‘Presumed Innocent’ Season Finale Recap: Confessions of a Killer

If you’ve been reading along with these reviews of Presumed Innocent all season long — and why wouldn’t you? It’s a good show! — you’ll have noticed they tend to focus less on whodunit and more on who’s involved in the whodunit. The great strength of David E. Kelley and company’s adaptation of Scott Turow’s sexy legal thriller is its characters, and the people who were hired to root around inside of them and see what they can uncover.

Jake Gyllenhaal, for example, has quietly become my favorite actor of his generation. He has the eyes of a big softie, the body of a badass, and the barely restrained energy of someone in a manic phase. Perfect casting for Rusty Sabich, someone you want riding the knife’s edge between “no way he did it” and “but I don’t blame them for thinking so one bit.”

Ruth Negga’s Barbara Sabich is a study in how to avoid the dreaded Long-Suffering Wife stereotype, and I don’t just mean because of her almost-thing with Clifton the Sexy Bartender earlier in the season. From the start, by making her aware of the affair (though not its full extent), the show paints her her an adult partner capable of making complex compromises, not a child bride shocked to find her man on the cheatin’ side of town. Especially in this episode, as her life really comes crashing down, you can see all the weight of all that decision-making suffocating her.

The bad guys are great too, almost to the point of distraction. I would so happily watch a show about Peter Sarsgaard’s Tommy Molto as he sulks and whines his way right past the constant positive reinforcement provided by his boss, O-T Fagbenle’s singular Nico Della Guardia. You can see why “Delay” is so quick to praise Tommy’s legal acumen and so quick to more or less openly mock his emotional instability. The guy is as good as he is insufferable; Nico is maybe even harder to listen to for more than a few seconds at a time than his underling, but he’ll never self-deprecate in a way that demands you fluff his ego immediately, which puts him ahead in my book. I can’t get enough of these guys.

With all that in mind, I don’t think it’s an insult to the work being done by director Anne Sewitsy and writers Kelley, Sharr White, and Miki Johnson in this episode to say the big climax couldn’t help but feel a bit anticlimactic. 

Don’t get me wrong: They pulled out all the stops. There’s the closing statements, the buildup to the verdict, and the verdict itself to get through first, and that cranks up the tension considerably. Then the final revelation is staged as an intense one-on-one between Rusty and Barbara. Rusty is 100% convinced Barbara was the real killer all along, a fact he tried to cover up by tying Carolyn Polhemus’ corpse up to throw off suspicion. Barbara knows she has nothing to do with it, and all of a sudden her husband is a) confessing he hog-tied the corpse of his dead lover, and b) accusing her of doing the killing. Both characters look like they’re going completely insane. 

They’re about to feel even crazier. Jaden, their teenage daughter, steps into the garage and comes clean. She killed Carolyn Polhemus, after the woman revealed she was pregnant with Rusty’s daughter. She left the murder weapon at Tommy’s house out of fear her father was losing the case. She’s the family member Rusty’s been protecting, unbeknownst to him.

So they agree to never speak of it again. And to paraphrase Don Draper, it will shock you how much it never happened. Relieved of the duties of his final trial, Rusty’s pal Ray Horgan goes back to gardening with his wife Lorraine. Tommy Molto, last seen dejected and despairing over his total defeat at the hands of the rival who stole the gal he loved, gets his mojo back enough to enjoy a football game with his cat, to whom he has surrendered his armchair. (A cat owner wrote that detail, you can bet your bottom dollar.) Jaden lies on a blanket on a lawn someplace, gazing dreamily. Later, she helps her mom prepare Thanksgiving dinner. All’s well that ends well..until next season.

A big twist, to be sure. And a better one than that of the very similar but short-lived Fatal Attraction series from last year, too. But throughout the season, I wasn’t really asking myself who killed Carolyn Polhemus. I was asking myself Why does Rusty act that way? and Since he’s constantly thinking of her in sexual terms, is he going to try to satiate that sex drive elsewhere again at some point? and Can Tommy Molto be saved? and Why does Nico Della Guardia sound like that anyway? Solve as many murders as you want as long as you let me keep those investigations wide open.

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.