‘Presumed Innocent’ Episode 3 Recap: The Night Of

Two observations to start. First, it’s not often I recommend a show based entirely on the strength of one supporting performance, but O-T Fagbenle makes Presumed Innocent such a show. What a villain, man! Imagine being a left-wing scholar getting publicly condescended to by a prosecutor endorsed by Obama. That’s his character, and it’s gorgeously obnoxious. As a bonus you get Peter Sarsgaard as his underling Tommy Molto, who wears shirts from Dan Flashes during his off hours and says things like “You dismiss me at your peril” with total sincerity. The fact that he’s Jake Gyllenhaal’s brother-in-law makes his role as Rusty Sabitch’s nemesis that much funnier.

Second, film and television are not only about what you see, but also the order you see it in. A cut between one image and the next can indicate the simple passage of time, or mark a standard scene transition…or it can imply a direct connection between the content or context of one image and that of the other.

So when the third episode of Presumed Innocent (“Discovery”) cuts from Rusty Sabitch angrily imagining the real killer of Carolyn Pohlemus out there laughing at him directly to his son’s baseball game, you bet your ass I wondered if director Greg Yaitanes and writers Miki Johnson and David E. Kelley were implying that either he or his spectating mother did it. I mean, the cut just seemed so loaded, so pointed. I was a film studies major, I know how this works.

But still, I thought, Nahhhh. If the mom was involved she’s the world’s greatest bullshitter even when she’s alone, and it can’t be the son.

Whoops!

Now it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that the presence of Kyle Sabitch at the scene of the crime — as captured by another visitor that night, Carolyn’s snooping son Michael, who’d been chronicling his mother’s affair from the bushes for some time — is itself a misdirect. I find it hard to believe he knows enough about hogtying a human being to pull that off, let alone the act of killing. But the show is certainly inviting us to look in Kyle’s direction for the time being. 

Your mileage with that may vary. Mine, to be honest, is pretty low; i’s a bit too soapy a twist for my taste. Please note that I mean soapy in the pejorative, “everything happens because of elaborate betrayals and realignments between the same dozen people” sense, not in the complimentary, “there’s lots of sex and twists and the emotions are pitched to the cheap seats” sense. 

Because by that measure, Presumed Innocent remains a success. So far, the Rusty Sabitch case has been a constant drip-drip-drip of additional information, either exculpatory or damning, squeezed out of people who really ought to have told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It turns out, for example, that Rusty was at Carolyn’s on the night of her murder, trying to win her back. That might have been nice for his friend and attorney Raymond Horgan to know!

On the flip side, the person taunting Rusty with this info is Michael, Carolyn’s kid, who’d been spying on the affair. When Rusty begs the boy to turn the footage and pics over to the police, he reveals he’d already spoken to the district attorney. This enables Horgan to righteously dunk on the completely insufferable Tommy Molto and Nico Della Guardia when he catches them red-handed withholding evidence and exposes them to the judge during the discovery phase of the trial. 

One way you can tell Horgan is a better lawyer than Della Guardia is that had he known Rusty’s connection to Carolyn’s case, he’d have taken him off of it. Delay knows Tommy harbors intense personal hatred for Rusty — knows, moreover, that Molto is a seething cauldron of narcissism and self-pity — but he lets the guy keep the job anyway. If Rusty’s lucky, this decision will come back to bite the prosecution.

The intensity of Rusty’s relationship with Carolyn remains a welcome focus. It’s constantly on his mind, as well now you’d expect it to be, given that he was trying to revive it as recently as the day she died. When he visits the crime scene, he can’t stop picturing the two of them fucking on the floor where she was eventually murdered. 

This plays into his conversation with Mya Winslow (Gabby Beans), the defense attorney Raymond brings in to assist on the case. Her first encounter with Rusty is more or less a pissing contest: He bristles at this outsider’s presence in the comfortable two-man dynamic he has going with Raymond, she bristles at his bristling and decides to needle him a bit in a way that almost guarantees they’ll get off on the wrong foot. Whether this is because she’s got basic human weaknesses or because she’s a brilliant defense attorney training him how to deal with hostile questioning is, welcomely, left up to the viewer.

Anyway, Mya quickly brings the conversation around — and I mean quickly, like it’s her first question — to Rusty’s feelings for Carolyn. Did he love her? Was it love or lust? It was both, he explains, and the love part came when he watched her tenderness with a victim of child sexual abuse.

Love and lust both, eh? So that’s what makes a man cross the ‘fuck up your life forever’ divide,” as Mya puts it?

Here he demurs. “Love isn’t what people tell you it is, Mya,” he says. “It’s just something that grows until one day, you just find yourself needing someone.” He can’t afford for the people defending him to have quaint ideas about Twoo Wuv. He knows it really is more complicated than that.

And what about Barbara? What does she know? She knows her husband is fucking up her life. In addition to the aforementioned drip-drip-drip of revelations, the presence of the paparazzi leads her boss to suspend her from her job at an art gallery. She also knows that, if she’s interested in getting laid, that is very much a live possibility. She’s befriended a handsome, obviously intrigued bartender, as effortlessly as you might expect someone who looks like Ruth Negga to do, and she’s got Raymond’s wife Lorraine egging her on for some vengeance sex. (That’s not how she puts it, but come on.)

One final observation: During their conversation over beers, Delay mockingly recalls how Tommy said “the girls are sure gonna like me now” when he got a promotion. He smiles and says they sure did; you can tell this is a lie because no girl alive would let him wear that shirt, and no man with a reasonable shot at girls would wear it. Is Tommy trying to ruin Rusty’s life because Rusty is the man Tommy wishes he were? And isn’t this the kind of hidden depth you want your potboilers to have?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.