EXCLUSIVE

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for The Rainmaker Episode 8.]

Sarah Plankmore (Madison Iseman) had a choice to make on Friday’s (October 3) new episode of The Rainmaker. After being confronted with the truth about what her client did — covering up the murder of multiple patients by a nurse — Keeley (Hugh Quarshie) offered her an off-ramp from the case, and she steered right away from it. Instead, she embraced her place as the zealous advocate for the client, no matter how problematic he is or how consequential his ills, painting a new narrative for what he did.

Show creator Michael Seitzman calls their exchange one of his “favorite scenes of the whole season.”

“It’s incredibly dynamic. I mean, it’s her last temptation, right? Every step of the way, Sarah has been offered these offerings… Rudy offers her another one. He says, ‘You haven’t done anything illegal yet. Do the right thing.’ She keeps getting offered a way out. And so each one of these moments is a character-defining moment for her. What decision is she gonna make? And I think, for me, the character has to have those moments because she has to make a decision. She can’t be forced into anything. She can be cajoled and nudged and seduced, but she can’t be forced into it,” Seitzman told TV Insider.

“She has to be given these moments where she’s really offered a way out. And that scene with Keeley, what I love about it is that he’s all conscious in that scene. Here’s a guy who’s made some really big mistakes, but in that scene, you get a view of his real conscience, the man he would have been had he not made these decisions, the man he was. She sees it, too,” he continued. “And when he says, ‘I’m going to offer you something that nobody offered me,’ she doesn’t take it.. The scene ends as he says, ‘Are you going to be there?’ She says, ‘Of course, I’m your lawyer.’ Well, that’s as big a declaration as any she has in the whole season. She’s not just saying, ‘I am your lawyer.’ What she’s saying is, ‘I know what I’m doing right now, and what I’m doing is making a conscious choice to cross over the dark side.’”

Sarah isn’t the only one who had to make a big decision in the episode, either. Jackie Lemanczyk (Gemma-Leah Devereux) was also sprung from her storage facility prison by the private investigator hired by Leo Drummond (John Slattery) and had to decide whether to trust Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan) enough to testify in Dot Black’s court case and put herself back into public view after being imprisoned by Melvin Pritcher (Dan Fogler) for so long.

We’ll have to wait until next week’s episode to find out what’s next for Jackie, but if you’re wondering whether she would’ve died in Pritcher’s custody without her unexpected rescue, according to Seitzman, the answer is no.

“I thought about it a lot when we were working on it. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t he kill Jackie?’ And the answer is… in Episode 3, when he says, ‘I always admired you.’ There was something about it, that there’s something about that moment, both on the page and also the way Dan Fogler delivers it that felt so real,” he explained. “He liked her, and he admired her, and he’s trying to avoid killing her. You even see it in the moment in five when he’s interrogating her in the cabin before she escapes… When she says that she was on the tissue committee, and he says, ‘You were on the tissue committee?’ There’s something so innocent in the way he says it, like he’s both impressed and jealous at the same time.”

“I think the thing about Melvin is, he’s clearly a bad guy who does really bad things, but he doesn’t think he’s doing bad things,” Seitzman continued. “He thinks of himself as heroic. As twisted as it is, he thinks of himself as heroic. So you have these moments with him that are incredibly earnest. We never wanted the character to be mustache-twirly. We never wanted him to be a cold or overtly psychopathic killer. We wanted him to be the guy next door who’s the killer. The one who you see at the mailbox and say hello to, but little do you know, he’s done really terrible things.”

For what it’s worth, the actor portraying the character does think Jackie would’ve been a goner if not for her timely rescue. “Yeah, I think that he was tying up loose ends. I think that. But you know what? A little secret. I think he maybe had a thing for her. That’s why she lasted so long,” Fogler said. “It’s like he couldn’t bring himself to really hurt her.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Bruiser (Lana Parrilla) welcomed home her father, only to have him reclaim his seat at her throne — er, desk — and demand that they settle the case with Leo for $1 million. Instead, though, Rudy quit the firm and signed the client over to his solo care, and Bruiser sent Deck (P.J. Byrne) packing right alongside him. We also learned more about the woman who died in her dad’s care — or how Prince (Tommie Earl Jenkins) is involved — but the scenes of her leaning on Bruiser for help were heartrending to say the least.

The Rainmaker, Fridays, 10/9c, USA Network