**This post contains spoilers for episode 4.03 of Suits, “Two in the Knees.”**

Last night, my friend Beth asked if I wanted to livestream a particular Miranda episode called “Holiday,” because it’s something I quote every single Wednesday night during Suits, thanks to the Rush promos starring non-accented Tom Ellis as the main character. “No, I’m sorry,” I said to her, “I have a friend over at my house unexpectedly.” Also, I didn’t tell her this, but I still had to torture myself with a rewatch of Suits in order to write this review before bedtime.

That’s my way of saying that I hope Rush is better than Suits, otherwise it might be the end of the line for me and USA Network.

What I wouldn’t give to be watching Miranda right now anyway. (Have you seen it? If not, get thee a free trial of Hulu Plus and educate yourself.)

“Two in the Knees” started out with Rachel complaining about all the work she has to do for the job she begged for, because she’s splitting her time between work and school, in case you weren’t aware that Rachel is a Columbia Law Student and a Specter Paralegal Summer Child Associate. Guys, seriously. I cannot impress upon you how busy Rachel is all the time, and how graceless she is about the entire thing.

Mike, of course, can’t let Rachel be the only terrible one on the screen, so he asks if Rachel loved Logan Sanders, son of the Colonel, and heir to the Fried Chicken Empire of Toronto-Manhattan. If that question seems a little out of the blue and oddly timed, that’s because it is. Why didn’t he ask when Rachel first disclosed this affair? Why didn’t he ask when he found out he was going up against Logan? Eh, those questions are better suited to a show that plots itself better. For now, we know that Mike is asking this totally random and juvenile question because it’ll come up later.

Mike redeems himself by having coffee with Donna, who is flawless as always — she even declares herself a fan of Harvey, as if we didn’t already know that. She confides that Harvey is trying to get ahold of his dad’s original recorded tapes, and it seems like a nice little moment until Mike uses those tapes against Harvey later. Womp womp.

Logan Sanders, serious about running this Fried Chicken Empire now, stops by to tell Rachel that he’s going to be tactical and calculated in his movements from now on. Rachel pretends to be totally on board with that, because she’s always pretending she’s an adult who doesn’t take these things personally, but again, we know she’ll change her mind later once she realizes what the stakes are. Logan, for all of his douchery, not only pinpoints Harvey’s weak spot (Mike) but he seems to sniff out the fact that Mike has something to hide. He tells Harvey to hire investigators to look into Mike, or that he will himself.

He’s in a waistcoat again! They’re reading my reviews! (Or my mind.)

Harvey spends the episode doing everything he can to avoid that eventuality — disclosing Mike’s former drug trafficking to Gilles, sidestepping Logan, the whole shebang — but Mike comes in stomping his little feet like some kind of Zane tornado and calling Harvey a “piece of shit,” which is something Harvey’s getting a lot lately. Harvey insists he shot Mike in the knees to keep Logan from shooting him in the face, but Mike continues his self-victimizing rant about Harvey having it out for him just because he left, and Harvey never seems to find the right way to tell Mike that he’s doing it because he cares. At the end of the fight, Mike reveals that he’s bought Harvey’s father’s tapes in a tactical move of his own, because he’s just awful now, I guess.

Mike: “You can’t stand that I got out of here and that I’m succeeding without you.”
Harvey: “Without me? I made you. Without me, you’re nothing.”
Mike: “Right there. That’s who you are. That’s why I left.”
Harvey: “Bullshit, don’t lay that on me. You left because you needed to feed that huge ego.”

Mike makes Pearson Specter sound like some kind of slum that people need to work to get out of, and tries to trumpet the idea that he somehow ~made it out alive~. Harvey, unfortunately, falls for it and trots out all of his usual arguments, but he’s also not wrong. Mike’s rewriting history now; he never left because of Harvey, he left because he didn’t want the threat of his lack-of-law-degree to hang over him for the rest of his career. Trying to couch it in this idea of Harvey being overbearing or a bully is just cheap and stupid, and it automatically puts the viewer on Harvey’s side for at least being honest.

