Suits 1 x 08 Analysis Part III
I’m back to discuss more about the potential of Michael Ross and Lola Jensen from 1 x 08 Suits.
Since my last posts, I have now gotten almost halfway through Season 3, skipping two episodes which were full of flashbacks and contained no plot problem. My opinion of Rachel Zane has since improved, given her kindness to Michael’s grandmother and her attempts to help him find the dear old lady a house before her tragic passing. (Very depressing!).
That being said, I am not swayed from my preference of Michael and Lola as shown by this one episode. Furthermore, I was both pleased and pained to read on Lola’s Wikia page that she was subsequently mentioned in some Season 3 episodes (where I am presently), but never featured in those episodes. I didn’t want spoilers, but I am given to understand that she committed some further crimes on Michael’s behalf. Given that he owes her a massive one, having produced a fraudulent degree certificate for him, this is curious in and of itself. But I am pained that she did not and has not appeared in subsequent episodes.
So when we left off, Lola had declared that she would use the embezzled funds from her father’s company, Clarity Drilling, to bring awareness to the environmental damage that he had caused. Right now, her father is unaware of her motives and seemingly unaware that she is stealing from the company. We therefore continue.
It’s clear that Lola has no intention of reconciling with her father, particularly when she is picked up from (presumably) university by Michael Ross, whom she generously refers to as “someone”. But from her dialogue, “You had to send someone? You couldn’t just call me?”, she implies she might have come of her own accord had her father made contact.
This is fair enough and explains why she turned up in the first place.
Mr. Jensen quite rightly points out that because of her embezzlement, he had to involve lawyers, but Lola is having none of it. Watch how she steamrolls over every word that Michael tries to utter, claims to be making the planet more habitable, and accuses her father of ducking her responsibilities.
Interestingly, Lola did not react to the accusation of embezzlement, which may substantiate my suspicion that she wanted her father to notice what she was doing, and so the dropped ID was a plant. That is what I think until I receive further information. The reason that Lola was unsymapthetic to her father’s side of the story was clear: she seems to feel that he solved every problem by buying people off, even if he worded it as a generous settlement package.
What we can learn about this scene is that Lola’s argument cannot be relegated to family issues; Lola will not confess that what she is doing is criminal, and defends the integrity of her research. In response to this, her father says, “I raised a thief.” Later on, he guilt-trips Michael in dismay, saying that he and his daughter are further away than ever.
You cannot make this up.
Now, of course I take issue with her father calling her a thief. It is true that Lola has serious criminal tendencies, probably stemming from being allowed to run wild by her father in childhood. At the same time, what kind of practiced thief plans to give away the money they have embezzled from their father’s evidently successful company?
Lola may have a history of criminality (as Harvey warned earlier on), but this particular event is far from self-serving. Personal gain has nothing to do with it. Hence why she told Michael Ross the reasons for her embezzlement and how she would use the stolen money, research, and the threat of exposure to prevent her father from getting his IPO with a clean record. It’s a vindictive plan that certainly doesn’t place her in a saintly light, given the scale of the crimes she has committed, but it’s not the behaviour of a habitual and self-serving thief, either.
By the way, her father thought this event was based on “hormones”?! Is he insane? Hormones do not lead to embezzlement and forgery.
So Lola’s anger comes from her frustration that no one is hearing her message.
Or aren’t they?
Michael Ross put a lot of thought into this meeting, and must have asked Mr. Jensen for particular details about Lola’s childhood in order to convince her to reconcile. One can only imagine how he managed to persuade Lola to come, but it worked.
When his feeble pleas fall upon deaf ears and Lola storms off, Michael’s disappointment leaves him speechless for a few moments and staring into space. Again, his penchant for quick thinking deserts him and instead he shakes his head in resignation, staring at his hands. One wonders why he doesn’t immediately assure Jerome that he can fix the problem, or even tell the him that Lola hasn’t distributed the money yet (that comes a little later). And in fact, when he eventually des give the latter piece of information, he sounds neither convinced nor happy.
No wonder Mr. Jensen loses faith in him.
From this scene, I conclude that Michael had been targeting this reunion not just for father and daughter, but to improve Lola’s opinion of him; to prove he wasn’t “an empty suit”. This means that Michael is concerned about the good opinion of a troublesome girl that he has only just met, with whom he must act in an official capacity and therefore not be swayed by his own personal judgements. But already he has relinquished that responsibility in favour of judging her character positively from her looks (”she looks so sweet”), from laughing at her joke about forgery, admiring her for naming her fake company after Robin Hood, and then going out of his way to mediate a nostalgic reunion.
Michael Ross here envisages himself as the hero who will save this poor, misguided Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from herself and win her high esteem.
But he fails.
TBC