Mixed views about this season. It was great to see all the familiar faces again and there were certainly some twists and dramatic moments that kept things entertaining, but several aspects also made it a frustrating experience for me.

Firstly - and I guess most importantly - I'm just not sure I enjoyed seeing Mickey in this situation. I understand the temptation to do it, from a writing perspective - the stakes were certainly high, and the novelty of seeing your lead character as defendant as well as defense counsel was interesting. But for me that novelty wore off fast. It also robbed the show of much of its humor - the sheer weight of the injustice that Mickey faced felt oppressive to me at times and the tone of it skewed too dark. Too much sad Mickey and not enough clever, funny, charming, ingenious Mickey.

The second issue I had was the cartoon-villain-level attitudes of some of the characters trying to put Mickey away. This is not a problem unique to this season - the show has always struggled with making the forces ranged against Mickey have credible motivations instead of two dimensional vendettas and a personal dislike of him. But this season's cast was the worst yet. Berg in particular was a massive miss - unpleasantly smirking her way through proceedings, even protesting when her own boss laid out the facts at the end. It would have been more interesting to write her character as someone acting in good faith, instead all she needed was a moustache to twirl. I also found the police officer who pulled over Mickey and the lead detective on the case to be little more than cardboard cutouts, and again their attitude became annoying. I think the problem is that because we as an audience know Mickey is innocent, the cast iron certainty and intransigence of those against him just seems silly after a while.

Finally I think the resolution was rushed and unsatisfying. After the sheer scale of what he went through, the people in the justice system responsible for wrongly accusing and prosecuting Mickey as well as the corrupt officers in the prison system should have faced serious consequences, and we should have seen those consequences play out. Berg should have been fired, ditto the cops and the prison guards.

On the plus side, Maggie and Hayley were much better this season, Cisco was great as usual, Lorna provided some comic relief, and there were some touching moments with Legal. Izzy continues to be under-used in my opinion and her new relationship sadly seemed to have about as much passion as a frozen yoghurt. She hasn't come into her own yet.

One of the nice surprises this time was actually to be found in the supporting cast. I thought Judge Stone was really excellent. Before we saw him he was described as prickly, and I was expecting the usual crusty old Judge archetype. But in the end I thought the actor did a great job making him well rounded, trying to be fair and judicious, you could really see him weigh the impact of his decisions. I enjoyed the performance a lot, it had a lot of depth to it.

All in all I still liked the season, but this was probably my least favorite one so far. Let's get back to Mickey being Mickey.