Bull season 2 episode 8 review: Michael Weatherly – Archie Panjabi scenes steal the show
There are a number of reasons why this episode worked as well as it did, but let’s start off with the nature of the case itself. Simon, a former assistant at Bull’s office (briefly) and a man that Cable was at one point very close to, killed himself while out doing a delivery as a bike messenger — at a kid’s birthday party, no less! It was a mystery as to why he would want to do that, but then it was uncovered that he was taking an experimental drug as a test subject for a pharmaceutical company. Bull was hired to take on the company, and here’s where things got complicated: Panjabi’s Arti Cander was brought in to be the opposing trial scientist. The two went toe to toe for most of the episode as Cander had to find a way to outmaneuver Bull using some of her personal skills.
What made Arti so different from Bull? She didn’t rely on any of the traditional bells and whistles; she just read people and could predict much of what they did in court. She had the advantage, and after Bull took her bait and allowed some of her jurors into the trial, she had the upper hand there.
You could argue that the show should’ve done a little bit more with showing the trial scientists battling it out on that turf, since really that is what enabled Bull to get the edge on her had more to do with discovery and investigation. Cable, Danny, and Chunk were all able to find some important information out in the field that showed that Simon wasn’t the only person who suffered from side effects of the medication, and the ace in the hole was learning that another man had killed himself six days after stopping the trial — and that the company head paid for his cremation in order to ensure that nobody could investigate the body.
As great as the Bull – Cander scenes were in this episode, how about a little bit of love to Freddy Rodriguez? There are few things that invigorate us quite as much as seeing a good takedown scene in the courtroom and what Benny did to the pharma CEO was a thing of beauty. There were great speeches throughout the trial, and for now, Bull has the upper hand on Cander. She was sly and crafty working against him the whole episode, and the dynamic between Weatherly and Panjabi was fun since both still maintained a certain playfulness despite everything that was at stake,.
Judging from the end of the episode, it does also seem as though you are going to see Arti Cander again.
CarterMatt Verdict
This was a great Bull episode through and through. Panjabi was great, Weatherly was consistently strong, and it was nice to see Cable, often a forgotten character on this show, actually be the impetus for getting the case off the ground in the first place.
Hopefully, Bull continues to take lessons from cases like this and deliver episodes that are head and shoulders above much of the others they’ve done in the past.
What did you think about Bull season 2 episode 8?
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