So Help Me Todd Season 2 Episode 2 Review: Your Day in Court

On So Help Me Todd Season 2 Episode 2, “Your Day in Court,” we spend as much time trying to differentiate at least three plot lines as we do tracking what happens in them—and that’s before they all go off the rails.

Margaret is thrust into a murder trial by Beverley. This is not the kind of role you want to find yourself in unexpectedly, especially when what starts as shared trial of a loving couple turns into two people using different attorneys to turn on each other.

Margaret is left representing a husband who was tricked into an entirely too convenient “confession” by his wife. In exposing the woman both for her crimes and her affair, she wins her trial only at considerable cost to her own client.

She is given the case in the first place because Beverley wants one with a star witness. For some reason (possibly involving Gus as opposing council), she also wants Todd there to run intervention and bring in Allison as a medical expert.

The case so deserving of her time is one involving attack by puppet. No, really. A tech giant accuses a puppeteer of using his puppets to traumatize her son at his birthday party. It may be for the best that this one ends in a mistrial.

Allison is in court because she’s also dealing with her own legal woes in the form of case of credit card fraud. Soon this case has multiple victims within the court system, because it’s being pulled off by a bailiff and her nephew.

Got all that? Good. Now add in awkward conversations between Margaret and Gus, the shadiness of Beverley’s manipulations, and the fact that every character is in a complicated place at the moment. This show is really making up for lost time.

With so much happening at such a fast pace, it’s difficult to comment on the specifics. The level of drama for the clients, especially in Margaret’s case, would be worth being the sole focus of an hour in a less condensed season.

There is probably a lot of realism in the circus the court turns into. A lot of absurdly convenient things happen as a reflection of the biases handed to certain sides in the justice system over the opposition. Margaret handles them as well as anyone could.

Her conversations with Gus are also very welcome, even if they’re just an uncomfortable step in the right direction. At least they are talking instead of leaning into the trope of letting a lack of communication fuel conflict unnecessarily.

Beverley’s trial is…just weird. I don’t have much else to say about it. At least watching both Todd and Allison react to legal questions about the sentience of puppets is hilarious. (Murder trials aren’t exactly known for their humor.)

As in the season premiere, I’m more troubled by what her actions reflect. It sure looks like she’s working against Margaret now, to the point of trying to lure Susan away from her. I don’t love that it’s happening and I don’t understand the reasons.

My best guess would be that, given the stakes Crest, Folding, and Wright now faces, she’s doing whatever she thinks is best to save it, even at the expense of a newly named partner. Still, I hate for any woman, especially a Black woman, to appear as a villain here.

These characters really are going through it, Allison most of all. Her own financial information has been stolen, leaving her homeless with a pack of unpaid parking tickets and a threat to her medical license until Todd jumps onto the case.

We spent a good chunk of an episode with her legal woes last season. Here, though they aren’t her fault, their seriousness is underplayed. I hope this is just another pacing issue, because she deserves the chance to use this difficulty to grow.

It would be good for everything to slow down a bit as we settle into the new season. We care about these characters and what happens to them. A few in-depth plots we can expand on will be better than just throwing out as much as these poor people can handle.

 

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So Help Me Todd airs Thursdays at 9/8c on CBS.

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