Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Nina Arianda, Dennis Quaid, Amy Brenneman, Beau Bridges, Graham Greene, Diana Hopper, Paul Williams, Julia Jones, Tania Raymonde, Griffin Dunne, Sherilyn Fenn, Shamier Anderson, Delanna Studi, Ana de la Reguera
In the last paragraph of my review of the first two seasons of Goliath, I suggested season three should go back to the show's roots and focus on what made season one work so well: Billy Bob Thornton and the inherent drama of courtroom proceedings. Season three decided to wade further out into the ocean and fill Goliath with so many drug-induced interludes, detours, tangents, and dead-ends that Thornton must feel like a guest star in his own series. Somewhere in between the diversions, there is room carved out for a class-action lawsuit in which Billy McBride (Thornton) takes on billionaire farmers who are hoarding a northern California county's water supply at the expense of the area's poorer residents.
The David Lynch-inspired nonsense doesn't add to Goliath as much as bloat it. We have the intelligent, resourceful, albeit wounded Billy pulling himself up by the bootstraps in the aftermath of a tough stretch for him. A former girlfriend (Fenn) from his law school days is killed after a sinkhole opens a giant chasm on her vineyard. Her widower (Dunne) believes the sinkhole was caused by the weakening of the soil by nearby farmers using all the county's water during a prolonged drought. Billionaire neighbor Wade Blackwood (Quaid) offers to buy the land at a very cheap price, causing Billy to look up the county water board, which is not coincidentally run by Blackwood and other rich land owners whose businesses thrive while most residents have to buy bottled water because they can't get any from the tap. Billy persuades county residents to file a class-action lawsuit while trying to discover the contents of a shady non-disclosure agreement between Blackwood, his partners, and the state of California allowing Blackwood to control the county's water rights. Another party involved is someone from Billy's not-too-distant past.
Knee deep in all of this is Wade Blackwood's sister Diana (Brennaman), who runs a cosmetics website and may or may not be engaging in an incestuous relationship with her brother. This is more than hinted at in the form of one watching the other take an almond milk bath and making toast (which I suppose is to symbolize climax when the toast pops). It's a tribute to the veterans Quaid and Brennaman that they are able to rein in their eccentricity-heavy characters and make them watchable. Quaid, as always, has a way with a grin that suggests maliciousness and the joy of indulging in such.
Billy, just like in the final chapters of season two, allows himself to suddenly act stupidly when he should be on his toes. He stays at an Indian reservation casino/hotel run by one of Blackwood's partners and frequented by Wade and his cronies to engage in some serious dope smoking. Billy is drugged at least twice to the point of near incapacitation, yet he still stays there despite his life being put in danger repeatedly.
Goliath's season three is overloaded with quirks and weirdness, including two hallucinatory musical numbers which do nothing more than kill time. When the show finally gets down to the business of courtroom drama, (around episode five), Goliath is at its best. Hopefully season four will give us more of the main event and less of the irrelevant sideshow theatrics. Somehow, I doubt it.
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