The Good Fight S04x03
Starting with a gardening scene is so S04E01. Now it's all about starting with a grave-digging scene. Junior psychopath or no, Carl's really good at making grave markets. Glenn and Maggie are also pretty good at digging graves, managing to smile wanly at one another as they do so.
The Good Fight s04x03
Back in Gotham, Bruce is working to make the city saver again. While keeping in contact with Alfred in the car, Bruce goes to the docks where a big shipment from Penguin is due to arrive. Bruce spots a thief trying to steal something, and Bruce decided to talk a look, but to the dismay of Alfred. But before Bruce can confront the thief, he is caught by the guards. They fight, but Bruce wins and both he and the thief get away separately. Later it is revealed that the thief was Selina. When they get back to Wayne Manor, Alfred stitches up the would Bruce had got during the fight. Bruce is immediately ready to go back to the docks and find out what was so valuable to try and steal it from Penguin. Alfred reluctantly lets him go.
Buffy calls Giles to give him the update re: Spike and Harmony. Wait, let me rephrase: Buffy calls sweaty, out of breath Giles who is holding a fencing foil and mopping his brow, clearly having exerted a lot of physical effort working out, sword-fight style. I just want to state for the record how fucking furious I am that we never got that scene, but how many times did we have had to watch Angel shirtlessly and sweatily Tai Chi his way through his gloomy vampire sadness? This is bullshit.
Jesse is a dick, is off on his own, and has a cool fight scene. Check. Cassidy is off on his own, getting horribly abused, and reminds us he's Irish. Check. Tulip is off on her own, and admits she's really really violent. Check. Starr acts all creepy with a new assistant. Check. Eugene and the Saint of Killers are off on their own and walk down a road. Excitement! Last week's two episodes were fairly promising. God was involved with the Grail, Jesse and Tulip staged a raid on Masada, Cassidy had a brief bonding sequence with his torturer, Staff stepped up as the new Allfather and chatted with some world leaders. But this week was the general slowness that bogged down much of Season 3. It's not that it's bad, it's just the show doesn't move forward. There's no character development, there's no major plot twists. So what happened in "Deviant"? Jesse is on the plane heading for Australia, and thinks back to what happened at the House of Entertainment. We find out he got a blast of opium smoke in the face, killed a bunch of residents who tried to kill him, and the boy he came to rescue was hit by a stray shot. It's a cool five-minute fight scene, as Jesse (and the stunt coordinator) shows off his chops and our protagonist forgets to use the Voice. ("Everyone, freeze!"). Maybe Jesse is just supposed to get off on the violence, but it comes across mostly as the writers neglecting to use the Voice to provide a fight.
Mycroft's physical and mental health are really bad, so are Albert's. They both drink too much and don't eat. They are both angry and sad, they have a fight which ends bad, really bad, really really bad.
Another sneaky, winking attorney opponent of Lockhart/Gardner, the Patti character is known to use pregnancy and, later, her infant to win sympathy. Plimpton won an Outstanding Guest Star Emmy for this role for good reason (specifically for the Season 3 finale, in which Patti and Louis tried to take over Lockhart/Gardner). Patti! Grr.
Love. This. Creepy. Murderer. My favorite Lockhart/Gardner client. If only he could be a series regular. Dylan Baker is so good at being a charming deviant. Remember the movie Happiness? Don't remember it! It's upsetting! But he's great in it/everything.
It's a hard thing with the Good Wife judges, and judges on legal procedural shows in general: No matter how good the actor is, they do tend to blend together. The Cuesta character was also a client of Diane's in "The Penalty Box" in Season 3. But if memory serves, he can no longer preside over one of their cases because of that? Does that mean bye, bye, David Paymer forever? Sad!
The idea for the Howard Lyman character is so funny: The cranky, old law partner who does nothing but collect money, but every once in a while is either useful for a vote or makes ridiculous trouble. It's always good to see Hesh from The Sopranos dropping in.
Courtney was an assistant who had worked for Patti Nyholm but then quit to work for Alicia and Cary. When Alicia and Cary were competing for the one associate job, Courtney played into the plot; but I have no memory whatsoever of what happened to her. Did we say good-bye to her, or is she theoretically still around, somewhere in the offices? Where the hell is Courtney? Maybe Eli's daughter, Grace's friend, and Courtney are all hanging out together.
Lady Wifi takes the first initiative by cornering Marinette in her room, prompting Trixx to use Mirage in order to give Marinette the opportunity to escape. The ensuing side effect of a dancing Eiffel Tower alerts Plagg that something's up, allowing Cat Noir to join the fight.
The five villains search the city for Marinette in order to force her to reveal her secrets. Ladybug notices and captures Lady Wifi for an "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, reminding her of her service as Rena Rouge, which prompts Alya to make her own record by becoming the second person to fight off Akumatization by sheer force of will (after Chloé in Miraculer), and the first to do so post-Akumatization. With the Fox Miraculous already there and the other four villains still on the loose, Ladybug decides to let Alya be Rena Rouge again.
AJ: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, the age difference is very minimal. Like you said, nine years, which seems crazy and yeah, maybe he did think it was just a way to get some easy money or something like that, but it wasn't going to be easy money based on what I go into a little later. You also asked, "How did he end up getting cleared to do this job?" I just want to read out a job posting that was made by Expanding Horizons, and this is shared on an episode of The Fifth Estate on this case. The job posting ad reads, "Foster parents and support workers needed in your community. We are a human services agency that provides direct services to children and youth in care. Our agency is currently seeking foster parents and support workers to join our caring team. A background in child youth worker, developmental service worker, social service worker, personal support worker or corrections is preferred, but not a requirement. A rewarding and challenging experience awaits you in the field of human services. We would like to hear from you." You know, just from that you can tell that you didn't need to have any qualifications. They would prefer qualifications, but if you didn't, that was okay. If someone doesn't have the qualifications that you would require, then maybe you would say, okay, maybe if they go through some more rigorous training, maybe if they can prove that they can actually take on this responsibility then we would allow them to do this even if they don't have the experience.
