Suits recap: Inevitable conflicts and conclusions

Suits forced its characters into some inevitable and excruciating decisions, so how did they deal? Here’s what happened in Suits season 7, episode 13.

Two words TV fans will never find in the same sentence: Suits and easy. That was particularly apparent in Wednesday’s latest episode of the USA series, fittingly titled “Inevitable.”

The episode begins with a seemingly normal morning for Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht). He seems to have made up with his girlfriend Paula Agard (recurring guest star Christina Cole), as he makes clear he’s not keeping things from her anymore.

Wow, Harvey’s really trying here, and you have to give him credit for that.

He’s certainly doing a sight better than Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), who’s got a gun in his bedside drawer but really, it’s just part of an odd role play he’s doing with Sheila Sazs (guest star Rachael Harris). There are so many levels of weird to this, we don’t even want to recap it further.

Mercifully, Suits brings us back to the law firm where Harvey has to explain the new world order to one of their clients. Teddy Doylw needs Harvey’s help to save his employees, but can he considering that he sold his company already? Well, he did come to the lawyer who tends to pull something out of nothing.

Harvey enlists Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), who has a perfect line:

"Mike: You’re right, I do leap tall buildings in a single bound. Good call coming to me for a help."

He also has an idea—find a way to convince the new owners of Teddy’s company that it’s worth more to them if they keep the factory open than it is if they close it and lay off all the employees. Great plan, but how are he and Harvey going to execute it?

Louis pretends that he’s not sleeping with Rachel in front of Gretchen (Aloma Wright), but she is able to read him in five seconds and gives him the deserved what for. He refuses to listen, though, saying that disaster won’t ensue. She doesn’t believe him; we don’t either.

Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) interrupts Mike’s strategizing to remind him that they also have all kinds of pre-wedding stuff to deal with, including a questionnaire they have to turn in about what they want from their relationship. That’ll be fun to find out about, but first Mike has to walk into Harvey’s office and tell him he’s already come up with a solution.

When they talk about how Mike will miss Harvey someday and Mike replies that “nothing lasts forever,” Suits fans are probably feeling a pang of impending loneliness, knowing that the scene is foreshadowing Patrick J. Adams’ imminent departure from the series.

The dynamic duo go to visit the man who now owns Teddy’s company, Kurt Baxter, and tell him they’ve cut a deal with the company’s U.S. suppliers that would increase his cash flow by a massive 80 percent. But they’re blindsided when they find out his only interest is in selling the company to China, and he’s not talking about anything else.

Oh, now it’s on.

Harvey is even more determined to help Teddy and his employees, while both Mike and Donna Paulsen (Sarah Rafferty) aren’t sure he can. He’s not listening, though, and decides to go from the positive to the negative approach—driving down the stock price to enable Teddy to take his company back, by an assist from their old friend Stu (Ian Reed Kesler).

Rachel finds out about Louis’s affair from Gretchen, while Harvey gets an unexpected call from his mother and invites her to have dinner with him and Paula. Paula expresses apprehension about it, but agrees, just before Harvey’s exit is delayed by an angry call from Kurt, who’s figured out the stock-tanking plan already.

He and Mike give Kurt the choice of selling the company back to Teddy or going down with the proverbial Titanic, but don’t let him answer before they hang up and trade notes on both of their impending personal obligations. Unsurprisingly, Mike didn’t fill out the questionnaire because he doesn’t know what he wants, which infuriates Rachel—who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what she wants.

"Mike: Why can’t we live our lives for a while and see what happens?"

Mike’s old friend Father Walker assures Rachel that their not having the same answers could be a good thing since they’re not locked into a plan, but the duo go home and talk about it anyway, in which Mike points out even their fights have a greater meaning.

Elsewhere, Suits shows us exactly what happens every time a TV parent shows up: they embarrass their children. Lily doesn’t leave without thanking Paula for the fact that her son is talking to her at all, but that compliment only makes Paula think about Donna. Uh-oh, we see where this is going.

Back at Harvey’s apartment, he confirms that he meant Donna and not her when he made that comment to his mother. That leads her to admit that she can’t handle Harvey having Donna in his life, because the last man she was with cheated on her with someone he worked with. So even though she swore she wouldn’t, she’s making him choose. She’s damaging her current relationship because of something that happened in the one before.

He has no answer to that, and Suits cuts to the next morning, where a subdued Harvey calls off Stu since he believes Teddy is about to buy his company back. But he’s wrong: when they get to Baxter’s office, he’s even more insufferable than he was the first time. Maybe you should’ve waited to make that call until the paperwork was signed, Harvey.

Harvey tells Mike to take the day and think of a Plan C, and if he can’t, they’ll break the news to Teddy. He assures his mom that he’ll be fine, even though his face says he isn’t. And then he has to call in a favor.

"Donna: I deserve everything I have.Stu: Then come over to me and prove that to the world."

As if that’s not depressing enough, “Inevitable” stuns us with Stu making a job offer to Donna and her actually saying she’ll think about it. That’s because she knows Harvey told him to offer it to her and Harvey is forced to confess what Paula told him. Holy heck, he’s willing to send Donna away so he can be with Paula. Why? Because he still has that kiss on his mind.

