By starrymag | May 6, 2016

By: Lyndsey Nadeau

Stitchers – Pretty Little Lawyers

 

How do you convince a lawyer to tell the truth? The “Stitchers” team must learn how to work with a deceitful law firm in this week’s episode, Pretty Little Lawyers. Meanwhile, Camille (Allison Scagliotti) finds herself stuck between her two best friends and a big lie and Cameron (Kyle Harris) continues to worry about Kirsten (Emma Ishta).

Swimming With Sharks

Anna Parker (Stefanie Brown) is a 25-year-old first-year associate at a law firm with a client base that includes billion-dollar companies, government agencies and entire countries. According to Sam Lewis, a Senior Partner at the firm, she is wonderful, bright and…dead.

 

Sam Lewis (Dondre Whitfield), who has a history with Maggie (Salli Richardson-Whitfield), claims that Anna didn’t have any problems with anyone at the firm. Once Kirsten enters the stitch, it’s clear that this may not be true. Anna and four associates are going through a mountain of documents related to the Fugate V. Newberry Automotive case. A mother and her children were severely injured when the battery in their Newberry electric car caught fire. The firm is defending Bonnie Newberry (Karole Foreman).

 

When Sam enters the room, he makes it obvious that Anna is his favorite, causing the other lawyers to be resentful. Anna presents a memo she found from the lead production engineer to Bonnie Newberry, proving they knew the batteries had the potential to be deadly but continued making them anyway. While Anna is hoping this evidence will motivate Bonnie to settle the case and recall the batteries, Sam insists that they will hide the memo. Bonnie wants Anna off the case, but Sam stands up for her and dismisses it as a rookie mistake.

 

More importantly, little Cameron-but-really-not-Cameron (Willem Miller) reappears in Kirsten’s stitch with important news. When the team moves her to another memory, she is unable to find out what it is. Kirsten now has to refocus on Anna and realizes that she was poisoned. After conducting a little internet research, Camille discovers that Bonnie has left a string of figurative bodies in her wake on her rise in the auto industry.

 

From past cases, we all know by now that the likelihood of Bonnie being the culprit is about 2% because then the episode would be approximately 20 minutes long, but she did have no problem nearly killing a mother and her children in the name of cutting costs. Maggie and Kirsten interrogate Bonnie, which neither she nor Sam take very well. He has an obligation to protect his client and is frustrated that Maggie would go to these lengths, but he lets it go since they have history and he’s basically the heart-eyes emoji.

 

At the lab, Fisher announces that Anna’s toxicology screen shows she was poisoned by oleander, most likely in liquid form. Kirsten says there was a glass of iced tea in front of Anna when she died. Someone had removed the iced tea from the crime scene, highly suggesting that the killer is someone at the law firm.

 

The team tries to question the pretty little lawyers, but quickly realizes they aren’t getting anywhere. As lawyers, they know how to play the game and can’t answer due to confidentiality, their constitutional rights and so on. None of them seem blatantly guilty, but they don’t seem so innocent either.

 

The team starts the tedious process of looking through mountains of records, including key card records for eight floors in the past two weeks and phone logs from 1,200 employees the entire week leading up to the murder. This isn’t going to be easy. While searching through the boxes, Kirsten gets a text from Fisher stating that Bonnie is not guilty. They eventually find that Anna had made a call from her office to the plaintiff who was suing Newberry, an action that could’ve gotten her into some serious hot water. Furthermore, Jenn, Randall, Morgan and Christine used key cards around the time of death.

 

Kirsten stitches into Anna’s memories again to try to find some more evidence. She witnesses a woman in the midst of a heated makeout session with Randall (Preston Jones) in the break room. Then, she walks in on the associates talking poorly about her behind her back. It seems like no one at this firm likes those who actually have morals. The stitch is once again interrupted by Baby Cameron, who is finally able to get a word out.

