Here’s to our future.
Our future.
Which now shows every sign of being exactly like our past.
In this episode, Rumpole gets in over his head when he has to take the second seat in a case. This doesn’t sit well, especially when the eminent lead council, Guthrie Featherstone, played to foppish perfection by Peter Bowles, takes a strangely lackadaisical tack. But when Rumpole takes a big risk, he finds the fate of his client as well as his own career hanging in the balance. This is another really good episode of the slow train wreck variety; as you watch Rumpole go farther and farther off the reservation, you can’t look away, terrified that this time around he’s finally gone too far. This episode has a bit of a deus ex machina resolution, but the journey to get there is tense and, often, cringe-inducing. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – pat resolution detracts, but only a bit, from this character driven episode about bold risks and the fall-out from them. 3 ½ stars.