That makes Harvey’s subsequent scene with Donna kind of hard to swallow, because she lays out some truths that don’t seem to mesh entirely with the scene we just saw. Mike’s the one acting out, he’s the one making it personal and coming back to Pearson Specter to rail at Harvey every time the man takes a shot, but Donna calls out Harvey for not giving the kid a good explanation for what he did. She convinces him to go to Rachel, because even Donna has an occasional bad idea.

Rachel’s more than happy to do Harvey’s dirty work, but she gets home to a morose Mike who read her depositions from Logan’s divorce trial and — get ready you guys, because this is a doozy — she lied. GASP. I know. And he’s upset. Because Logan dumped her, so that means Mike is just the guy she settled for! Mike, the same Mike who kissed Rachel while he was dating Jenny, that Mike. He’s just all over the place being terrible. She puts a bandaid on it, but I’m betting it’s temporary. Like all bandaids.

She goes to Logan to plead to his human side? I don’t know, but we get another terrible Rachel flashback where she accidentally encounters Logan with his wife, and his wife correctly pins Rachel as his mistress. In the ensuing argument, Logan tells his wife that he’d never cheat on her with “a paralegal” which is presumably where she started getting that victim complex about her job, which is also incredibly annoying.

She goes to Logan’s Chicken Fried Apartment in the present and tells him he owes her because she lied for him in his divorce proceedings. He goes to Mike to apologize and say he’s backing off, but he doesn’t miss the chance to take his shot: “I don’t want to hurt Rachel.” He says it with a smug expression, and Mike takes it as a challenge I’m sure. (No one on this show just does straight up business.)

The face of a man who just took another calculated shot at Mike Ross.

Luckily, Mike does right by Harvey by sending him the tapes via courier Rachel Zane. So that’s over.

Meanwhile, in Louis Land, Jeff uses Louis to try to get some one-on-one time with Jessica, but it backfires twice somehow. First, Louis thinks Jeff is in love with him. Then Louis figures out that Jeff is in love with Jessica. The upshot is that even though Louis was being great to Jeff, and Jeff wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt him… Louis now feels betrayed and heartbroken by someone he thought had genuinely liked him as a friend.

It was all almost worth it for this expression, though.

Jessica spends the entire episode sidestepping an increasingly predatory Jeff, which I was mildly annoyed by, because dude is getting really pushy. It ended well, because Jessica didn’t give in to his rather aggressive tactics, so I feel like this storyline kinda works only because Jessica is so strong and driven. (Rachel would’ve given in a long time ago.)

The episode ends with Jeff telling Jessica that the big SEC case they’ve been hinting at is about to start. She tells him it’s about time he started earning his money, and honestly, I’ll love this guy hardcore if he’s actually a good lawyer and doesn’t make the same Specter-Ross mistakes we’ve been putting up with for the last three seasons.

Two weeks from now: Rachel thinks all Mike cares about is winning. Then my DVR cut off the rest of the preview, so that’s all I have to look forward to. *yawn*

**This post contains spoilers for 4.01 of Suits, “One-Two-Three Go…”**

Suits came back… and everything still kind of sucks.

I can’t help but feel like there’s a severe disconnect between me and the people who write and create the show. Sometimes I think I’m watching a completely different show from what everyone else is watching, and then I remember that I have a Twitter timeline of people who normally have vastly different tastes from me, but for one hour every Wednesday night, we’re all united in our bewilderment over the state of Suits for the past couple of seasons. That makes me think that maybe the problem isn’t with me… it’s with the writers and showrunners.

The show has evolved from a fun little drama (bordering on dramedy at times) into one that takes itself entirely too seriously. It’s like watching Law & Order but all of the characters are from your favorite comedies, and they’re awkwardly playing against type — like if Chandler Bing and Leslie Knope were walking around growling about lawsuits and mergers, nary a sarcastic remark or enthusiastic pep talk in sight. It’s like these characters have been warped and twisted to be more stoic and less interesting.

Last night’s season 4 premiere was more of the same pattern. Mike now works for one of Pearson Specter’s clients, and predictably, he and Harvey find themselves at loggerheads over something called Gilles Industries by the end of the episode; this will definitely be the new Hessington Oil/overwrought half-season story arc that will end with with a fizzle rather than a bang.

