Screen: USA
Of all the 19,000 shows of which I've never missed an episode, Suits is probably the dumbest one that most of the time I barely understand. I'm sure any actual lawyers who watch it find it simplistic (when they're not finding it unrealistic across the board, which I assume is the case whenever any person in any profession watches it portrayed on TV; I know I did during the Slugline era of House Of Cards), but considering it's a drama on USA, of all damn places, I often find the details of the characters' cases too obscure to follow. I definitely have never watched another show in which more of the "action" hinges on whether someone has a file. But I think I hang in because eventually all those scraps resolve themselves, and the show gets back to the stuff that I can follow: hurt feelings and vengeance. Fortunately, the midseason finale had lots of both.
Despite having been established early as Harvey's grasping, jealous antagonist -- not even cool enough to be a foil -- Louis has steadily grown into one of the show's most lovable characters, and this half-season has particularly been the Summer Of Litt, from his cultivation of his own protégée Katrina to his triumph on the stage. Louis's attempts to forge real human connections has been rebuffed in past seasons, from Mike's choice to stick with Harvey as a mentor to the dissolution of his relationship with Sheila, which is why it's been all the more satisfying to me, in Season 4, to see Louis being supported by his relationships with his colleagues, and maybe even pointing toward an eventual relationship with Donna. So, of course that couldn't last.
I get why the whole Forstman/SEC situation is bad (...basically?) (just kidding -- that I understand), and Louis couldn't really stay on at Pearson Specter -- and, not only that, but if he hoped there might ever be any kind of reconciliation in a hypothetical future, the only honourable AND expedient thing he could do was resign. But the sentiments he expressed in his letter of resignation were real: everything we've ever seen has shown that he bleeds for this firm, no matter what it's variously been called. So for the viewer who is mostly just watching for the human drama and doesn't care about the legal part, this finale was rough.
Louis knows he's put himself in a terrible situation, but he doesn't actually comprehend how terrible until he tries to start the next phase of his life. He has no value to other firms if he can't bring clients with him. He won't win Sheila back even if he moves to Boston. Harvey secures him a new job as in-house counsel, but Louis won't regard a move to Cincinnati as anything but a banishment -- and while that might seem snobbish, the show has established that Louis's extracurricular interests are very much Manhattan-based; Cincinnati may have a ballet, but it's probably not up to Louis's standards. When Louis does find a client he can safely poach, Mike and Harvey just outmaneuver him, again. No wonder he finally lets himself believe what he'd only ever suspected and confronts Donna, and then Jessica, about Mike's Harvard fraud: it really is his last move. I thought I was bored by the constant threat of Mike's exposure -- when he decided to transition into finance at the end of the last season, I was relieved that he could still be a character on the show without producers' having to bring that whole thing up again, particularly given that it seemed like less of an issue the longer the series went on -- but giving this knowledge to Louis is different. And not just to Louis, but to this Louis. Pre-banishment Louis was already the kind of character who would nurse grudges for years -- decades, probably -- and surely never forgot the time he put a hand out to Mike and had it slapped away in favour of Harvey's. Now Louis knows that Jessica and Harvey would treat him as expendable even as they covered Mike's lack of actual credentials and treated him as an ascendant golden boy. He's going to make them pay, and they're going to have to. Name partner is surely not going to be the end of it.
Louis's run of rock-bottom episodes actually redeemed, for me, a season that was pushing me to consider dropping the show from my DVR, actually. Granted, it might hook me better if I paid closer attention to how, for instance, lawyers and financiers work together or antagonize each other while structuring takeover deals, but it turns out that moving Mike to a whole other realm of file-havers made all of that gamesmanship even more opaque for this idiot. And goosing it with flashes of Rachel's old affair with Logan Sanders didn't work. First of all, as soon as she promised to keep it professional, we all knew she wouldn't, and when the inevitable infidelity turned out not to be more than a couple of kisses, it was kind of hard to care. (That said, I did appreciate both that Mike acknowledged that Rachel was right to remind him that his whole Tess thing meant he's not exactly pure either and came home, AND that his coming home didn't mean he'd entirely moved past it.) Elsewhere in romance, Jeff Malone is a very strong addition to this show's harem of hot men, and even though Gina Torres could create chemistry with anyone or anything -- she could make a pair of galoshes sexy if she cut her eyes at them the right way -- the two of them were hot together.
The relationship that moved forward the most in the first half of the season, though, is that of Louis and Donna, and now that Louis has made his big move, there's no way that doesn't change. I really think the two of them have become true friends, and certainly some scenes have made me think that she, at least, would contemplate "and maybe more." But Louis isn't the only one who bleeds for Pearson Specter; Donna does, too. And while part of her may understand that Louis only used Mike's situation because he literally had no other reasonable option, that doesn't mean she'll like it. Will it be worth it for Louis to achieve his biggest dream of name partnership if it means simmering hostilities turn active and overt, and that he loses his staunchest (remaining) ally in the firm? We'll have to wait for the midseason premiere (ugh) to find out.