Josh closes the Lavinia Foster-Peck case as Trial & Error closes its second—but hopefully not final—season

“None of this makes sense
unless you live here.”

If you’ve been watching Trial & Error religiously since you
first found out about it and you’ve been frantically trying to tell everyone you
know that they should be watching it, too, then you know exactly what Josh
means when he utters the above sentence in the opening moments of the first of
tonight’s two new episodes. It’s one thing to say that this is one of the funniest
shows on television at the moment, but trying to offer specifics about why it’s
funny… Yeah, that tends to be a little bit more difficult, since so many of the
biggest laughs are directly tied to knowledge of previous moments, most which
are nearly impossible to explain. Sure, you can try, but any attempt will
inevitably send you sputtering to the same concluding statement: “You know, you really just need
to watch it.”

Like Josh, I’m glad I came to East Peck, and I hope like hell that I’m provided with the opportunity to return again. For now, though, let’s just take a look back at the final two episodes of season two, shall we?

To say that there’s a lot
going on over the course of episodes nine and ten just doesn’t cut it. It’s
already well established that Trial &
Error is one of those shows that all but requires more than a single
viewing of every episode, just because the jokes and visual gags are popping up
at such a frantic pace that the odds of catching them all in one go-round are
pretty darned slim. With these episodes, there’s the added pressure of knowing
that the end of the season is nigh, so everything’s got to be wrapped up in the
neatest little bow possible, and that’s a bit of a problem when you’re dealing
with matters of murder, which are notoriously messy.

Also messy: when a pregnant
woman’s water breaks, which is what poor Carol Anne experiences in the midst of
Jesse Ray’s retrial. After eagerly watching this storyline throughout the
entire season and anxiously waiting to discover
the identity of Carol Anne’s baby’s daddy, it somehow never occurred to me—not
even with all of
her reminders that Josh really wasn’t necessarily the father—that
we were on a path which would
ultimately lead to a conclusion where Josh wasn’t the father. Given his
reaction, I would argue that it never occurred to Josh, either, or if it did,
then he clearly never really allowed himself to believe that there was a possibility that things were going to go that way.
Either way, the end result was the unexpectedly heartbreaking moment when he
left Larry’s skate wrench on the bench and walked away.

Oof. Thanks for the punch to the gut, Trial & Error.

Still, before breaking our hearts with the
revelation about her baby’s parentage, the last moments of Carol Anne’s pregnancy
resulted in a number of great laughs, starting with her final trip to the
veterinary gynecologist and another guest appearance from Jayma Mays’ husband,
Adam Campbell, who’s probably the only actor who could’ve gotten away with that
gag about giving her a treat for being a good girl. Mays made the most of the
physical comedy in the subsequent courtroom scene, although I’d argue that the
funniest moment belonged not to her but to everyone else in the courtroom,
since I laughed hardest when they got so invested in her travails with the
folder that, when an item slipped out of it and landed on the floor, they all
simultaneously went, “Awwwwww…”

Yes, the sudden lowering of Carol Anne’s
voice was ridiculous, but when combined with her water breaking, it gave Josh a
great line: “You sound like James Earl Jones, and you just turned the courtroom
into a slip-and-slide!” Yes, it was gross when Carol Anne demanded that her
long-suffering intern clean up the residual effects of her water breakage so
that she could continue with her case, but it’s hard to argue against the
recurring cutaways to said intern, which never failed to score a laugh. In other words, in terms of comedy, the pregnancy proved to be the gift that kept on giving…except, of course, for that whole thing where Josh wasn’t actually the baby’s father, where it brought nothing but tears.

It still hurts, Trial & Error, and the wound’s not going to heal anytime soon. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

But enough about the miracle of life already:
let’s get to the death…or deaths,
rather, since Lavinia is on a real tear when it comes to tying up loose ends,
taking down not only Forge Clooney and Rev. Tats but—God
help us all—Mickey Moose. Lavinia may have plumbed the depths of awfulness by
lacing the poor creature’s food with cyanide, but the resulting memorial parade
was truly a sight to behold, one which was filled with more jokes that I can
begin to cite here. (I will say, however, that I quite enjoyed the “3 DAY
MORATORIUM ON MOOSE MEAT” sign.) It also provided an opportunity for Lavinia to
detail all of her despicable actions up to that point and for Josh to look as
horrified as we’ve ever seen him, with the possible exception of when the
stuffed bear was struck by the arrow.

