‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “Discovery”

In The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2 Episode 3 (“Conflicts”), Mickey Haller played hardball in court in order to secure People Vs. Lisa Trammell discovery materials in a timely manner. And that tactic worked. But in a hardball move of her own, or “a big middle finger from Andrea Freeman,” as Mickey puts it, the prosecutor has dumped hundreds of bankers boxes on Mickey and his team. Reams of emails and documents from Mitchell Bonduran’s business dealings, plus every bit of Lisa’s personal life, up to and including gardening equipment and tools. But in their morning meeting, Mickey, Lorna, Izzy, and Cisco toss around one simple, nagging question. Why? “Some rich developer gets murdered. Why is a chef the prime suspect?” Lorna’s theory confronts the most obvious answer. Maybe Lisa really did do it, and Mickey is too biased to see that. But he swears again, up and down. “Lisa is a client. Nothing more, nothing less.” Alright, dude. 

Lisa can’t be Bondurant’s only enemy, right? He’s made a career of pushing people around, from tenants and staff at his residential properties to the partners and contractors he builds them with. The team delves into the discovery to see what they can find. There has to be something Andrea is hiding, Mickey insists, something buried deep in the paperwork that would blow up her case. But Lorna can’t ignore the vibe she’s getting. “There’s something off about Lisa.” There’s also something missing from the chef’s toolkit: a hammer. And Mitchell Bondurant died by blunt force trauma, with no murder weapon recovered. When Mickey asks her about it, she says it wasn’t her toolkit but her ex-husband’s, who she dismisses as a stoner layabout who she’s no longer in contact with. Lisa gets emotional about the case. Publicity has cut into reservations at the restaurant, and she feels lost. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mickey!” But Cisco also uncovered photos of her in a physical altercation with Bondurant. Lisa maintains that she is innocent, but stuff keeps popping up to suggest there’s more to the story she’s telling.

Cisco, standing rather obviously behind a small bush with his camera and its gigantic telephoto lens, takes photos of Kaz meeting with an unknown man. Cisco’s on the hook with the Road Saints to vouch for his friend, that he’s not a snitch for the feds, but this looks really bad. With Lorna’s measured support – be careful, she stresses – he confronts Kaz at his motel. And dammit, he really is working for the feds. Kaz didn’t have a choice, he pleads. Shit went down in Corcoran, a guy jumped him – it was self-defense. So now that he’s out, he needs to drop dirt on the MC. ““I told them that Hard Case Casey got hammered and ran his mouth about a gun run. Six figures of metal traveling through the clubhouse. Now, my fingerprints are nowhere near this deal. I figured it would be a good piece of info to trade. If anything, Teddy’s gonna think it was Casey who tipped off the ATF…”  

“NO, you fuck!” Cisco sees what’s real. If Teddy gets raided, he’ll blame Kaz immediately because he already suspects he’s a rat. And then the Saints will come for Cisco, too, because he vouched for Kaz. Witness Protection? Kaz might think the government will uphold that promise. But what’s Cisco going to do? “I have a new life. A good job. A woman I love. I can’t just walk away. This whole situation is fucked!”

Mickey has helped out Terrell Coleman (Shwayze) in the past, and now his friend needs a big favor. Terrell’s teenage daughter Angelica (Anais Lee) is in juvenile court, accused of vandalizing a boutique’s exterior wall. She painted it black in a tribute to late fashion designer Virgil Abloh, but the store’s owner doesn’t see it that way. She’s pressing the vandalism charges. So Mickey, in one of his this-leads-to-that moments, connects his conversation with daughter Hayley about the viral content that kids live for with Terrell’s job working in media for the Los Angeles Lakers. And next thing you know, former Laker great Robert Horry is posing for photos with fans in front of Angelica’s black wall, justifying it as a destination for street art, not vandalism. The owner agrees to drop the charges – she was promoting it on her Instagram, anyway – and Terrell and Mickey share a few laughs with Big Shot Bob.

It hasn’t been specified what exactly Henry Dahl, the shifty true crime podcaster, was doing sitting in a car outside Mickey’s house, watching him speak with Lisa. But he surfaces briefly during an event at her restaurant, only to be warned again by Mickey that he can’t use anything Lisa says in one of his pods. Mickey is also excited about a few tidbits of information uncovered from the discovery search. Lorna and Izzy have determined that Mitchell Bondurant’s business was hemorrhaging cash to the tune of hundreds of millions in losses, and Mickey found an email with Bondurant laying out demands for millions from a contractor on one of his stalled building projects. That contractor, as Cisco’s digging uncovers, is the son of Sasha Kazarian, the boss of an Armenian crime family who operates his empire from federal prison. Mickey believes Bondurant’s demands for payment amounted to extortion of Kazarian, and that Andrea Freeman was hiding this information in the endless boxes of discovery. He tells Lisa that they’re going to fight her case in court, and win.

Not so fast. “The circumstances on the ground have changed,” Freeman says. If the prosecutor was willing to perhaps let Lisa plead the murder one charge down to the comparatively lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, that offer is no longer valid. In other words, “See you in court, Haller.” And for Mickey and his team, that means Freeman found something else, something with the potential to detonate his entire defense. “So now we have to find out what that is,” Mickey tells the group. “Cancel your plans, everyone. It’s gonna be a long night.”   

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges