First off, I'd like to apologize...

First off, I'd like to apologize to Jamey Sheridan for my tacky eye-patch comments from last week. The reason he wore it (which I wanted to know anyway) was the medical condition known as Bell's palsy, as a lot of people wrote into tell me. Pointless aside that I can't fit anywhere else: Ever notice that D.A. Carver is holding a knife in the opening credits? Now, on with the analyzin': This heavily hyped two-hour "event" began with a missing popular high-school girl, nipple clips and a guy who bites girls on the lip. Dug the ersatz Nancy Grace. "Smell the rotting meat in the air, that's the vultures gathering..." mused Deakins. Bethany (the name alone suggests a naïve tart why didn't they call her Catherine or Joanne?) wasn't the only missing girl there was a black girl who also disappeared. Nancy Grace apparently had no comment on her until Tannia's mother gave her an earful. The principal suspect was a 17-year-old who somehow combined S&M with poker. Give the boy points for original deviancy. Sadly, Ethan Garrett truly is his father's son. Too bad his father is boozing, degenerate Harold Garrett (Colm Meaney), a jurist who specializes in statutory rape. That is, the practice of statutory rape. The old transporter chief sure has been beamed light-years from the cozy confines of Picard's Enterprise (although those "Traitor! Iago!" cries suggested overexposure to William Shatner). Garrett père played as dirty as Goren does he used a P.I. to interrogate the detective's delusional mom and rubbed Robert's face in her embittered comments. Goren countered by baiting Garrett into admitting he had sex with a minor. Whoopsie. As Carver later observed, "For a man who had sex with a 16-year-old girl, arrogance isn't the best defense." The interaction between Goren and Logan was anticlimactic, despite the boys' mutual knowledge of all things Rat Pack ("There goes Ocean's Two," quipped Eames.) The weirdest moment was Ethan's assault of Big Mike. Logan is many things, but "bitch" isn't one of them, kiddo. Unfortunately, he and Barek more or less disappeared in the final 45 minutes. At times, Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra seemed like guest stars on their own show. Eames' passionate endorsement of Goren's "acquired taste" style of law enforcement while under cross-examination was unexpectedly touching. He is lucky that she withdrew her request for a new partner. I wonder if Kathryn Erbe ever gets tired of being the chaser of this relationship, because she is the one thing that makes Vincent D'Onofrio tolerable on alternate weeks. I learned a lot about Goren, who has become much more sympathetic. The only beef I have with him is that he hogs every episode he's in. Oh, and the mother killed Bethany.