‘Presumed Innocent’ Episode 4 Recap: Punching Down

Well, Rusty Sabitch won’t be beating those explosive-temper allegations anytime soon, will he?

Rusty ends the fourth episode of Presumed Innocent — something it’s getting harder to say about Rusty by the hour — by beating the snot out of Brian Ratzer (Marco Rodríguez), a potential second suspect whose semen was found at the scene of the crime that apparently inspired Carolyn’s murder. If the catastrophic implications of this act weren’t clear enough, the smash cut from Rusty pounding away at the guy to the wide-eyed face of Carolyn herself drives the point home. He’s gonna look like a psycho killer to everyone now.

We’ve covered two of the biggest plot points in this episode: the match of the DNA at the Bunny Davis scene to Ratzer, a husband and father who’s quite unhappy to see Rusty and his cop friend Rigo (Nana Mensah) when they come calling; and Rusty losing it on Ratzer when he shows up at the Sabitch house to scream at Rusty for snooping around his family. 

The third major development is the discovery of Rusty’s skin under Carolyn’s fingernails. How’d it get there? Rusty sure doesn’t know! He’s insistent that she never scratched him that night, and this is a guy who tends to come clean the moment he feels he’s been caught dead to rights, so I for one believe him. 

Is he really being framed, as he suspects? If so, by whom? The lead suspect is of course Tommy Molto, who turns out to be the least favorite person of not just Rusty but everyone else in the office, too. Kumagai, the medical examiner whose bombastic hostility toward Rusty has been a comic highlight of the show thus far, is equally pugnacious, if not more so, toward Tommy, so it’s unclear why he’d help the latter frame the former; he hates everyone equally, it seems. Not even Tommy’s boss and political ally Nico “Delay” Guardia seems to like the guy, and his anxiety about giving Tommy the case is evident even through that sly, slightly mumbly tone of voice.

Which is where we really get to the meat of the thing: For a legal thriller, this is a show about characters, about relationships. The episode-ending shocks and surprises are, for me anyway, vastly less interesting than watching Barbara slowly work up the courage to have an affair of her own with her handsome and attentive new bartender buddy, Clifton (Sarunas J. Jackson). Or watching Tommy control his innate unpleasantness long enough to coax vital information about Rusty’s state of mind the night of the murder from Carolyn’s son Michael. Or the distinction Ray Horgan draws between self-centered shame and outwardly focused guilt, and how anytime Rusty is called on anything — from the affair to ignoring that his son is Black and involved in a crime and therefore in grave danger — it’s shame, not guilt, that shows on his face. 

At the heart of it all remains Rusty and Carolyn. Carolyn is the structuring absence at the center of the show, the black hole around which everything else swirls in gravitational captivity. Renate Reinsve’s work in making this woman seem both irresistible and at the same time unknowable is really something. The way she shifts from tenderness to viciousness when rehearsing her closing statement in the Bunny Davis case, for example, is what makes Rusty finally tell her he has feelings for her. But this same ability to toggle between kindness and cruelty eats at him later, when he recalls how she gave him the brush-off the night of the murder by kissing him goodbye, knowing this would provide him just enough hope to be willing to leave voluntarily.

Carolyn is all but a third presence in the room when Rusty and Barbara make passionate love one night, too, with Barbara openly asking Rusty if this is the kind of intensity he brought to sex with Carolyn. He assures her that it’s different; I get the feeling she didn’t really need to be told that.

Presumed Innocent is not agnostic about the morality of Rusty’s decision to cheat, no matter how far it goes to present you with his side of things. It might not work if it were less condemnatory, since the whole idea is that his hubris led to avoidable tragedy. (This isn’t The Affair, in other words.) But it’s very sharp writing by Sharr White and David E. Kelley, that’s for sure, writing that digs into some unpleasant secret parts of adult desire and validates them as real and important and capable of changing your life. For better or for worse…well, that depends on the context.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.