‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 3 Episode 1 Recap: Snakes For The Memories

One thing we’ve learned about Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) over two seasons of The Lincoln Lawyer : he loves to get chocolate in his peanut butter. Not purely in a foodie sense, though Mickey does remain a renowned epicurean. No, we’re talking about how this guy is always mixing the pleasures of his personal life with the pressures of his professional self. Remember how Mickey’s Season 2 hookupship with Los Angeles restaurateur Lisa Trammell (Lana Parrilla) coexisted with him helping her beat a murder rap? Not only did they return to sleeping together after she’d been cleared, but Mickey later had Lisa arrested upon his deduction that she actually had killed somebody: her husband, who she buried in her garden . Since Mickey Haller also maintains close relationships with both his former wives – Maggie McPherson (Neve Campbell), who’s also a prosecutor, and Lorna Crane (Becki Newton), his office’s chief legal aide – it’s clear that Mickey doesn’t just mix his chocolate and peanut butter from scratch. It’s part of his original recipe.

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And he’s doing it again.

The Season 2 finale of Lincoln Lawyer prepared us for this. Sex worker Gloria “Glory Days” Dayton (Fiona Rene) had been a confidante of Mickey’s since the first season. But there she was, dead on a slab down at the LA County morgue, and in the present, Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye) is in custody and accused of her murder. Tech-savvy Julian, who worked as a digital facilitator for Glory’s escort clientele, says she told him to call Mickey if he was ever in trouble. And so the attorney arrives at his usual predicament. Are the details of this case too personal for him to take on? Or does the fact that it is personal inform his interest the most? Lorna’s right. With Mickey Haller, it seems like it’s always personal. And however that plays out in the legal world, well, with his tactical game in the courtroom and support from his staff, a group that also includes the resourceful Izzy Letts (Jazz Raycole) and investigator Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski (Angus Sampson), they should come out in the clear.

As a defense attorney, Mickey’s actually been playing tactics for years. In the opening episode of Lincoln Lawyer Season 3, we also get two interesting flashbacks to 15 years before, when Mickey was still a public defender and still happily married to Maggie. For the series, it’s a means of inserting Neve Campbell back into Lincoln . Campbell is terrific as Maggie, but she also moved full-time to San Diego at the end of last season, and took their daughter Hayley (Krista Warner) with her. The flashbacks show us idealistic bits of their origin story together, from before Mickey went private and escalated his criminal defense lawyer flash factor, when he still had his body board and car seat in the back of a beat-up VW, and they were just a young family making ends meet.

In that same past, a case Mickey solves using his particular razzle dazzle also exposes Detective Neil Bishop as a liar. (Bishop is played by the always great Holt McCallany, back on Netflix post- Mindhunter .) It’s the kind of courtroom win that will become his legal calling card. But the flashbacks also show us another origin story. When Mickey spies a luscious 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible for sale, he sees his own future reflecting off its miles and miles of chrome detail.

For The Lincoln Lawyer to be the Lincoln Lawyer, he’s gonna need a driver, and with Izzy working in both the office and at her dance studio, the position is open. Enter Eddie Rojas (Allyn Moriyon), a childhood babysitter of Hayley’s – he’s mentioned in the flashbacks – who’s grown up to be a musclebound enthusiast of smoothies prepared with kale, burdock root, and nettle leaf. After Mickey gets Eddie out of a supposed Beverly Hills carjacking beef that was actually an instance of racial profiling, he offers him the job as his new driver, which Eddie is eager to accept. (Moriyon’s eagerness is palpable; as Eddie, he instantly adds a fresh dynamic to the Mickey Haller support team.) With Eddie driving either the Continental or the matte silver Lincoln Navigator, and Cisco chasing down the details of Glory’s movements around the time she was killed, and Lorna and Izzy gathering paperwork and court documents, Julian La Cosse’s case as an accused murderer is gearing up to be Mickey’s next big Los Angeles lawfare splash.

Another high-profile murder trial for one of the city’s top criminal defense attorneys? Beyond the conflict of interest it poses, the visibility also means Mickey Haller is again taking on the kind of risk that Maggie used to warn him about. Julian swears he didn’t murder Glory Days. But if he is innocent, then who did the deed? Mickey’s friendship with Glory also entailed her snitching on some drug cartel business during one of his cases. With the suspicious circumstances of her death, Mickey has some concern that it might be connected to feared cartel guy Hector Moya. They call Moya “La Culebra,” the snake, and murderous cartel heat isn’t the kind of chocolate anyone wants in their peanut butter. But if Mickey’s past actions in any way contributed to the death of his friend Glory, then he believes the risk is worth the stretch. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to process it any other way.

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That night, as Eddie drives Mickey back to his rad midcentury ranch up in Baldwin Vista, they find out how the cartel and La Culebra like to process things. The place is totally trashed, and a rattlesnake has been left behind by way of a warning, curled and snapping in Mickey’s bed. How’s that for inherent risk?

Johnny Loftus ( @glennganges ) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.

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