Perry Mason recap: It's fight night in this season's crackling penultimate episode

Welcome, viewers around the world, to fight night on Perry Mason. The main event: a brutal, overdue grudge match between compadres, drinking buddies, colleagues, and, ultimately, two unkempt nudniks who love each other so much that they’d rather throw down in an absolute slobberknocker than work together. Perry and Pete have been itching for a fight all season—heck, they’ve probably wanted to pop each other for a solid decade—and “Chapter Fifteen” delivers. But not without a quick reminder of the friendship these two share as the episode opens in media res with a shot of Perry and Pete, washed ashore, as the mustachioed newsboy-cap enthusiast reaches for a smoke only to discover a soggy cig. Has there ever been a more perfect image of these two? It’s hard to be friends with Perry Mason. There’s nothing but heartbreak, hard times, and water-logged cigarettes. Though, occasionally, he wins a case, too.

“To victory,” Milligan cheers as he offers Pete a glass of cognac given to Milligan’s ancestor by friggin’ Napoleon. As he chokes on his taste of the good life, Pete tells Milligan that he’s wasting his fancy drink on a small-town schmo like Pete. Nevertheless, Milligan’s plan worked. The judge will admit the gun as evidence and will not declare a mistrial. This gives Perry some leeway, though not much. Thankfully, Pete’s already having second thoughts as he lives off the fat of the land he acquired by selling out a friend.

Relegated to guest star, Shea Whigham, a clutch player in any show’s dugout, hung around the periphery this year. Nevertheless, he’s been a joy in every episode he appears. Playing for the opposite side, Pete struck a deal with the devil to keep food on the table as the powerful play the powerless against each other. He’s the reverse of Paul, who never benefited from Pete’s privilege but grew fed up with working for the police after one payoff. To paraphrase Charlie Bucket, I bet all that gold makes the cognac taste terrible. Pete chokes it down but decides he must come clean with Perry.

After a season of wrestling and boxing, we finally get some honest fisticuffs between friends. Pete appropriately asks Perry to meet him at a lonely concrete bridge, where he spills the beans, blaming his former partner for making it too easy to break into the safe. The argument quickly comes to blows, with Perry doing as Anita recommended, working the body before focusing on the head. Letting out the aggression breaks the tension, and after the bell rings (i.e., Pete barfs), Pete’s ready to let bygones be bygones. However, Perry is all but done; he’s prepared to be disbarred and thrown in jail. Pete hands his old friend a cigarette and some encouragement because this is when Perry’s at his best. “If I can piece together some fucking bizarre evidence,” says Perry, “I could possibly take down some of the biggest names in this city.” Pete’s raring to go: “So let’s do it.”

It’s not going to be so easy. When Perry brings Pete to the office, he has to sell the actual people who have been helping all season on bringing Pete back into the fold. Paul didn’t appreciate Pete deceiving him earlier this season, and he’s still paying the price for it. Ozzie Jackson’s probably dead, and Paul’s relationship with Clara is strained at best. So when Perry tells Della and Paul that he’s responsible for the gun fiasco, it looks like Perry has a mutiny on his hands. Throughout all of this, and as we noted in “Chapter Thirteen,” there’s a profound feeling of things clicking into place with Perry Mason, and this scene epitomizes it. Perry asks everyone to calm down and focus on what we know is a crucial moment when the show’s finale begins to materialize, with the answers just exceeding everyone’s grasp. Still, everyone is finally on the same page. The culmination of everything this season is pure energy rocketing these four to the conclusion with a simple question: “What do we know?”

Perry’s right to return to basics, but he’s in even deeper than he thinks. The episode jumps to Lydell at a meeting with Japanese government agents. Camilla overhears Lydell embarrassing himself with horse talk, so she interjects and suggests the agents rethink their shipping arrangements in light of the heat falling on the McCutcheons. Effectively, she cuts Lydell out of the conversation. When Camilla attempts to placate Lydell for stepping over him, Lydell spits venom at her, calling her a “barren spinster,” which feels almost as violent as when he put that guy’s head in an oil derrick.

From one fractured relationship to another, Della heads to Ham’s office for a confrontation. Sure, she wants to know what the prosecution has up its sleeve, but Della’s also concerned for her friend. And for good reason. Ham’s being blackmailed with pictures of himself and another man. Suddenly, all that time with Anita isn’t so innocent as we’re flung back into the not-so-distant past that’s constantly repeating itself. Thinking only of self-preservation, Ham would like to end this case so he can put this threat behind him. Still, if Perry can take down some of the biggest names in the city, maybe Della can save him after all. He’s not the only one with something big on the line. Luisa Gallardo (Onahoua Rodriguez) visits Mateo in jail to inform him that Rafael was accepted into art school. The stakes have never been higher for Mateo, who now has an opportunity to free his brother if he admits to Brooks’ murder. But it’s not like Mateo doesn’t have anything on the outside. He has a wife and daughter.