Katie: Well it seems like now, Jordan, I was thinking at first like he was a sketchy guy. Maybe he is, but it seems like he was at least trying to have some good intentions and be prepared for this while the company was like figure it out for yourself. Here's a bunch of kids.
AJ: From doing all the research and looking into this case, I never got the vibe or I never got the sense that Jordan was a sketchy person or that he had ill intentions. I do honestly believe that he was young, he didn't really know what he was getting into. He thought maybe if he was trying to get into that sort of industry, into social services, you might think, "okay, this is a good way, a good job to have to get into that." But he wasn't even going down that path, so it is a little weird, but I never did get the sense that he had ill intent or that he was sketchy. I think he was legitimately trying to do the right thing, but just was too naive to really know what the responsibility was going to be. That's the sense I got. So the supposed rules in the foster home were very few and far between. The rules were basically no smoking pot on property, take turns taking out the garbage and obey the curfew, which Jordan set. Basically these four children, there was four in the home, they didn't have a lot of rules and they didn't have a lot of supervision. Of course, just this 24 year old. So already David was stepping into a situation that was certainly not ideal for him. David would go home on the weekends, but then he would have to return to Barrie during the week. His mother says that David would always want to stay at home longer, and he would make excuses for why he had to stay home a little longer, why he should stay an extra day. From that, it's clear to see that he didn't really like the situation he was living in. I think, you know, his mother was probably thinking," who would like to live, no one wants to live in a foster home." So she thought, yeah, he was protesting it. He didn't want to go back, but I think she probably just chalked that up to, you know, he's just rebelling. He doesn't want to go there because it's not home. But I don't think she thought that he didn't want to go there because of the situation necessarily in that particular home. I just think she didn't think that he liked the situation in general. Around the same time that David arrived at the foster home, James also arrived at the home, and James' real identity is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, so they call him James in The Fifth Estate episode. I'm going to call him James for this episode. I don't know what his real name is, but he arrived at the home in December, 2018, and he was just 14 years old, so this was around the same time as David arrived. James had been in the foster care system for only a few months before this, and even though he was only 14, he had already been diagnosed with ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, OCD, and a learning disability. He had a history of intense drug use. James was raised in a home marred with physical and verbal violence, and his parents separated in 2015. He attended school only up until the third grade because his behavioral problems caused him to drop out at that time. He, at one time lived with each separated parent for a brief period, so he lived with his mother in her home, and then he lived with his father and his new partner for a short period of time. Both parents realized that they were just not able to care for him due to his severe behavioral problems. He was deemed an official ward of the Crown, which I guess is a Canadian term for a ward of the State. I guess that's what you would call it, probably in the States. He was deemed an official ward of the Crown since 2017, which put him into the foster care system that ultimately led him to that very foster home in December of 2018. Already, like I said, Jordan had been promised that he wouldn't be getting any children who had violent histories, but as you can tell, James did have a violent history. He had arrests in his past. He had been in juvenile hall, so he had some run-ins with the law. Already that was going against what Jordan was promised. It was very soon after James' arrival that trouble arose. James tried to rob a convenience store that was just a few streets away from the home, and Jordan says that he was afraid of James. On February 17th, 2019, the police were called to the home after James broke down Jordan's bedroom door in order to get inside. Some sources I've seen say that this incident happened on February 17th, and others say February 18th, so I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was one of those two days. For this incident, the Toronto Sun reports that James was arrested and charged with mischief, and then on February 18th he was released and returned back to the foster home. What they didn't know at the time of the incident when he broke down Jordan's door was that inside Jordan's bedroom he kept a series of knives locked away from the children, and two of these knives had been stolen by James in this incident. It's believed that once James returned to the foster home on February 18th, he was very angry and determined to find out who had ratted him out for breaking into Jordan's bedroom. No one had really witnessed it or Jordan didn't witness it at the very least, and he was adamant that somebody, one of the other kids in the home must have ratted him out to Jordan, then got the police involved. It was speculated that he blamed David for this and decided to take matters into his own hands in order to get back at him. Jordan says that the two teens were seen playing video games with each other that night, but clearly all was not as well as it might have seemed. Remember when I told you that the owners of Expanding Horizons would tell Jordan to search Google for the answers to behavioral and situational problems? Well, it was the escalating situation with James that had prompted Jordan to go to them and ask. James had robbed that convenience store just a few days in, he was having more intensive violent outbursts, and then he had this incident with breaking down the door, so he had gone to them and asked for their support saying that he needed extra staff on site. He needed more people to be there and they would just direct him to Google and say that Google would have the answers. Clearly they were dismissive and didn't take the situation seriously, or they just didn't care. One of the other children in the home, he goes by Evan in The Fifth Estate episode. Again, that's not his real name, but we're going to call him Evan for this episode as well. So Evan tells The Fifth Estate that Jordan had confided in them, in casual conversation, that he needed more staff and he needed more support, but that Expanding Horizons was not providing this. This was something that Jordan had made very clear to even the people that were living in the house and was making it clear that he was not able to deal with James and his escalating violent outbursts. According to Jordan, they had even allegedly told him to hire his own staff when he inquired about getting more experienced staff into the home to support the kids, which is just a totally ridiculous answer. Isn't that their job? Why should he have to hire more staff? 041b061a72