‘Perry Mason’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Mason for the Defense

Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Chapter Ten’

You can take Perry Mason out of criminal defense lawyering, but you can’t take the criminal defense lawyer out of Perry Mason. That Perry discovers this with no evident chagrin is a testament to the truth of it. You don’t gain a sourpuss like his without a keen sense of the injustice of the world; on the evidence of last season, he has the legal know-how to do something about it, and he’s not about to forget it.

His true vocation comes calling again in the form of the Gallardo brothers, Mateo (Peter Mendoza) and Rafael (Fabrizio Guido). These two young Mexican American men have been charged with the oil heir Brooks McCutcheon’s murder by D.A. Hamilton Burger, who assigns his lieutenant Thomas Milligan (Mark O’Brien) as lead prosecutor. There’s just one problem, from the look of things: The Gallardo brothers didn’t do it.

At first, Perry and Della are reluctant to take the case, primarily because, well, they don’t take criminal cases anymore. But for both legal minds, the wheels of justice are in motion. Della seizes an opportunity as Burger’s beard for a charity event at the home of the oil magnate Camilla Nygaard (Hope Davis) to try to convince him to accept a plea. (He demurs.) Funny how oil money keeps coming up.

Perry, meanwhile, straight-up breaks into impound to case the car in which Brooks was shot, discovering that the official line — McCutcheon was shot by one of the nervous Gallardos during a random stickup — doesn’t match the bullet’s trajectory. After a jailhouse meeting with the brothers further debunks the theory, Perry and Della agree to take the case. Pulling a fat monthly retainer out of the grocer Sunny Gryce in order to bankroll the defense is all it takes.

Almost all. To get to the bottom of things, they’ll need a top-notch private investigator, and with Perry’s old partner Pete Strickland working for Burger, the ex-cop Paul Drake is the man for the job. Paul is reluctant to take on another job from Perry, especially after his recent gig with Strickland landed a relatively decent loan shark behind bars. Ironically, it’s Perry’s admission that he has no way to win back Paul’s trust that convinces him that Perry can be trusted.

After some nosing around — including in an evidence box tampered with by the same shadowy, fedora’d figure who kept popping up in the pilot — Team Mason discovers that Brooks’s gambling boat was deep in debt to a variety of stiffed contractors, most of whom were retained because the ship is falling apart.

Perry and Paul pay a visit to the ailing vessel, with Paul forced to take the employee taxi. In short order, Perry stumbles across Brooks’s cocktail-waitress lover, bearing bruises on her neck from the rough extracurriculars we learned about in the season premiere. Paul learns from a chef that only one produce supplier will do business with them anymore. And the two men narrowly escape the clutches of the crooked Detective Holcomb, whose voice thrums with a lethality he barely bothers to conceal as Perry makes his very public escape.

But some elements of the case remain outside Perry’s sphere of perception: to wit, that shadowy figure and his paymaster, an associate of Brooks’s father named Crippen (John Prosky). After the mystery man murders Charlie Goldstein (Matthew Siegan), the boat’s last produce supplier standing, Crippen torches a grand jury subpoena for Brooks that recalls the one served to the slain carrots-and-potatoes man earlier in the episode.

It has all the makings of a grand conspiracy of the Los Angeles noir subspecies, but the most impressive thing about the plot of “Perry Mason” so far this season is how dependent it is on the charisma of the characters and the performers behind them. We can start with Juliet Rylance as Della, a character who is as compelling in a red gown and white gloves at a dull charity event as she is when she’s hollering at a boxing match with her new lady friend. As Drake and Holcomb, the actors Chris Chalk and Eric Lange deliver memorable line readings: There’s a lifetime of hard-earned cynicism in Drake’s telling Perry he doesn’t know how they’ll get to a point of trust, and there’s an unmistakable promise of violence in Holcomb’s invitation to Perry to return to his boat “anytime … anytime.”

The star of the show in every way remains Matthew Rhys as Mason. Although he does his best to conceal it, he’s still every bit as sexy an actor as he was as Philip Jeffries in “The Americans”; I found myself thinking that it’s a good thing that Della’s romantic inclinations are so firmly established, otherwise the chemistry between him and Rylance might go up like a torched casino boat.

But Rhys’s primary talent here is looking not outraged by but disgusted with injustice. From his fury over getting played by Milligan outside the courthouse to his dogged determination to look into the Gallardos’ case, he has the air of a man made physically ill by seeing decent people get jammed up. If you’re going to play a role synonymous with the successful defense of the innocent, that’s a vibe that serves you in good stead.

From the case files:

• Here’s where I admit I’m not a big mystery guy; I’ve got nothing against the genre, it’s just not where my bread is buttered. But I think this redounds to my benefit because I spend approximately zero time trying to figure out whodunit before Perry, Paul, and Della do. I’m not a practiced enough viewer to delude myself into thinking I have any chance.

• From Davis as the oil tycoon to Gretchen Mol as Perry’s ex-wife to Katherine Waterston as their son’s obviously smitten teacher, this episode drops so many impressive actors on us in such quick succession that it feels like a flex.

• O’Brien earned my undying admiration with his turn on “Halt and Catch Fire,” a bonafide Peak TV masterpiece. He took a potentially thankless role as the new love interest of Mackenzie Davis’s lead character, Cameron Howe, and showed you what she saw in him, a more impressive feat than it sounds.

• Remember when I noted that there was no graphic violence in the season premiere? I suppose it depends on your definition of “graphic,” but audibly squishing a guy’s head like a melon is violent all right!