And that’s one thing that I loved about this episode. Every revelation raises the interpersonal stakes. But the biggest of all is out to sea. Stripped of his trademark leather jacket, Perry follows Pete aboard one of Lydell’s ships to figure out this whole oily fruit situation. They find a bombshell: Lydell uses fruit ships to export oil to Japan illegally. With the help of Della’s great hire, Marion (Jee Young Han), they realize that Lydell might be involved in some light treason. Lydell is selling oil to the Japanese, which the American government sanctioned in the decade leading to World War II. This, too, heightens Lydell’s scheming because it shows that, perhaps, Brooks was innocent in this venture and that Lydell may have had his son killed.

As we’ve seen all season, doing the right thing is never as easy as we hope. Heck, even Brooks knew that. In a revealing flashback, we learn Brooks was attempting to use the fruit Lydell’s men were tossing overboard. “Focus on your charity,” his father told him. So Brooks tried using the discarded fruit for the soup kitchens, but when the Department of Agriculture got wise to some undeclared produce, the McCutcheons were subpoenaed. Brooks wasn’t worried, though. He wasn’t involved in this oil scheme. Lydell, it appears, had no choice but to take care of the Brooks problem. It’s too late. Della is already at the Department Of Agriculture looking for information on the subpoena before she’s asked to leave and stalked into a parking garage.

During all this, Clara, of all people, becomes Paul’s gumshoe and does some recon on the mysterious blue sedan they’ve been pursuing. Isn’t it nice to see everyone working together again? They tail their mystery car to Beverly Hills, and, posing as a Jehovah’s Witness, Clara follows the owner into her house and watches as she overdoses on heroin. Moments later, her husband and Camilla’s lawyer, Phippsy (Wallace Langham), saunters in, wondering if his wife wants Perino’s for dinner. Sadly, there will be no Perino’s for Phippsy tonight.

Perry confronts Lydell at his home, putting himself dangerously close to Lydell’s hunting rifle. The lawyer believes he has everything all shored up until Lydell says he wasn’t the one who wanted Brooks killed. “Then who did?” Perry asks. The episode cuts between Camilla playing her piano and Mateo crying in prison, crumpling up the acceptance letter as his traumatized brother lay below him. Finally, it closes with Camilla answering a call from the man who stalked Della in the parking garage. It looks like Perry Mason has found Brooks’ killer.

Stray observations

• Title Card Corner: We talked about it up top, but the early reminder of Perry and Pete as a dynamic duo, a gruesome twosome, a Disgusting Brothers, was crucial to this episode. It’s another example of this show clicking together. After a season of ambiguity, this was a reminder that, at its heart, Perry Mason is a show about messy people working together to solve a messy problem.
• Pete’s post-fight barf was a nice touch.
• “Clickity clack,” says Pete. Perry is still the horse, and today, he took his dive.
• Pete opening the door and inviting Paul outside for more fisticuffs was perfectly acted by Whigham. I absolutely love his performance on this show.
• “Do you want to lose two fights today?”
• Justin Kirk’s nervous laugh when he hands Della the photos is heartbreaking.
• As usual, the lighting in the prison was just so precise, creating these hard angles with the dividers at the visiting table. It looked beautiful, but the composition imbued the scene with so much tension. There are straight lines everywhere, but Mateo’s decision is anything but straightforward.
• Pete calls Coignac “pussy punch,” which is a very Pete Strickland turn of phrase.
• As Mad Men taught us and Succession recently reinforced: “Every time an old man starts talking about Napoleon, you know they’re going to die.” We’re not so lucky with Milligan yet, but comeupance must be coming, right?
• I couldn’t help but look up some information on Perino’s, which opened in 1932, making it a new spot for old Phippsy. Perino’s was the kind of Golden Age of Hollywood spot that celebrities would frequent, the type of place Charlie Chaplin ordered pumpernickel cheese toast. I found some lovely photos of the restaurant. Though a kitchen fire destroyed the interior in 1934, burning up the Perino’s Phippsy knew. If you’re curious, here’s the menu circa 1950, which I could read for hours. Old food is so weird.