Editor’s Note: The following recap contains spoilers for Matlock Episode 8.

Alfie (Aaron Harris) and Edwin (Sam Anderson) are back for the Matlock Winter finale and Matty (Kathy Bates) tries once again to have it all. This week Alfie is hosting a mock trial competition where he plays an eyewitness in the fake case and Matty is determined to see him in action. First she has to sneak into Senior’s room (Beau Bridges) office and print out the attachment to the Wellbrexa email, prove that they are the missing documents, and use them to prove that Senior helped bury evidence that opioids before ten taken off the streets for years.

Of course, getting to Senior’s desk is more complicated than Matty expects, and only gets more difficult as Olympia (Skye P. Marshall) announces that she is bringing Matty back to her side of the farm to take on a case involving the defense of a wrongfully terminated nanny. Julian (Jason Ritter) is against Olympia taking the case because the nanny works for one of the mothers at the twins’ school, but Olympia is in no mood to seek Julian’s advice since he just told her he cheated before she did have officially separated. Meanwhile, the investigation into Wellbrexa and getting the information she needs from Senior is on hold, while Olympia hopes she will take the lead puts Matty in a very difficult position.

In “Matlock” episode 8, everyone is a fraud

The details of this case really aren’t important to Matty or the other lawyers, nor to the course of the episode, so we’ll briefly go over the basic facts. A nanny who works for a friend of Olympia and Julian’s and has even babysat her children approaches Olympia one morning while she’s dropping off the twins to tell her that she’s just been fired. Her photo was taken and submitted to a nanny monitoring site used by rich moms to observe via helicopter the people they hired to raise their children. Not only did the images get the nanny fired, but the site is also using them in a new promotional poster, making it impossible for the nanny to find work.

To move forward with the case, Matty and Olympia must make their case without infringing on the site’s freedom of speech – in part because they are facing a very pro-First Amendment judge. They manage to get a waiver that requires the site to give them the email address of the person who submitted the photos, and it turns out to be Olympia’s best friend and fellow lawyer. It turns out that said friend is having an affair with the husband who employs the nanny. When she saw the nanny playing with the children in the park near the hotel where they were meeting, she took the photo in hopes of stopping the nanny from reporting the affair. However, the nanny never saw the couple and the whole drama was in vain. Given Julian’s recent revelation, Olympia isn’t thrilled about having a cheating boyfriend either. She urges her friend to come forward, the nanny receives an unfair severance pay, enough to finance taking her own children to America, and Olympia has another victory to its name.

The really important development in this case is between Matty and Olympia. When Matty learns that Julian has been cheating, she takes it upon herself to keep an eye on Olympia. Matty stops her from going to school on a day when she could mock any of the judgmental mothers who might approach her. She constantly reassures Olympia that she has her back and will do whatever it takes to be there for her. At the beginning of the season, Olympia was hesitant to admit that she even liked Matty, and now the two are developing a borderline relationship. Things almost explode when Julian admits that he asked Matty to take care of Olympia, but Matty is adamant that everything she does in this case is only because she truly cares about her boss . On the one hand, it’s heartwarming to see the development between Matty and Olympia. On the other hand, as I said before, it makes the Wellbrexa exam all the more complicated.

Where are the damn documents in “Matlock” episode 8?

After a few problems, Matty finally gets to Senior’s computer and prints out the attachment that she and Alfie need to analyze. Unfortunately, she prints out the partner pool attachment and Olympia’s assistant grabs it. Matty is tired of going to Alfie’s mock trial to seek out the expression of what his own drama entails. Alfie agrees with the decision, but it leads to another argument between Matty and Edwin when he says it reflects her old behavior towards Ellie. After all the guilt of missing the mock trial, Matty finds the printed attachment, only to realize it’s not the missing Wellbrexa documents: it’s a photo of Senior and a blonde in Sydney. It also helps cover up the fact that someone must have forged Senior’s signature when releasing the Wellbrexa documents.

This narrows our suspect pool down to either Julian or Olympiawhich is a much harder pill for Matty to swallow because she has become closer to both of them, especially Olympia. Matty puts her eggs in the Julian basket and places a recording pen in his office at the end of the episode, which picks up a conversation between him and Olympia about his affair. Matty mutes the recording as Olympia demands to know who Julian slept with – which is very rude to those of us who want that tea – and showed her loyalty to them. There are still lines that Matty doesn’t want to cross to solve this case.

However, it doesn’t look like Matty has fully considered what might happen if it was really Julian or Olympia who hid the documents. After Matty swore that she and Olympia weren’t friends a few episodes ago, she’s bending over backwards to prove that she’s really there for Olympia. I’m now convinced that Olympia is the one who hid the documents because It will be the most narratively interesting and complicated option so Matty can navigate. Can Matty really blame Olympia, whom she has come to respect so much, for the death of her child? On the other hand, can Matty send the father of Olympia’s children to prison if he also showed her kindness?

Things are getting more and more chaotic and we are now past the halfway point of the first season. That means we’re closer to finding out who the perpetrator really is than we thought whether Matty can stick to the plan if she finds out the truth. I suspect that the answer to all of these questions will be something that not even Matty could have imagined.

Matlock is taking a break for the Christmas holidays. New episodes air Thursday, January 30 at 9 p.m. on CBS. Episodes will be available to stream the next day on Paramount+.

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