Donna is understandably upset, feeling unsupported and like she shouldn’t effectively lose her job and all she’s earned because of one mistake. Harvey may not see another way out of a situation that they shouldn’t even be in, but she does. She goes to see Paula directly and apologizes to her hoping that will put her at ease. But it doesn’t, because Paula wants her to swear that it’ll never happen again.

Teddy gets the bad news that Harvey hasn’t been able to save his company, and Harvey tries his best to comfort him in his Harvey Specter way by telling him the Liberty Rail story from a few seasons ago—you know, the one where Donna was fired and Harvey got her back. It makes the lightbulb go off in his own head, and he asks Mike if their Plan A is still good.

By offering equity partnership to the employees whose jobs he’s trying to save, Teddy can raise enough extra money to reach the asking price Baxter wants for the company, and buy it back in the end. Too bad Harvey can’t have the same kind of epiphany about his personal life, because it’s a flaming disaster at the moment.

He comes back to Specter Litt to find Donna’s resignation letter on his desk. Since Paula won’t compromise, Donna has decided she can’t stay, and she’s gone before he can catch up to her to convince her otherwise. This leads an utterly shell-shocked Harvey to stare into space at Paula’s apartment, where he tells her that Donna has left—but that he’s also breaking up with her. We have never been so happy to see a breakup on this show, ever.

Suits fans know where he’s going next: Donna’s apartment. He hands her back her resignation letter, informs her that he dumped Paula, and asks if she’ll take her job back. Which she does, so he’s okay. And we’re okay.

After this week, there are only three episodes of Suits left in two weeks, as the final two hours of Suits season 7 will air back-to-back. So we’re at the end of the line here, and that shows in this week’s episode. This is the episode that essentially clears out the clutter and gives us a clean slate for the more pressing issues ahead.

The bulk of “Inevitable” concerns the Harvey-Paula relationship, and it’s no great loss that the story comes to an end. Many Suits fans were never quite on board with it to begin with, since it was a bit weird that Harvey would date his former therapist. But the last few episodes took out what made Paula different, and sent her down the same path we’ve seen others go before. She felt threatened by Donna, made Harvey choose, and she lost.

It was kind of a foregone conclusion, because Christina Cole is a guest star and Sarah Rafferty is a regular, so only one of them can really leave Suits. (We already know Rafferty will be back for the eighth season.) But more than that, there’s just no value in the Paula character or her being with Harvey when she no longer is confident enough to stand on her own.

Revealing that her ex cheated on her with one of his co-workers feels like a way to retroactively justify her putting Harvey in a frankly ridiculous position. She behaves irrationally here, basically forcing the issues of her past onto her present relationship, and not thinking about anyone but herself. That’s different from the Paula who was secure enough last season to understand the man she loved could have a close female friend.

And yes, Donna kissed Harvey and they have a past, but how many times does she have to hear it was a mistake to understand it was a mistake? And even if it wasn’t, how can she reasonably demand a choice that would change someone else’s whole life around? At least in the end she seems to realize that she’s gone too far, but it’s too late. She’s no longer someone we care about the moment she starts making her issues Harvey’s problem.

But ending the relationship is the only reasonable solution, and it gets that storyline out of the way. Then we just have Louis-Sheila and Mike-Rachel to deal with, and only one of those has a real chance at concluding well in the next three hours (if there’s not a Suits wedding before the end of the season, someone may riot).

The chief concern with “Inevitable” is an overarching one that’s been brought up before and probably will be again. The legal action on Suits seems to have taken a back seat to the personal stories. Again, the case of the week feels like an afterthought. Suits has normally been very good at intertwining a balance of the two, and it often takes the Buffy The Vampire Slayer approach of finding a case that somehow plays off the personal stuff—like how it’s Harvey talking about Donna to Teddy that enables him to solve Teddy’s problem. When those two aspects of the show work together, that’s when it’s pitch-perfect.

But since the show’s return a few weeks ago, the cases have felt like they’re hardly there. There is a sense of imbalance, and it may not be corrected given that the two-hour finale not only has to be a finale, but also write out Patrick J. Adams and Meghan Markle, and also help launch the spinoff featuring Gina Torres. That’s a lot of stuff happening, and most of it is going to wind up being about characters who are leaving, have left or are going to be in Chicago with Jessica. How will Suits handle everyone else’s needs and still tell a story that has resonance within the halls of Specter Litt?

There’s no doubt that Suits is a show in transition. It’s losing two main cast members in just a few weeks, while it’s gaining three more (the returning Dule Hill and Amanda Schull plus new arrival Katherine Heigl). And by losing the Mike Ross character, it’s also losing its very premise, because Mike was the catalyst of that premise. This show has to figure out what its future looks like, and episodes like “Inevitable” are the metaphorical spring cleaning that gets rid of what needs to be finished and allow the show to move forward.

Now where is Suits season 7 going to go in three episodes that will show us what’s going to be next? What kind of a story can it tell in that short time frame? And can it get back to finding all of the pieces that make it the best show on TV, rather than just focusing on a few? This may not be the season’s best episode, but it serves a necessary function to make this great show better.

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