Sure, sure. Uh, okay, so, as you might recall, near the end of the first half of the season, after Lola’s hearing, aside from the other advice Laski offered, he said to be careful of Benner as a mentor, that she had skeletons in the closet. Keep that in mind.
Last week, Benner told Lola she was running for Attorney General and wanted her help in digging into her background, to uncover anything her opposition might. Lola found a few borderline iffy cases from when Benner was in private practice and went to Laski about them, he singled out the Cuprillon case and said to look deeper into it. Cuprillon’s workers had sued because of unsafe working conditions that left them sick and, represented by Benner’s firm, Cuprillon had settled for far less than they should have. To investigate more thoroughly, Lola contacted the opposing lawyer who’d worked that case, Jean Rubenstone-Frost, played by Brenda Strong. At this point, we only had a pic of Jean but I was like, hmmm, a female lawyer her own age, skeletons in the closet, let’s see where this leads. >_>
In yesterday’s ep, Jean came to Lola’s office and said, yes, Cuprillon definitely settled for way too low, they bullied her clients into taking low offers, but worse, a few months after, leaked documents came out from Cuprillon showing that they had known about the damage being caused. And there’s no way their law firm wouldn’t have known. Lola was like, but Benner was just a third year associate at the time, could she have done anything? To which Jean was all like, oh, Lisa Benner was never just passively involved in anything. And she knew this because she’d DATED her! I felt quite vindicated, although there wasn’t any kind of conflict of interest, they’d broken up years earlier, despite having been pretty serious, living together, meeting the parents, all that. So yeah, she was really disappointed in Benner.
As she’s leaving, she drops by at Benner’s office to give her a heads up about what she told Lola, as a courtesy, but you can tell it’s more to confront her a bit. She doesn’t mean to stay but as it happens, the main plot of the ep is a hostage situation in Lola’s court, so the whole building is in lockdown and these two have to stay in Benner’s chambers, like some kind of fic.
They try to chat a bit, catch up, both were married and have kids, Benner’s husband is dead, Jean has an ex-wife. Jean has a dog now, with the same name they’d always talked about for their dog. But it’s pretty frosty, especially from Jean’s end. Finally, they get around to talking about Benner’s run for Attorney General and Lola’s investigation into her and it comes out that she kind of expected Lola to find out and she wanted to know, if someone with a moral compass as strong as hers could find out and be okay with it, maybe Benner could forgive herself and of course Jean is like, wtf, that’s not how this works. She’s mad but then the scene in the gifset happens. It’s a nice moment where Jean realizes Benner hadn’t changed as much she’d feared while Benner gets some absolution, although, still, leaked documents don’t fix anything, as she knows.
Incidentally, at the end of the ep, after the lockdown is over Lola sees Jean leaving Benner’s office and hugging her visibly fondly, which makes her all thoughtful. We’re supposed to wonder, I think, if Lola is suspicious of Benner’s possibly neutralizing someone who could have spoken against her, or if she realizes there’s more to the story than Jean told her that morning.
