‘Bull’ Season 4 Premiere: Did Jason & Benny Make Up? Plus, a Flashforward!
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Season 4 premiere of Bull, “Labor Days.”]
“All I need is one juror,” Jason (Michael Weatherly) says when we first see him in the Bull premiere, but what he really needs is Benny (Freddy Rodriguez).
The lawyers Bull tries to use as his possible replacements are just not good fits. (Really, the problem is simple: they’re not Benny.) But when he takes his next case, a young bartender on trial for involuntary manslaughter, he can’t sit back and do nothing. It wasn’t her fault that a man her boss made her serve drove drunk — she even followed him, in a cab, once she saw him drive off, to make sure he got home — and then killed his estranged wife and her friends.
Since Bull is unwilling to see her face any jail time, he turns to the only person who can get the job done. But Benny refuses to come back. “I don’t think you’re capable of doing what it would take: show me some respect,” he explains. And it’s not just a matter of saying “done.” He’s had enough of Bull accepting cases without consulting him and never asking him his point of view in court.
But a sincere apology from Bull goes a long way, and Benny shows up in time to (try to) help Patricia (Monique St. Cyr). It’s business as usual after that, until Benny proposes a different defense. Bull does usually handle the narrative strategy, but Benny admits that he hasn’t presented his own ideas because he didn’t think they’d be “welcome.” He wants to prove the man drinking at the bar didn’t cause him to commit murder, and therefore their client is not responsible.
But after both sides present their cases, the jury is split, and there needs to be a unanimous verdict. If there’s a standoff, they’ll have to do it all again. Three days after closing arguments, when there’s no news, Benny takes the blame for not getting it done. But Bull in turn tells him he was wrong and Benny’s argument made him “turn green” (see their side). They’ll just have to keep waiting until …
A flashforward to 27 years later with Bull and Izzy’s (Yara Martinez) daughter reveals that after 13 days, the jury was hopelessly deadlocked and the district attorney dropped the charges. “The way my dad and my uncle explained it to me, he said back to them the same thing they kept saying to each other: ‘I guess sometimes things just happen. Sometimes they just do,'” she explains to her husband. From off-camera, both Bull and Benny call them inside.
Bull’s daughter (CBS)
Yes, Bull introduces flashforwards in its premiere. Let’s just hope that they won’t be part of the series moving forward because that ending was a bit too weird for the CBS drama. While it didn’t feel necessary to inform viewers of how the trial ended for Patricia, it did serve another purpose: revealing that Bull and Benny’s friendship, which is back on track in the present, remains strong enough for the next 27 years to spend New Year’s Eve together as a family. (Also, they’re both alive, so we don’t have to worry about the series killing off either character.)
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Bull, Mondays, 10/9c, CBS
