The Firm, episode 2: wherein a menacing bald man seeks absolution for killing some girls

The Firm Episode 2

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The suspense is palpable on this week’s Run, Mitch McDeere, Run The Firm, as we’re introduced to Brian, a tortured young man who admits to Mitch that he accidentally hit his girlfriend, Amy, with his car and stashed her body at a lake house (what an opening—but sadly, it wasn’t this lake house). Our TV brief and our Objections and Order in the Court checklist after the jump.

When Brian flees, nothing is as it appears, because 43-year-old Calvin Parker—a disturbed, menacing bald man who has an obsession with missing girls—shows up at the precinct and confesses to strangling Amy to death (twist!). Ray’s (Callum Keith Rennie) razor-sharp sleuthing skills lead to Brian at a youth hostel, and Mitch eventually proves through car mileage (how, we’re not sure) that Brian really was the culprit, that the incident was in fact an accident and that no strangling had actually occurred—so everything is looking up for accidental murderer Brian. But something’s amiss—even though Brian’s little body stash was determined to be an accident, there’s still the matter of this weird guy seeking clemency for a death he didn’t cause. Here are some signs that further investigation was essential: Calvin freaks out and says he is a killer who “must be stopped” (red flag!), and his bedroom is covered in newspaper clippings about missing and murdered girls (we know Martha Stewart revived scrapbooking, but let’s be serious).

Is he the Zodiac killer? No, but he has killed his fair share of women. A fact that is literally uncovered (the ladies were buried in a hole in the floor) by Mitch and his brother, who are hung up on Calvin’s claim that he does his killing in a “red room.” The same room that his mother once taught music in at a now-abandoned school. A different room than the little boy mentions in that scene from The Shining. This case of the week is tied up nicely with the arrest of Calvin Parker (thanks to an anonymous tip from Juliette Lewis’s character, Tammy), but Mitch can’t celebrate just yet: he’s being chased by the firm’s Andrew Parker and Alex Clark for Mitch’s latest defendant’s (Sarah Holt, who seems like she’ll be involved in the most cray cray of cases) computer (more about this to be revealed over the next eight weeks, we’re sure—is this the Veronica Mars of courtroom dramas?). But Mitch is nowhere to be found. Cut to black (dun, dun, dun).

Spoiler alert: He’s on a pay phone outside. But where? (dun, dun, dunnnnn!)

Our observations on where The Firm got it right (Order in the Court) and where it got it wrong (Objections).

Abby McDeere’s teaching methods. Not only do we find out that she’s Claire’s teacher, she breaks the spirit of Heather the cheating student by making her a teaching assistant “because she did so well.” Now this young girl is likely to develop a guilt complex that will haunt her well into her adult years.

Heather the cheater. School may be a war zone, but there’s something about the way she threatens to socially destroy Claire if Abby finds out she cheated that screams, “Maybe this broad works at the Firm, too.”

Mitch’s reaction to the red room dead bodies. He runs away and throws up so realistically, we should probably look into whether Josh Lucas was forced to stumble upon actual corpses.

Andrew Parker’s suit. Mitch makes a quip about not meeting with anyone who wears $5,000 suits, and Andrew takes off his jacket and throws it away. This proves that Andrew is too stupid to work at the Firm—or any firm.

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