Perry tries to be a better dad. Della tries a Turkish cigarette. Paul runs an interesting and inconvenient ballistics experiment.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Chapter Eleven’Della Street has Perry Mason’s number. She has just learned of the suicide of their former client Emily Dodson, by way of a stack of desperate postcards and letters Perry that dumps on Della after keeping them secret for months. She realizes that this is the reason they switched to civil cases from criminal law — a major career shift, the rationale for which she ought to have been told.It’s the reason she’s had to “walk on eggshells” around his mercurial moods. It’s part and parcel of his overall pattern of evasive, self-isolating behavior. And worst of all, it’s behavior even he doesn’t fully understand.“Why didn’t you tell me?” Della asks Perry when she learns about Emily at long last. His reply seems to baffle even himself: “I don’t know,” he stammers, before repeating himself for emphasis. “I don’t.” Seeming to extrude the words rather than speak them, Matthew Rhys expertly conveys Perry’s confusion about his own motivations. Why didn’t he lean on his strong, capable colleague for support as Emily’s pleas started piling up? Why didn’t he come clean about the suicide?For that matter, as Della pointedly inquires, why didn’t he do anything to stop it before it happened? “When are you ever not alone in anything?” she asks, exasperated with his need to bear every burden in silence.After another hour spent in Perry’s company, I get the sense that injustice and tragedy are, to him, almost like a physical malady from which he suffers. There are times when he can simply take no more and springs into action, as he did with Emily’s case in the first place, and as he is doing with the Gallardo brothers now. It’s this almost impulsive zeal that leads him to stand up against the oil tycoon Lydell McCutcheon, whose goons strong-arm Perry into a meeting that devolves into threats. (Elsewhere in the episode, McCutcheon maims a man who comes looking to collect on a debt owed him by his dead son, Brooks, so we know he is willing to make good on those threats.)But Perry is also capable of ignoring this kind of pain until it’s too late, then wallowing in it, even exacerbating it. Yes, he is the kind of guy who can deftly, gently shame the new case’s slightly pretentious presiding judge (Tom Amandes) into having the Gallardos placed in protective custody after they report finding broken glass in their jailhouse chow. But he is also the kind of guy who’ll deliberately drive his motorcycle at unsafe speeds rather than admit to Della that he may have contributed to his former client’s sense of suicidal isolation and despair.Perhaps the sad tale of his service in the Great War — he was discharged after mercy-killing his own wounded men in the trenches — says everything you need to know about Perry. He’ll fly in the face of authority and society at large to do what he feels is right, but as that judge points out to him, he almost never does so in a way that will lead to a happy ending for anyone.This dynamic plays out in miniature when he allows his son, Teddy (Jack Eyman), who is staying with him overnight while Perry’s ex works overtime, to skip out on homework in order to catch “King Kong” at the movie theater. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but all Teddy gets out of it is an extra day of makeup work and nightmares about dinosaurs.That said, Perry’s poor parenting gives him another opportunity to flirt gingerly with Teddy’s teacher, the fetching Miss Ames. It’s a more straightforward bit of banter than what goes down between Perry and Camilla Nygaard, Lydell McCutcheon’s rival in the oil biz. When Perry and Della approach her for information about the McCutcheons, she chats with them in a swimsuit while performing a workout that wouldn’t pass the Hays Code.Is she coming on to Perry, about whose core strength she saucily inquires? To Della, whom she invites to return to the estate? Is it all an intimidation tactic? Is it simply how she rolls? For now, her motives are a mystery — although she bristles when Perry drops the name of a medical facility called San Haven and says, inscrutably, that “the Lawson girl’s family has been through quite enough.” (See below for the apparent answer to this particular riddle.)Some other questions turn out to be a bit easier to answer. Perry and Della’s investigator Paul travels to the Hooverville where the Gallardo brothers lived, where he quickly and cleverly acquires the gun used in the Brooks McCutcheon murder and traces it to the brothers. As he tells the gun dealer, who nearly kills him before Paul backs him off, this was not the answer he wanted to find.Perry, meanwhile, traces the phone number we saw that mysterious figure place in Brooks’s wallet to a sanitarium housing a catatonic young woman named Noreen Lawson (Danielle Gross). Perry’s conversations with both Camilla and Lydell leave the strong impression that Brooks was responsible for the woman’s diminished state of cognition. This means, contrary to initial appearances, that the mystery man must have been out to make Brooks look worse, not better, when he planted that number in the police evidence locker. What’s his game? Another open question.But not all of the goons involved in the McCutcheon murder are quite so inscrutable. The episode begins with a surprisingly sympathetic look at the off-duty life of the crooked Detective Holcomb. When he isn’t busy doing the criminal bidding of Los Angeles’s rich and powerful, he comes home to a loving wife and children whom he’s anxious to remove from a city he can no longer stomach.Holcomb comes across here like one of those ancillary “Sopranos” characters who morph from “third goomba from the left” to late-season main character, however briefly — specifically Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro), the made guy who inherited a fortune and wanted to ditch New Jersey for the sunny climes of Florida. Sadly for Holcomb, I fear there are few more dangerous things to be on prestige television than a goon with dreams of bettering himself.From the case files:Last week, reporters told Perry that the prosecution had found one of Rafael Gallardo’s fingerprints on Brooks McCutcheon’s car. This week, Rafael swears this is impossible. It’s a discrepancy worth keeping an eye on, especially now that it seems the brothers were in possession of the murder weapon. It’s also worth noting that when we spend time with them alone, neither brother shows the slightest sign of having actually committed the crime.Perry’s conversations with Miss Ames and Camilla Nygaard had some spark to them, but Della’s late-night rendezvous with her new love interest, the screenwriter Anita St. Pierre, over Chinese food and Turkish cigarettes is a four-alarm fire by comparison.At least twice, the director Jessica Lowrey finds poetry in afternoon sunlight: first as beams pass through the window to be filtered through an ornate railing as Perry investigates the sanitarium, then through the trees in the little grove where Paul travels to conduct his amateur ballistics test. I’ve gone on and on about how the lively characters and cast make this show; it’s often just plain lovely to look at, too.For that matter, I adore the show’s ever-inventive end-title sequences. (Since each episode kicks off with just a title card bearing the show’s name, it falls to the closing credits to do the cool-looking stuff most shows these days like to start with.) This week, we’ve got a series of rats standing against a black background getting shot at, just like the critters the kids in the Gallardos’ Hooverville attempt to hunt and eat. It’s very “closing shot of ‘The Departed.’”Paul’s pal Morris (Jon Chaffin) listens to a rabidly xenophobic radio broadcaster in the Father Coughlin vein, who rails about the Gallardos and demands mass deportations in response to the McCutcheon murder. Mo is out of work, thanks largely to the incarceration of the relatively benevolent loan shark whom Paul inadvertently helped put away; broke, miserable people desperate for a scapegoat have always been a key demographic for demagogues of this sort.“At some point, Mr. Mason, you must find all of your righteousness just a bit exhausting.” I think the judge who tells Perry this is right. Find me a single shot in this show where Mason looks well-rested, and I’ll bankroll your baseball team. More
