In the mid-season/summer finale, Jessica leaves Pearson Specter Litt, and Gina Torres leaves the show! Also, Louis proposes to a pregnant Tara, and OMG, Harvey and Donna end the episode holding hands, in what seems like a platonic way.
Though do platonic friends often hold hands? Not really. Not unless they’re in a rom-com about two best friends who are actually in love but one or both of them hasn’t figured that out yet. So maybe Harvey and Donna shippers do have reason to rejoice. Maybe.
Jessica has made Leonard Bailey’s appeal her #1 priority, because when she was an awkward teen with un-straightened hair and her workaholic doctor father never had time for his wife or daughter, she wanted to become a lawyer, and not the ‘power-hungry bottom-feeding’ kind, but the kind that helps people.
So when Robert Zane warns her that the company her number one client Jim Reynolds works for is shopping around for a new law firm, she makes Harvey and Louis handle that situation, because she has a death row case to fight, damn it.
In court, she slays Georgina, Bailey’s former defender. One for Jessica. She agrees to have Bailey testify about what happened the day of the murders, which is that he and his alibi witness, both of them high on meth, came upon a dying, bleeding girl on the street and he stayed with her until the police came and accused him of killing her and her already dead boyfriend.
Jessica lets Rachel question Bailey before the jury and he comes across as sympathetic. And when Mike and Rachel suggest that Jessica let the victim’s father incriminate himself on the stand (taking a page from the movie A Few Good Men) – with regard to him paying off the alibi witness to go away and not testify before she conveniently died – she goes for it. The gamble works – Bailey is exonerated and released on the spot.
After a verdict like that, Jessica can’t even anymore with the PSL travails. She turns down Robert Zane’s offer to merge firms, as generous and kind-hearted as it is. She’s going to move to Chicago instead with old flame Jeff and fight injustice, an idea Jeff appears to be in full support of, though since when is hitching your limo to the wagon of some guy you went out with for a few months a year ago a good idea for a smart, powerful woman? Never mind. Jessica gets a bittersweet ending and an au revoir.
When she breaks the news to Harvey and Louis, Louis freaks out but Donna, the Voice of Reason, points out that Gina Torres has been released from her contract because she can’t stand living in Toronto for half the year and is moving to Shondaland in L.A. instead, so there’s nothing the other principals can do except continue to endure Toronto life, and console themselves by instagramming idyllic photos of summer weekends spent at Patrick J. Adams’ family cottage in Muskoka.
With Jessica preoccupied with the Bailey case, Harvey and Louis work as an uneasy team to save what’s left of the firm. When they hear clients are bailing because Sutter is spreading the word that Harvey ‘tanked’ his defence, Harvey goes to Sutter’s house and threatens to have it seized under the bankruptcy proceedings unless the rumours stop. To avoid losing number one client Jim Reynolds, Harvey and Louis enlist Trader Stu’s help one last time and get him to buy out a major portion of the company Reynolds works for, so they can keep Reynolds in charge and fight off the PSL-hating Board of Directors. Trader Stu and his suspenders are also leaving, though – his motley crew of traders was offered free use of Sutter’s former offices in the bankruptcy settlement. So, goodbye, Stu.
There’s no goodbye for Louis & Tara, more like a hello baby, because Tara is pregnant, with her ex’s child, and Louis is fine with that, he doesn’t even need to sleep on it, not really, though these two know each other even less well than Jessica and Jeff. Never mind again – Louis proposes and Tara accepts, because they’re both crazy. And it looks like Carly Pope is staying with the show for a little longer.
Speaking of weddings, Rachel and Mike do not discuss when theirs might happen, though Mike gives Rachel a picture of her being a boss in court, because she’s well on her way to big-time lawyer-dom, while Mike’s future is up in the air.
When he and Harvey sit down in their open neck shirts to drink scotch and celebrate Mike’s release from jail, Harvey offers Mike a consultant job at the firm. Mike is grateful, but he doesn’t know if he wants that – he’ll think about it during the hiatus.
And did I mention that with Jessica gone, the office empty again, and the future not looking too bright, that Harvey and Donna hold hands, gaze out the window together at the photo backdrop of New York at night and look hopeful? Yeah, I think I did.
Suits will return in the winter of 2017 to finish the 6th season, and so will I.
Kim Moritsugu is a Toronto novelist and sometime TV show recapper whose latest novel is a suburban comedy of manners called The Oakdale Dinner Club.