We also briefly seemed to be on the cusp of
getting a bonus death, thanks to Dwayne’s unwise efforts to explore the magic
and mystery of autoerotic asphyxiation, which… Okay, I’ve got to be
honest here: I watched these episodes as advance screeners, and even as I’m typing
this sentence, I’m thinking, “Am I wasting my time writing about this? Is this
part even going to make it on the air?” Not that Dwayne’s recitation of step
two and his subsequent reaction didn’t make me explode into laughter, but even
with the onscreen warnings to viewers that “this man is a moron,” the mere
inclusion of this material would seem to be confirm definitively that NBC isn’t
paying the slightest bit of attention to Trial
& Error…and at least in this one particular instance, that’s a good
thing, because holy shit, that was
funny!

Alas,
Anne doesn’t get as much opportunity to shine in these episodes, but between
her malady that prevents her from opening her eyes and her subsequent decision
to paint fake eyes on her eyelids to disconcerting effect, she definitely earns
more than a few laughs herself. Actually, make that quite a few laughs, because I just remembered the visual gag of her dropping the gold bar. Regrettably, the same number of laughs were not provided to Nina: beyond
her amusing asides about Josh giving her a “boyfriend look,” she departs the
series anticlimactically, leaving behind an entertaining podcast but not much
else.

Actually,
that’s not entirely true: she tells Josh—and, in turn, the viewer—that he’s in
love with East Peck, and even if that’s something we’ve already learned, it’s something that Josh may not have
consciously realized. Since it’s reasonable to presume that he still has this
information bouncing around inside his head after he learns that he’s not the
father of Carol Anne’s baby, it’s something he can latch onto as a reason to
stick around town anyway, which means that whenever we get the season three that we so desperately
desire and, yes, that we deserve (I know it’s not just me who feels this way), we can
count on Josh still being front and center.

I’ve waited until the end to tackle the
conclusion of the Lavinia Peck-Foster case because there’s so much to unpack
that, to be perfectly frank, I’m really just giving the show the benefit of the
doubt that the whole thing makes sense. At a certain point, you just have to sit back, have
faith that you’ll make it your intended destination eventually, and enjoy the
ride, and if you can’t enjoy a ride from Kristen Chenoweth… Actually, that
sentence took a very wrong turn somewhere, but my point is that Chenoweth was
amazing throughout the season, and if someone wanted to create a Kickstarter
page for a Where in the World Is Lavinia
Peck-Foster? miniseries to follow her whereabouts after the end of this
season, then I’ve got a crisp $5.00 bill right here that’s got their name
written all over it.

Before that, though, I’d prefer to see season
three of Trial & Error, because those
stories about the East Peck Three aren’t going to tell themselves, but they’d damned
well better get told. Seriously, someone needs to make another season of Trial & Error happen. Yes, we get an ending, one which establishes that Carol Anne won the election and that she’s clearly leaning toward a future that involves Josh even if he isn’t the father of her child. Those things are great, of course, but to allow this series to leave the airwaves altogether… Why, it’d be a travesty of justice!

Also, it’d really [bleep] suck.

Stray observations:

• The
  crowd’s differing reactions to the photo of Jesse Ray with Chet and the
  photo of Chet’s corpse and the ligature marks around the neck were
  fantastic. (“Oh, yes, that’s far less
  offensive!”)
• “Guys?
  Human beings are dying. This was a moose. Maybe we should get some
  perspective.” “Fuck you, Josh!”
• Lavinia
  Peck-Foster: not a lemon sherbet fan.
• “I wish
  my uterus was as fertile as your imagination.”
• I’d
  really like to think that the seeds of the “DNR” tattoo joke were planted
  when the character of Dwayne was originally created, and it’s just taken
  this long for the joke to pay off. I don’t know about you, but with this
  series, I find that premise completely plausible.
• “Would you suggest that to a man?” “I
  would if he was crowning.”
• Please, please tell me that I’m not the
  only person who distinctly heard the Hillboy coroner utter the words “no
  diggity” at one point.
• As
  awful a person as Lavinia may be, her speech about life was remarkably
  poignant: “The secret is to hold on tight to the good times and grit your
  teeth through the pain, because at the end of the day, life is just a
  journey…and if you’re lucky, you don’t have to take that journey alone.”
  Why, it’s enough to bring tears to your eyes…just as long as you forget
  the bit about how all our journeys end in a hole in the ground.