'Suits' Creator Teases Emotional Season 5 Summer Finale
Suits fans have shed a few tears before, but they’ll definitely be needing tissues for this week’s summer finale. Season 5 has built to two big decisions: Will Harvey accept Forstman’s ultimatum — Harvey leaves Pearson Specter Litt and Forstman will no longer fund Hardman’s attempt at a takeover — in order to save the firm? Will Mike keep up this fraudulent life that he’s been leading after Trevor, of all people, told him he should stop?
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What makes the episode extra emotional are the flashbacks to significant events in their lives that made them who they are: Mike dealing with his parents’ deaths and Harvey handling his mother’s infidelity. “I wouldn’t call it 100 percent origin story, but it’s pretty close to it,” creator Aaron Korsh says.
He’ll break it all down for Yahoo TV in a postmortem posting after the East Coast airing, but in the meantime, he can tell us how the writers decided to have Hardman return. “In Season 5, I didn’t want to do just one case the whole time, so the organizing principle was going to be this Harvey-and-Louis brewing dynamic as a result of Donna leaving. And we wanted some sort of other firm threat, so we put Jack Soloff in there,” he says. “It was kinda funny: The writers’ room gathers at the same time that I’m usuallly doing the rewrite of the current episode with [executive producer] Dan Arkin and the writer of the episode. We were doing this rewrite, I think it was Episode 6, and the writers’ room and my room, at the same minute, came up with the idea that Soloff was in cahoots with Hardman. I went in to tell them we were thinking about that, and before I could speak, they said, ‘How do you feel about Hardman and Soloff being in cahoots?’” he recalls, laughing.
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Hardman is, after all, one of the only people who could get Louis and Harvey back on the same team at this point. “That was absolutely a natural consequence. I don’t think that’s why we did it, but once that happened, obviously Louis would turn around,” Korsh says. “And the other difference between Soloff and Hardman is, Hardman is closer to pure malice than Jack is, and we wanted to humanize [Jack]. Hardman has his motive for malice in that they tossed him out, so he wants to get them back; he’s not just pure evil. Jack had his motives for going to Hardman in the first place — his ambition and for advice — but Jack is not inherently evil and he did actually turn around. But then he laid down with dogs and came up with fleas, so to speak.”
The Suits summer finale airs Aug. 26 at 9 p.m. on USA.
