‘Matlock’: Kathy Bates & Team Preview Season 1 Finale’s Resolution & Cliffhanger

The jury is in. Kathy Bates is guilty of killing it in Matlock, CBS’s freshman legal drama, which is already renewed for Season 2. As a septuagenarian lawyer, Bates’ Madeline “Matty” Matlock went undercover at a fancy law firm to find out which attorney hid documents that would have prevented the sale of addictive opioids that led to her adult daughter’s deadly overdose. As Matty said in the premiere, “When women age, we become damn near invisible.”

The upcoming April 17 two-hour finale, which Bates calls her favorite episode of the season, solves the mystery (after some very intriguing twists) but opens new questions. The changed Matty, who created her persona based on her daffy sister Bitsy (Julie Hagerty) and the classic Matlock TV series’ folksy Southern lawyer (Andy Griffith), must figure out what she will do next after discovering she’s a fine mentor and a pistol in the courtroom. Bates tells us, “She’s needed. People of all ages, we want to have a purpose, to feel like ‘I helped somebody.’ Matty never expected to feel that way again. She’s going to be able to move over to litigation, her passion. That’s coinciding with how I’m feeling with this project. I haven’t been able to play a complex double character like this since Dolores Claiborne.”

That 1995 psychological thriller was Bates’ second film based on a Stephen King novel. The first was five years earlier: Misery, which earned her an Academy Award for playing the deranged superfan of a famous author (James Caan). The April 10 episode gave a wink to that horror hit in how legal genius Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), Matty’s colleague and close friend, responded to having discovered Matty’s charade. She locked her in a room and forced her to write, much as Bates’ character did to her literary idol. In this case though, the heartbroken and betrayed Olympia had Matty write down all the lies she’d ever told her. After Matty finally got out, she said, “I felt like a prisoner in a horror movie.”

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Of the emotional face-off between the pair that begins in that room and stretches over the final two episodes, Bates says, “I love working with Skye. It was mano a mano, playing and negotiating with her. Matty never realized when she went on this mission that she would fall in love with the people that she works with. She falls in love with Olympia. [Series creator] Jennie [Snyder Urman] is always saying that it’s a love story between these two people.”

Marshall understands Olympia’s extreme response. “Olympia is definitely broken, because Matty Matlock found the crack in the castle wall. Olympia doesn’t let people in. She allowed Matty to come close and be vulnerable. We got to see Olympia’s point of view in flashbacks and understand the manipulation and intimidation and ways Matty inflicted her mission on Olympia’s personal life. It gives the audience an opportunity to sympathize with Olympia – we’ve been rooting for Matty Matlock this whole time to obtain every tiny step towards her goal.”

The audience will get both resolution and a cliffhanger in the complex final episode that Urman reveals was originally supposed to be an hour but was doubled because there was so much story to tell. Going into it, despite the terrible rift between them, both women are invested in solving the mystery of the document thief culprit. “Now that Olympia and Matty are working together, they are able to access answers that Matty was not able to get alone and drive towards figuring out who did what,” says Urman.

Matty is sure the guilty party is Olympia’s soon-to-be ex-husband, attorney Julian (Jason Ritter). Before Matty exposes him, Olympia wants a chance to prove, for the sake of her kids, the deed was engineered by Julian’s partner dad, known as “Senior” (Beau Bridges). Matty puts Olympia on a ticking clock.

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“Matty and Olympia go through this whole period of not trusting one another. It’s a complicated dance, which I find so rich and exciting,” Bates reveals. “Matty has to lay all of her cards on the table. She has to bare herself. There’s a wonderful exchange between these two women who are powerful lawyers.”

As Olympia races to track down evidence to prove it wasn’t Julian, who is blissfully ignorant of her investigation, he goes on his own journey. Julian has never had the easiest relationship with “Senior,” and Ritter describes how drawing on personal experience helped when working on a finale scene with Bridges where the father and son reach a tipping point.

“He’s so amazing and he’s such a lovely guy in real life that when he turns off that warmth to you in the scene, it does feel sort of painful,” Ritter says. “He also physically sort of reminds me of my own dad in some ways. They got mistaken for each other a lot. I knew it happened to my dad, but Beau told me that it also happened, where people would assume one was the other. It all helped access some of those complicated feelings. I feel like he’s my dad in some weird way, but a very different relationship. But thinking about if my dad, who is as warm and lovely as Beau is in real life, was looking at me with disappointment and even disgust, it would feel so awful.”

There’s even more stress for Matty and rookie lawyer Billy (David Del Rio) who help his fellow newbie Sarah (Leah Lewis) with her first case, which is higher stakes than anyone imagined. “If this doesn’t go right for her, you might not see her in Season 2 because it’s pretty bad. What she did could have gotten her and Billy kicked out of Jacobson Moore,” Lewis says. As for Billy, Del Rio hints, his character will get a huge surprise in his personal life. “There’s a humongous piece [of his life] that he needs to figure out. The audience are going to be completely blown away.”

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That’s not the only shocker. Even the cast had strong reactions to the whodunit reveal. Marshall says, “When we read the script, everybody gasped at the table read and it was 50% of ‘I knew it’ and 50% of ‘You got to be kidding me. I’m totally blindsided.’”

Urman is already a month into the process of writing Season 2, which will pick up soon after the cliffhanger ending. She has many future storylines in mind including “a case about elder abuse and how that will resonate with Matty specifically, and internet scams.” One thing about Matlock will remain the same though: “I think in some ways this is an homage to women who work and that you can love what you do at the same time as you parent and love your partner and all of the other parts that make a life,” Urman says. No matter how it all works out, Matty tells her husband Edwin (Sam Anderson), “I cannot go back to being invisible.” We’re in unanimous agreement.

Matlock, Season 1 Finale, Thursday, April 17, 9/8c, CBS