'Defending Jacob' Finale Review: Laurie's struggle to accept her son’s innocence leaves Barber family in ruin
The start of 'Defending Jacob' Episode 8 sees Andy Barber (Chris Evans) receive a call from Joanne about Leonard Patz confessing to the crime. He wakes Laurie Barber (Michelle Dockery) up as it is the middle of the night and tells her that Patz confessed and hung himself which would mean that Joanna can push for the charges to be dismissed. Their son, Jacob (Jaeden Martell) hears from the judge that the charges against him will be dropped. The Barber family is about to return home when Ben Rifkin's father Dan continues to blame Jacob for the death, but instead of reporting him for harassment, Laurie wants him off the hook. She understands how much he as a parent is struggling and she empathizes. All she can do at the moment is be thankful that her suspicions were not true. That her son really is innocent. But is he really?
The final episode drives hard to keep us on the hook with this question. Is Jacob innocent or is he not? There is no definite answer to this question for a long time. Even after Andy reads the case report of Leonard Patz's death and confronts his father, Billy only continues to blame Patz for the crime because he is dead set against seeing his grandson in a place like a prison after having experienced the same himself.
Can Andy really let Billy get away with plotting the murder of Patz? Considering that the question in front of him is to be a good man or a good father. What choice will he make? If he did let this entire framing of Patz for a crime that the man probably didn't commit go, can he really look at Jacob every day and lead a normal life?
In the face of his conversation with his father, Andy doesn't want to think about the entire ordeal too much. He now has yet another secret that he has to hide from his wife if he hopes to see her lead a normal life. He hopes that a holiday in Mexico would help their family get past everything that had happened since Ben Rifkin's death.
But of course, with no clarity on if Jacob really is innocent or not, Andy is unable to calm down. When he sees Jacob meet a new girl, Hope, whom he befriends at the hotel in Mexico, things just begin to settle down and even Andy and Laurie begin to get comfortable. Hope goes missing though, and that's when the world comes crashing down around Barber's family.
In a moment of panic after being questioned by the cops, Andy ends up confessing about the truth behind Patz's death. This gives rise to all the suspicions that Laurie had tried to bury deep about her son surfacing again. Hope is found by the cops again, she is alive and she went missing after some men spiked her drinks with drugs. So technically, that should have made both Andy and Laurie feel better but it doesn't. Instead, Laurie is on the edge even after returning from Mexico. She does pack up to leave, but she cannot shrug off the feeling that her son is guilty and Jacob picks up on her mood quite quickly. At this point, all that we can say is we are back to contemplating if Jacob is innocent or not.
After days of tiptoeing around Laurie who seems fragile at the moment, Andy decides to confront her and gives her the option of spending some time away by herself to get over everything. He tells her that all that he has been trying to do is to move on from everything but she has made that impossible. So if time is what she needs then she should take it, he says.
However, Andy is unaware of what Laurie had planned. How she had tried to confront Jacob about the truth, about how stressed she was about everything that related to Jacob, how distraught she was over the possibility of her son being guilty of murder. That's why he let her take Jacob for a haircut. However, things escalated too quickly for Andy to be of any help because in the moment of complete hopelessness, Laurie intentionally crashed the car that she was speeding on a rainy day resulting in Jacob's suffering severe injuries.
The reason Andy is currently being questioned by Neal, the reason he is reliving the past is to investigate the crash caused by Laurie. The interesting thing is, Laurie is told that it was "just an accident" while in truth she did intentionally hurt herself and her son. The fact that she continues to lament over what Jacob would think were he to wake up is ironic, but also explains how much Laurie was mentally stressed to take such a harsh decision and block memories of it to be able to live through the consequences of the accident. The Barber family, in the end, is just a shell as all of them are estranged from each other and Andy, is left to deal with the heartbreak of losing two people he loved the most alone.
PS: We never get a definitive answer to if Jacob really is innocent and that is the most chilling part of this show.