 

Kirsten has a sister! Her name is Ivy Brown and she’s from her father’s first marriage to Elizabeth Brown. Having to pretend she didn’t just get a bombshell dropped on her, she jumps into another memory where Sam is angry that Anna’s conscience is interfering with the case. He finds that she scanned the memo and sent it to the LA times.

 

While they have more information than they did before, they still do not have any proof that one of the associates is the killer. First, Maggie tries to get more details out of Sam. He insists he didn’t kill Anna, but she thought someone was trying to sabotage her. The email to the LA Times was only a draft and deliberately planted to make her look bad.

 

Now, they’re going to have to throw some blood in the water to watch the sharks eat themselves. They prove that Anna didn’t make the call from her office because she had been ordering takeout from her cell phone at the same time. Instead, the sharks bite back. Randall has done some research of his own and broadcasts that Cameron’s father is James Miller, a man behind a three billion-dollar scheme that wiped out people’s life savings. He still has 14 years in prison, while Cameron is “sitting pretty in his fancy loft.” This effectively works to tick Cameron off and he storms out of the room, where Kirsten comforts him (Camsten!). They also run into Linus (Ritesh Rajan) who has new key card proof and Camille who has found the source of the oleander used to poison Anna.

 

Cameron and Kirsten demand everyone hand over their key cards and quickly discover that Christine was the only one in the building to make the call. She denies the allegation and then Kirsten notices that she’s wearing the same bracelet as the woman making out with Randall in Anna’s memory. She uses this new information to her advantage, prompting Christine to say that Randall took her key card. Suddenly, it dawns on Christine that Randall must’ve killed Anna.

 

Randall denies this and says he “did not poison her with oleander.” The team had never mentioned oleander, immediately exposing Randall as Anna’s killer. He takes a knife to Kirsten’s throat, but she slams him against the bookcase behind them. Lawyers may be cunning, but their self-defense abilities do not rival Kirsten’s.

 

There’s some good that emerges from Anna’s murder. Sam wants to convince Bonnie to settle so no one else gets hurt from the deadly batteries.

Camsten Back at it Again

Once again, Cameron ditches Nina (Jasmin Savoy Brown) for work at the “video game company” and promises to make it up to her afterwards. Nina happily tells him to tell Kirsten hello, bringing attention to the fact he’s spending more time with his work girlfriend than he is with his real girlfriend. While at work, Cameron requests Kirsten to have a pre-stitch physical as he’s beginning to worry about her and she declines. Cameron really cares about Kirsten’s wellbeing. Since Cameron knows Kirsten is hiding something from him related to the little boy in the stitch, he also reminds her that she can talk to him about anything, and nothing is ever going to change that.

 

Later, Cameron ditches Nina again to help Linus and Kirsten dig through records at the law firm. Either Nina wants to maintain her status as a super patient girlfriend or she’s secretly evil and doesn’t really care about Cameron as far as romance goes. Or, maybe she’s just a big Camsten shipper.

Camille’s Work-Life Balance

Camille is struggling to define the line between her work and personal life and continues to disappoint Linus as she’s unable to reveal what she’s been hiding. He even talks to Kirsten about his suspicion that Camille is seeing someone else. However, since Camille is also hiding her fake relationship from Kirsten. Kirsten assures Linus that Camille isn’t seeing anyone behind his back.

 

Worse, Liam is getting a little too handsy during their fake relationship. While she wants to successfully do her job, she also doesn’t want to take the relationship too far. Liam kisses her right as Kirsten walks in, causing Kirsten to be furious. Still, Camille can’t tell Kirsten the truth and is now receiving the cold shoulder from two of her closest friends who thinks she’s a two-timing backstabber. After all of this, she doesn’t feel like she’s being appreciated for all the sacrifices she’s making in order to get Liam to fess up information about Kirsten’s father.

 

The episode concludes with Kirsten arriving home to find Camille and Maggie waiting for her. They tell her the truth, then give her the option to end it. Fearing it’s too dangerous, Kirsten doesn’t want Camille to see Liam anymore so she volunteers to do it instead. This is about to get even more dangerous.