Matlock Recap: The Web, So Tangled

One of the best decisions that Jennie Snyder Urman and the Matlock writers have made so far is their choice to make Matty a little messy. For every moment where one of her plans locks right into place and everybody buys her lies, there’s another where her mask dangerously slips or where the stories she tells cause more problems than they solve. It’s all too much sometimes — to the extent that in this week’s episode, she actually breaks down crying in front of her husband Edwin, complaining about how hard it is, “lying all the time.”

Edwin’s icy reply? “I never wanted you to do it in the first place.”

To be fair to Edwin, his wife has been crossing a lot of lines lately. This episode opens with the couple searching all over their mansion for their grandson Alfie, who they find asleep in Matty’s office, behind the couch, having spent all night searching for evidence on Olympia’s laptop. And while she promises Edwin that she’ll stop asking Alfie for help and “let him catch up on life,” Matty soon goes back to texting Alfie urgently while he’s supposed to focus on school.

The emergency text stems from an opportunity at Jacobson-Moore that Matty and Alfie have been eagerly awaiting. She finally gets some time in the firm’s documents room, and she needs her grandson’s help to figure out how to find the evidence they need to prove J-M buried damaging information about opioids.

The scenes in and around the documents room are this episode’s tensest and funniest. Matty has to navigate around the very strict, highly suspicious “Mrs. B” (Patricia Belcher), who won’t let anyone look up anything without a supervisor’s signature and an appointment. (There’s a fine bit of wordless comedy where Matty, standing right in front of Mrs. B, pulls out her phone to send an email to request an appointment, and then there’s an excruciating pause between the WHOOSH from Matty’s phone and the DING from Mrs. B’s.) Ultimately, Matty turns her nemesis into a friend by pretending to have a sick dog — after finding out that Mrs. B is a dog-lover.

But here’s another example of how lies beget lies, leading to some touchy situations. When Olympia sees Matty crying over her fake dog, Mrs B. is appalled that Olympia has never heard anything about her underling’s pet — which forces Matty to scramble and blame her boss’s “we’re not friends” ethos.

Matty gets into a similar pickle with our client of the week: the chronically anxious artist Robert Walton (John Billingsley), who is suing the owners of his apartment complex because his wife died of respiratory failure, possibly caused by bacteria present in the building’s aged plumbing. Matty’s job is to keep Robert calm, which she does by bonding with him over the death of her own fake husband.

It’s not all phony, of course. Matty is clearly drawing on memories of her daughter Ellie when she sympathizes with Robert about absently setting a place at the table for a lost loved one or when they talk about the moment before opening the front door when they imagine their person is still alive. (“I’d give the world to live in that split-second,” she says.) So it’s no wonder that after they spend several days together — with him telling her stories about how his wife once watched a hawk snatch up an adorable family of rabbits and her encouraging him to get over his self-doubt and embrace what’s left of his life — Robert would give the “widow” Matty a glass rabbit figurine and ask her on a date.

As if to underline how emotions and relationships can make devious scheming more complicated, this week’s case — another good one! — pits the J-M lawyers against each other. Elijah, still steaming after Olympia unilaterally ended their relationship last week, seems to take a perverse glee in informing her that the firm now represents Foundate Financials, the corporation which owns the Waltons’ apartment building (among many, many others). So they have to hire a mediator to put up a “firewall,” with Olympia’s team hustling to present evidence of the landlords’ negligence while Elijah’s team puts the blame on lax building codes and Robert’s art supplies.

Then, just when it looks like Robert is going to have to settle for a paltry $250,000, he and Matty find water damage and a patch of black mold in his apartment, which could be a much bigger problem for Foundate. Olympia gets a new offer of $6,000,000, plus a clean-up fund — but only the latter survives after Senior pulls a maneuver called “the Texas two-step,” protect Foundate via a sneaky out-of-state re-incorporation and bankruptcy filing. Matty catches on to what Senior’s doing when she sees him wearing golf pants, which he always does after he “snuffs out someone’s soul.”

This outcome is a reminder to Matty that for Senior and his corporate clients, people like Robert don’t matter — and neither does Ellie. It’s a good thing then that while poking around th J-M documents, Matty finally finds a damning piece of paper… with a signature that looks to be Senior’s. She’s pretty sure she now has her target, and it happens to be someone she already dislikes: That smug hawk in the executive suite, idly slaughtering rabbits.

She and Edwin also reconcile by the end of the episode, though she never really addresses his deeper concerns. She’s still in cahoots with Alfie, for one. In a chilling sequence, she uses her memories of Edwin’s angry argument — coupled with a bag of chopped onions — to help her fake grief over her non-existent dead dog. The more she uses her own life to lend credence to her masquerade, the harder it’ll be to keep her own firewall intact.

Hot Doggin’

• Not a lot of action for Sarah and Billy this week. They spend the bulk of the episode bickering about Sarah’s apparent lack of interest in anything having to do with her colleagues’ personal lives — something indicative of the lack of “balance” in her work-centered personality. But at the end of the episode, she admits she calls Billy her “friend” when she talks to her therapist; and this so touches him that he introduces her to his girlfriend Claudia (whom Sarah had previously assumed was one of his many sisters). Billy also gives the viewers what I think is new information when he tells Claudia that Sarah wants to start dating, adding, “If you know any nice girls….”

• Julian, meanwhile, is clearly angling to get back together with Olympia. He stands up for the Walton case when Senior wants to drop it, and at the end of the episode, he brings his ex-wife a box of Senior’s mementos for her to smash with a golf club. I’m still finding it hard to care about the Elijah-Olympia-Julian triangle, but at least this week all the mixed-up relationships make the office politics juicier. (Also, I suspect this will all serve a larger narrative purpose, likely related to Matty’s covert investigation.)

• Is Matty overselling her hard-luck story around the office? When Olympia says Matlock has a lot in common with their client, Matty quips, “Did Robert catch Sandy under a hooker wearing a flapper dress too?” The stunned stares she gets from her co-workers suggest that she may be taking things a bit too far and making everyone uncomfortable.