Rachel the Magical Unicorn, after getting her Super Special Exception from Jessica for going to Not Harvard, has managed to not only strongarm Jessica into letting her be some kind of dual-enrolled student-and-unicorn-lawyer, she is also Harvey’s new pseudo-mentee. Leaving aside the fact that Rachel I-Don’t-Use-My-Dad’s-Name-to-Get-Things Zane managed to make this entire law firm bow to her every whim through tears and tantrums, I’d like to know what it is about her that is supposed to make us believe that Harvey finds her an acceptable mentee. Harvey, who pitched a fit to Donna in the pilot episode that all of the prospective associates were so boring — they were so terrible that he went and hired a kid with no law degree just because he found Mike fascinating. Other than the fact that she’s dating his old mentee, what is Harvey supposed to see in Rachel? Because the viewers aren’t buying it.

Anyway, Rachel insists on not being used by Harvey to send messages to Mike unless she knows she’s being used, because that makes it better somehow. She whines to Harvey, then whines to Mike, then literally fails at being cute (Harvey: “Instead of failing to be charming, why don’t you do something useful”) before finding out that she’s going to be Special Unicorn Associate Lawyering for one Logan Sanders, which appears to horrify her. We don’t find out the big reveal until the end of the episode, where she tells Mike, “Do you remember when I told you that I once had an affair with a married man? It was him.”

You dun goofed, Rachel.

Simple solution: take yourself off the case. Super Special Unicorn Columbia Law Student Associate solution: something infinitely more convoluted and whiny.

The Louis-Katrina alliance is a much more dynamic relationship to watch, because Katrina does everything with purpose; she’s serving Louis with simpers and compliments and while you get the impression that she genuinely likes him, you’re also acutely aware that Katrina is a schemer. But she’s loyal to Louis for the time being, and Louis is constantly proving himself too smart for this law firm. Nearly every episode starts with him about to make a good decision, then he’s waylaid by some harebrained advice or gossip from Harvey, and Louis proceeds to spend the rest of the episode (or season) being woefully misinformed, even though his initial instincts were right.

Last night’s episode was no exception, as Louis and Katrina quickly sussed out the week’s Big Bad Threat, a man named Jeff Mallone who happens to be the man Jessica is seeing. Louis spends the entire episode sitting on this information, waiting for Jessica and Harvey to come to him for help because Harvey had given him dumb advice early on. It’s frustrating that this show relies on its same old tropes even as they try to present them as New! and Fresh! because honestly, we’ve seen this same song and dance for three seasons now.

“You cook?” asked Harvey, because apparently he wanted a knee to the groin.

Jessica Pearson continues to kick ass, because no one writes weak stuff for Gina Torres. The only thing that bothered me about her storyline is the way people (namely Jeff and Harvey) kept insisting that she had to choose between her business and her relationship, but since she’s Jessica, I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay. The scene in Harvey’s apartment, where she cooked and confided in Harvey about her relationship with Jeff, was a particularly great scene… until Harvey awkwardly turned into a twelve-year-old boy and literally asked Jessica if that means Jeff had seen her naked. This is what I’m talking about — this kind of banter is stilted and forced, but early in the show’s run, it happened organically.

“Hmm, what? I can’t hear people who are WRONG ALL THE TIME. Bow to me, for I am Donna.”

The other theme du jour was Treating Donna Like Crap, and almost everyone did it. Donna is the everyman on this show, the person through which the average viewer tends to watch the show (this is another thing I think the writers fail to realize — they write as if we relate to Rachel the most, or Mike, but no: it’s Donna, it’s always Donna) and to watch her be dismissed and belittled separately by Harvey and Mike, it makes the viewer feel oddly alienated. If we aren’t going to have the reliable Harvey/Mike alliance to fall back on, we at least need to know that Donna’s still appreciated.

So to recap: Mike vs. Harvey, with Rachel having slept with Harvey’s married client, and Jessica is hiring her boyfriend Jeff as a partner I guess? These all sound like really good plotlines that will no doubt pan out perfectly for everyone.

Tune in next week for more shenanigans! Or don’t, I don’t really care. I’ll still write about it.