the initial report.
The next afternoon, after the forensic pathologist testifies, Raymond continues to destabilize the prosecution’s evidence. He points out that if Rusty and Carolyn were having a passionate affair, it’s possible that his DNA could’ve found its way underneath her fingernails in a moment of tenderness as much as in a moment of self-defense. Raymond’s main task is to show how circumstantial evidence is not enough to convict a person — that personal bias might be getting in the way of justice. By keeping to this tactic, he will create a reasonable doubt in the jury and demonstrate that nothing Tommy says can be taken at face value, which is just what Tommy feared. In the last episode, we got a glimpse of Tommy’s insecurities about not being taken seriously; in this episode, we are watching as they are expertly weaponized by Raymond. Also important, it becomes obvious that Raymond’s equanimity is crucial to Rusty’s potential acquittal: We have never seen Rusty act with this much levelheadedness.
We have seen Rusty lose his mind quite a few times but never as tellingly as later in this episode when he violently grabs Barbara. A powerful malignant spirit possesses her (it’s the only explanation), and she confesses her brief escapade with Clifton to Rusty, telling him they kissed at his apartment. At first, I was thrilled that even though I know Rusty is erratic, it was hard to guess how he’d react: unpredictability is a sign of a character coming more fully into himself and slipping away from the viewer’s hands. But then he reacted selfishly, and I thought, Of course he did. He asks Barbara, “How does it feel to make a fucking mistake?,” which once again makes her understandably storm off, except this time she tells him to fuck himself as she does. He takes her arm in an aggressive grip, his eyes clouded over with anger. Tommy’s proposition that, in a moment of fury, Rusty could easily become “other,” a person seized by the desire to hurt, becomes all too credible. Barbara is scared, then angry again. The next day, she refuses to join him at trial.
Even Jaden can intuit, however subtly, that her father could succumb to his demons in a moment of anger. Home from school one night, she tells him about what she learned in psychology class about “trauma and dissociation” and wonders out loud whether he could have dissociated from an action he couldn’t “reconcile with.” His children’s doubts about his innocence always shake him — which in this show is signaled by having him run on the treadmill — but the next morning, Jaden apologizes and offers to go to trial with him in Barbara’s absence. Later, watching Jaden sleep, Rusty poses the million-dollar question to his wife: “Why do you stay?” “The same reason you do,” she replies.
It’s a moment of domestic coziness, the kind of scene reminiscent of scenes past, back when things were “normal,” or at least a little less fucked up. Talking to Lorraine about Clifton and Rusty, Barbara leaves out the fact that Rusty violently grabbed her but defends her confession by saying that lately, in her marriage, she’d been feeling “close and safe.” Barbara used the word safe to describe her feelings seeing Clifton’s artwork as well. I’m not sure that the state of their marriage was telegraphing safety in any way, and this haphazard justification takes away from the impact of Ruth Negga’s “darkest hour” line delivery at the beginning of the episode, as if the writers just had to tack on a motive instead of letting the viewer sink into the mysteries of character.
The next day, things escalate beyond the point of no return. Judge Lyttle offers voluntary manslaughter as the best compromise, even a win-win situation for someone who might face eight years in prison rather than the rest of his life and someone who would either get a conviction or none at all. Nobody buys the idea because their judgments are impaired by the claustrophobia of being in a room crowded with four overinflated egos. In testimony, an enraged Michael brings up what he had already told Tommy about his mother having been scared of someone at work, a person he takes to be Rusty. He has a long back-and-forth with Judge Lyttle about the difference between fact and opinion, and as Raymond stands to press on this matter, he falls to the ground. All hell has broken loose.
Addendum
• As we continue to track how the story of Presumed Innocent has changed since its debut as a novel in 1986, here there is the introduction of DNA evidence, interpreted by the prosecution and defense to suggest opposite things. In the book, the evidence that damns Rusty is totally different: a used beer glass, carpet fiber, and sperm from a man with type-A blood. Scott Turow himself has said that DNA forensics would have totally changed Rusty’s situation back then.
• I am absolutely not changing my mind on Tommy’s villainy, but it was kind of cute when he came home to his cats.
• Some readers have pointed out that Jake Gyllenhaal’s age is distracting — he looks more like his kids’ brother than their parent. It’s not helping his case that he’s wearing a hoodie every other frame when he’s not in the courtroom. They need to stop putting him in a gray high-school-boy hoodie if we’re going to buy him as a father at all!
