Summer sleuthing: The Firm season 1, episode 14 rewatch

Watch The Firm season 1, episode 14 starring Josh Lucas.

With TV crime dramas winding down their seasons, what should genre fans watch over the summer? In our Summer Sleuthing series we’re going back to old favorites, starting with one you probably missed the first time: NBC‘s The Firm.

The Firm was largely ignored when it premiered in 2012. It was a follow-up to the John Grisham movie of the same name, with Josh Lucas assuming the role of lawyer Mitch McDeere. But it was not a lawyer show; it was a crime thriller with strong performances and a few plot twists.

Every week we’ll revisit an episode from The Firm‘s first (and only) season. You can rewatch the entire series on Tubi. This week, we open the book on Episode 14.

The Firm season 1, episode 14: “Chapter Fourteen” (originally aired April 21, 2012)

This is the episode where The Firm officially departs from being a TV crime drama and goes full-blown thriller. It’s centerd around the abduction of Abby McDeere (Molly Parker, in her biggest amount of screen time all season) and her husband’s determined attempt to get her back.

On one hand, this is a sharp downturn because as we’ve discussed before, The Firm was at its best when it had that TV crime drama baseline. Its cases of the week were genuinely compelling pieces that showed why Mitch was such a great lawyer and usually gave the audience something to chew on.

But on the other hand, “Chapter Fourteen” gives us Martin Donovan gone full bad guy and adds in the fantastic character actor Al Sapienza (Brotherhood) as Kevin Stack’s equally nefarious associate JD Silver, so from an acting standpoint it’s a lot of fun. Like get your popcorn, sit back and relax kind of fun.

It’s pretty straightforward “give us the evidence or we kill your significant other” kind of stuff, down to the part where Silver kills someone else to show he means business (sorry, Andrew—and sorry to Shaun Majumder that his character never got as fully developed as he could have).

The next day, Stack lurks at the back of an office meeting where Alex Clark (Tricia Helfer) tells her staff that Andrew’s body was found floating in the river, not mentioning that his murderer is in the same room.

We do get some much-needed backstory on Alex: Martin Moxon came to her first but with Kinross & Clark hurting financially, and fearing she’d lose the firm her father founded, she decided to cover up Stack’s crimes instead of turning him in. She also has some sort of romantic involvement with him, because he tries to get affectionate with her and she tells him, “Not here.” That implies it has happened somewhere else and just…why?! The man doesn’t seem to have an ounce of humanity in him.

(The editing of this sequence is also awkward. It’s the middle of the day when Stack and Alex are first talking, but when The Firm comes back to them after cutting away to Abby, it’s dark outside. So have they been talking in her office for the last several hours? Did they leave and come back? It doesn’t matter at all, but it’s a noticeable difference.)

Tricia Helfer is incredible in this episode as Alex has her crisis of conscience; we finally have the details to understand what makes her tick, and she expands beyond being Mitch’s shadowy boss. If the show had expounded on this earlier, likewise with Andrew, the conspiracy part would have been so much richer because there would have been more layers and more empathy for the other characters. As it is, while we care about her now, the season (and series) is more than half over.

“Chapter Fourteen” ends on a vague note as the McDeere brothers come face-to-face with Stack, but it’s an episode that really isn’t about them. It’s about Abby and Alex, and Parker and Helfer. It is as much a character piece as The Firm has ever done, albeit just out of place in the grand scheme of a TV season.

dark. Next. What happened in The Firm episode 13?

The Firm is available to stream on Tubi and Amazon Video, and available for purchase on iTunes and DVD.

Home/TV Crime Dramas