The season 2 fall finale of Matlock raised the stakes with someone getting fired — and someone else discovering Matty’s secret.
During the Thursday, December 11, episode of the hit CBS series, the plan to take down Senior (Beau Bridges) took a turn when he suffered a heart attack. This caused Olympia (Skye P. Marshall) to have doubts about their plan while Matty (Kathy Bates) wanted to keep moving forward with getting Senior arrested.
They tried to remain on the same page despite Olympia still protecting Julian (Jason Ritter), who Matty didn’t trust. They ended the finale with Olympia showing that she trusted Matty by giving up the copy of the Wellbrexa study. Their moment was seen by Julian, who started to grow suspicious of Olympia and tailed her to her house where he seemingly pieced together the situation.
Elsewhere in the finale, Sarah (Leah Lewis) came clean to Olympia about working with Senior to spy on Julian. This caused Olympia to move Sarah to another legal team. Sarah tried to confide in Billy (David Del Rio) — who took a personal day — but he revealed his girlfriend suffered a miscarriage.
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Matlock, which premiered in September 2024, follows wealthy retired lawyer Madeline Kingston (Bates) who pretends to be a poor widower named Matty Matlock to get a job at Jacobson Moore law firm. As it turns out, Matty thinks someone at the company is complicit in the opioid epidemic that resulted in her daughter’s death.
After becoming a critical success, fans started to expect the show to take big swings. Creator Jennie Snyder Urman teased exclusively to Us Weekly that the overwhelming support for the show allowed their onscreen twists and turns to evolve.
“It was both difficult and interesting to be in this bubble where we were shooting episode 17 when the first episode aired. We were already down the road and now we are airing and so we are in conversation with the audience and I try to be aware but not be beholden so that we are still telling the story,” she explained in April. “But I always think if there’s a problem — and they’re finding a problem — I can fix that more and more. I want the story to be as good as possible and as airtight as possible.”
Urman warned Us that viewers shouldn’t get too “comfortable,” adding, “It allows for the formula to change and for that to be its own stock. We have a lot of fun structural stuff like that next year that I think is going to really surprise the audience in really fun ways because the finale leaves us in a really loaded position on a bunch of different story lines.”
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Ritter, 45, meanwhile, was excited to see Julian take on a bigger role.
“[In season 1], Julian was in the middle of a divorce, but he was going through his life with his skeletons safely in his closet. Now, with the affair coming out — and then with the other big reveal coming out — he’s in a new boat,” he teased. “There is no pretending with [his ex-wife] Olympia anymore. Or compartmentalizing and putting [things] away in a dark and shameful drawer.”
He continued: “Julian is going to have to grapple — one way or another — with this. It’s such a shameful thing that he has just put it away, tried to be a good dad and focused on his family. Now, he is grappling with the ramifications of what he did. Also he’s terrified.”
Matlock returns to CBS Thursday, February 26, at 9 p.m. ET.