Through the Kofi character, Your Honor exposes the cruel hierarchies of the city, where the sins of the powerful are brought to bear on the powerless. Still confused, he nonetheless does what he’s told. When he’s thrown back into a lock-up on vehicular homicide charges - again, an incident he knows nothing about - a gang leader sends him the message that he has to do the time for it.
(One of many, many loose threads now dangling from the Desciatos’ scheme.) Instead, a mob-connected officer drags him to an abandoned warehouse, shackles him to a desk, and, later, tortures him into confessing the location of Rocco’s cell phone, about which he knows nothing. He believes he’s being held on minor charges, negotiating his release by giving a desk officer the Mariano Rivera-signed baseball he found on the car floor. Things escalate quickly and, to Kofi’s mind, inexplicably from there. It’s when he gets pulled over for running a red light that the trouble begins. Having witnesses to his crime doesn’t matter yet, but he still approaches it as a casual drive from Point A to Point B. The assignment is so easy, in fact, that perhaps Kofi takes his safety for granted: He does it in broad daylight, in a white neighborhood, slipping in and out of his hoodie conspicuously. The keys are waiting for him on the right front tire. He’s assigned to “steal” the Volvo and drive it to an impound lot, but he doesn’t even have to worry about breaking into the car or hot-wiring it. The most affecting storyline in this second episode simply follows Kofi through this nightmare of someone else’s devising. Oh what an insanely tangled web we weave! Michael doesn’t hire Kofi directly, because he needs his fingerprints off the cover-up, so he uses his connections to Charlie (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a mayoral candidate, to find someone to steal the family Volvo and make it “disappear.” We discover later that Charlie has put in a call to a gang leader to task some underlining with the job, which becomes yet another thing that needs to be covered up. And so now Michael’s own image as an administer of racial justice - someone willing to jog all the way to the Lower Ninth Ward to undermine a white cop’s testimony about a Black family - gets thrown directly into question. In a fairly outrageous coincidence, the teenager, Kofi Jones (Lamar Johnson), happens to be part of the family Michael assisted in court over dubious drug possession charges. Now Michael faces a truly compromising position: He cannot allow his son to come forward and likely get whacked by the Baxter crime family, but also cannot allow a blameless teenager to get put in the same terrible spot. As if the Desiatos had wished on a monkey’s paw, another young man steps forward to plead guilty for vehicular homicide, which theoretically wipes all their troubles away, but leaves too dark a stain on their consciences to withstand.
But it also goes wrong because the fate of another, completely innocent human being now hangs in the balance.
This week’s episode makes an absolute mess of things, as the effort to cover Adam’s tracks goes so spectacularly wrong that it’s a miracle both Desiatos don’t wind up dead or in the clink. Some of their actions may be questionable - Adam ultimately fleeing the scene foremost among them - but they’re in the realm of the decent and understandable. Judge Michael Desiato could be slagged for using his connections to arrange a softer-than-usual landing for his son Adam, but the bottom line is that father and son pulled into a police precinct with the intention of turning Adam in for the incident.
#Level up tv show episode 2 series#
Your Honor is a series about the effort to cover up a deadly hit-and-run accident, and the first episode ends with a certain amount of moral clarity: There would be no cover-up if the victim didn’t happen to be the son of a vicious mob kingpin.
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