Photo: Erik Voake/CBS
One of the odder aspects of aging is that our brains continue to code anyone who presents as classically “old” — gray hair, wrinkles, whatnot — as being part of the same generation as the elderly people of our youth. I bring this up because in this week’s Matlock, Matty has a meaningful conversation with a peer about seeing Janis Joplin at Woodstock, and it took me a moment to overcome my cognitive dissonance. To my 54-year-old mind, septuagenarians ought to be listening to Guy Lombardo and Frank Sinatra, even though I should know that they were probably dope-smokin’ teenagers during the Summer of Love. I’m guilty — as many of us are — of assigning traits and beliefs to a person just based on how they look.
And yet the irony of Matty’s Joplin spiel is that it’s all a tactic: an effort to get close to a woman who might hold the key to Jacobson-Moore’s latest case. Olympia’s team is defending Tranquil Pines, an assisted living facility being sued by the family of Walter Higgins, who died from a stroke that might’ve been prevented if the staff had been more attentive. Matty’s assignment is to coax some useful intel from the residents by relating to them, oldster to oldster. That’s how she ends up talking about free love and rock ’n’ roll with Lucille (Joanna Cassidy), Walter’s girlfriend.
What Olympia and Matty are hoping to prove is that Walter’s libertine lifestyle was more to blame for his death than any nursing home negligence. There are rumors about Walter popping ED meds without telling his doctors, so Matty dons her best knockoff Ann Taylor slacks and pretends to be a potential resident, so she can ask all the horny biddies to spill their hottest tea about the Tranquil Pines dating scene. (Gesturing toward a man with a walker, one lady says, “His legs don’t work so well. But his tongue…?”)
As happens from time to time on Matlock, Matty’s job — along with the practical necessities of her secret scheme — has put her on the wrong side of a fight, making choices that hurt the undeserving. She pushed Olympia to take this case in the first place because Tranquil Pines was one of Julian’s clients. By poaching them, Olympia will keep the animosity in her divorce case at such a high level that it may lead to a discovery process that will unseal some usefully juicy Jacobson-Moore documents. In service of that tactic — itself quite sleazy — Matty finds herself trying to help Olympia prove that a seemingly very nice man was responsible for his own sad, lonely death.
She also finds herself manipulating Sarah in ways that could become a real problem. Sarah reluctantly accompanies Matty on her trips to Tranquil Pines, where she reveals a more vulnerable part of herself. Initially grumpy about having to spend so much time surrounded by “the smell of old people,” Sarah at one point does something incredibly sensitive and tender by helping a dementia-addled resident back to her room and singing Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” to her.
In addition to giving Leah Lewis another chance to show off her lovely singing voice, Sarah’s scenes at the nursing home give Lewis a chance to deliver a couple of knockout monologues about her character’s past and her cultural identity. First, when Matty scoffs at Sarah’s suggestion that she pretends to be her granddaughter — saying, “You and I don’t exactly swim in the same gene pool” — Sarah curtly says that she was adopted and that her actual grandmother does, in fact, look just like Matty. Later, after helping the lady with dementia, Sarah tells the story of how her grandmother would savagely defend her against anyone who said anything nasty about her ethnicity … until she got dementia herself, at which point she would scream, “Get this Chinese girl out of my room!”
Sarah’s big personal moments reminded me a lot of some of the better Olympia scenes from earlier in this season when she’d snap at Matty for expecting the kind of special deference that a Black woman rarely receives in such a high-pressure profession. And just as Olympia’s honesty eventually softened Matty’s opinion of her in ways potentially detrimental to her mission, so Sarah’s honesty leads to a snap decision and a strategic error.
See, there’s a second case-of-the-week this week, involving Autry (Hal Williams), the helpful elderly witness from back in Matlock’s second episode. In addition to giving the team a hand with their current case — by using his expertise as a retired electrician to point out how Tranquil Pines’ residents are disabling their room’s security features — Autry needs some assistance from Jacobson-Moore. His co-op wants to evict him for playing his TV too loud, though he believes the real reason they want him gone is because his neighbor wants Autry’s apartment.
Olympia has no time to dedicate to this, so she tells Matty to decide whether Sarah or Billy will be arguing Autry’s case. Matty initially picks Sarah, having seen at Tranquil Pines how she can connect with an older person when she has to. But then Matty capriciously switches the assignment to Billy, who ends up rocking in court, proving Autry’s sneaky neighbor was secretly cranking up Autry’s TV at night with a stolen remote control.
Billy’s success, coupled with his useful suggestions to Olympia on the Tranquil Pines case, leaves Sarah seething. She blames Matty for what has turned out to be several very bad days at the office. And when Matty sincerely says, “I’m sorry,” Sarah icily replies, “You will be.”
I dunno … Maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea for someone who has been poking around in Jacobson-Moore’s digital files to make an enemy of someone dating a Jacobson-Moore IT worker. Something else to keep in mind: Sarah is in an a cappella group with Shae, “the human lie detector,” who also has her own reasons to take out Matty.
Why did it go down this way? Because Matty’s spy pen was taken from Julian’s office by someone innocently using it as an actual pen. When the pen makes its way into Olympia’s hands, Billy recognizes it right away as a surveillance device and offers to take it to the police officers in his family. Since the email account attached to the pen’s streaming data could be traced, Matty has to steal it back, and when Billy catches her rummaging around in his desk, she changes the subject by handing him Audrey’s case. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Maybe there are good reasons why Matty’s making so many unforced errors. Perhaps her subconscious is rebelling, realizing she’s been crossing too many moral and ethical lines. With Tranquil Pines, Matty and Olympia win their case by proving that Lucille poisoned Walter. But Lucille only did this because Walter asked her to — because he hated Tranquil Pines so much that he wanted to die. This is the institution that Matty defended, and all because she wanted Olympia and Julian to stay mad at each other. Where’s the win?
There’s also this: Matty is old. She has no trouble passing for a potential resident at Tranquil Pines among all those folks who are growing physically weaker and losing their memories. There’s a touching moment in this episode when Matty tries to cheer up Olympia, who’s worried this case is slipping away from her — along with her career. Matty reassures her that she has plenty of success ahead and that Olympia may end up running Jacobson-Moore for 40 years. As for Matty? “I’ll be long gone, girl,” she says.
In other words: The time she has left to do something meaningful is ticking away, and she knows it. She won’t have this opportunity at Jacobson-Moore — or her faculties — forever. That makes it all the more heartbreaking when her decisions make matters worse.
• Sarah’s professional setbacks do suck for her, don’t get me wrong. But I have to say … some of it is her fault? She’s persistently bad at connecting with clients and witnesses; plus, she seems openly willing to break the laws she’s sworn to uphold. In the Tranquil Pines case, for example, when the team discovers new facts detrimental to their client, Sarah immediately asks, “Do we have to tell the other side?” Yikes. Is that the kind of lawyer you want leading a team?
• As tense as this episode is, there are moments of levity, mainly involving Billy’s enormous belt buckle. He sports the new buckle to project confidence and impress women, which prompts Sarah to quip, “If you find a woman who likes that belt, marry her.” Seconds later, Matty walks into the office and says, “Cute belt!” Then, when Autry arrives, he’s impressed both with Billy’s trial strategy and with his belt, given that Autry has a big buckle of his own. (“Smart thinking from my buckle buddy!”)
• Matty does, in fact, get her spy pen back from Billy and replaces it with another one that Billy’s cop kin can’t trace. The reason? This makes Olympia more paranoid, so she suspects Julian is spying on her. This is all going to get so ugly.
