Ding.Ding.Ding.Ding.Ding.I thought I was proven wrong three times tonight, but it turns out I was off-base just once.I thought that Tom was going to leave the tape in the bookend — but he didn't. One "X" for Matt.I thought that this episode would end with a big twist, then grew to think that we'd only get complete closure. But the twist came.And speaking of that twist, I thought that when Ellen was solicited by Nye's FBI agents, she would comply with their request and go undercover at Hewes & Associates, and that would frame our Season 2. Though at first they made us think Ellen declined, she didn't. And thus we have the setup for next season (still officially pending, so cross your fingers).We got a lot of closure otherwise. Patty got the charges against Ellen dropped... by brokering Greg's tape, which at the end of the day emerged as moot. The Frobisher case was settled — and then some, thanks to Larry the snitch. Ellen and Patty arrived at some sort of truce. David ...
read more
Nooooooo. Nye is bad?! I know many of you called it, and I always left the door open for it, but... Nye is bad?!We were getting so much closure tonight, I literally double-checked the FX site to make sure this wasn't somehow the season finale. Partly that's because I always imagined the season was "over" once the flashbacks met up with the present day. But now the flashbacks are done, and Ellen is putting the screws to Patty to get her exonerated for David's murder.Just to recap:• Ellen snuck out to help Patty with dead Ray. • David caught Ellen in a lie; they have The Fight. • Katie sneaks up to apartment, hands off Greg's tape.• Lyla "My Last Name Is Red Herring" stops by, seemingly only to let in Fro's goons. • Goons pummel David, come up "empty," then go to Patty's, where they scuffle with houseguest Ellen. ("Things got a little fouled up," bearded guy tells Fro.) • Ellen comes home to dead David, is arrested. • Patty is cowering at beach house...
read more
Again, I lead off this recap with: Wow.I mean, wow.Yes, you had to see it coming. The usurping of his power at the firm, the blackmail, the guilt.... Any other outcome than Ray swallowing the barrel of a gun seemed impossible, a cheat. Then when they showed him in bed with his wife, I thought, "OK, maybe we're not going there." But suicide is a selfish act.It appears that our two stories, present day and the flashbacks, have now met, since Ray's spatter of cranium has soiled Patty's loafer. That's a question answered, a red herring dismissed. So, assuming that Patty flakes and flees because of Ray's suicide, she never sees Ellen again. Meaning that she already cleared Ellen to stay at her place....But Ellen and David haven't had the big fight yet, have they? Don't they have to have the fight over "a man being dead now," before Patty lets Ellen stay over? So Patty must see her again. And what of the "Did we go too far?" chat? Perhaps that came before Patty met with Ray in her offic...
read more
Wow.Knowing that Damages' episode titles come from lines of dialogue, do you ever keep an ear open for them? This week I waited, and waited... but boy, when it came, it came. Talk about picking at an open sore. I'm amazed that the deposition room didn't take more damage or that "bitch" was the worst Frobisher had to call Patty.There's so much ground to cover this week, I don't know where to begin. Maybe we should start at the very beginning with David's sex dream, which actually started off kinda hot... then brrrrrr! Shades of Michelle Pfeiffer morphing mid-straddle in that Harrison Ford thriller.We then go to Tom asking Patty about her "plan" for Ellen. "As long a Gregory is still in play, so is Ellen." Well, that certainly didn't bode well for Ms. Parsons. Good for Ellen for ultimately taking control of her destiny, telling the dragon lady, "I'm so sick of your bulls--t." Encore! Alas, it looks like the firing (which I suspected was "staged" in order to steer Ellen into "enemy ter...
read more
Does Patty regret what you did? I dunno, tell me what you did!I am really beginning to wonder what happened "six weeks later," which is where we are now at. Ellen had to perhaps kill a man in self-defense, came home to a bludgeoned David, got collared and, when she perhaps needs her most, cannot track down Patty — who, we now see, is hidden away at her Hamptons beach house literally quaking, sporting a look on her face along the lines of, "I'm a bad mamajama, yes, but even I cannot believe I did what I did." Hmmmm. And now, just as Tom goes to find her, Patty makes tracks out of New York State. Double-hmm.As I assumed, despite many a conspiracy theorist here, George Moore is in fact George Moore. No preposterous "switcheroo" there. George is fed up with this case dragging on and Patty putting together the pieces, so he has taken action, hand-delivering a chunk of evidence in the name of forcing Frobisher to settle this bad boy once and for all. Speaking of settlement offers, wh...
read more
Holy. Crap. Did not see that one coming. "Boone" is George Moore, aka the SEC bigwig who went after Frobisher "pretty aggressively" (yeah, as if!) during the government trial. Now that's a horse of a different color. Here we were thinking he was just a crooked broker or something.So is the case-breaker here that Katie can place an SEC exec at a beachhouse belonging to Frobisher's lawyer? Boone/Moore said to Art that Fiske — whoever he is/was to Gregory — put him up there.Let's revisit the latest flash-forward clues. David is all aghast at his fiancée because "a man's dead now. Is that the plan?" Whose dead body do you think has surfaced? Greg's? Or Larry's? Meet the parents? No thanks. I found the stuff, at least the early, aren't-Ellen's-naive-folks-cute stuff, a bit intolerable, and was liberal with the FF-button — unheard of during Damages. Is the purpose to show that as ruthless an attorney Ellen is training to be, it's a good thing? That had Dad followed her...
read more
So, do you think Greg was foolish to flee, despite Patty's goon having his back? What a risky, risky move, and one that seems ill-fated, as that Mean Version of Paul Giamatti was last seen hot on his trail. Then again, this is the same Greg whose own paranoia on the sidewalk literally landed the subpoena in his lap.I'll give this episode a solid "B," as it served up lots of intel on the present day. Among the clues we were given:• Ellen and David had a fight, so Patty invited El to crash at her place. Very interestingly, Patty and only Patty knew Ellen was staying there.• Patty was out of town when Ellen slept over — and continues to be MIA as the police interrogate blood-soaked Ellen.• Ellen had never seen her attacker before.• Despite a mutual pledge of trust, Tom is totally playing Ellen and is in contact with Patty. Ellen, thank goodness, suspects this and has Hollis Nye on Tom's trail.Getting back to Gregory, as Ray calls him.... Looks like many of you ...
read more
Dare I say, we've hit a bit of a slow patch here with Damages. Still a superb show, do not get me wrong, but I find that when it's not dazzling you with misdirection and shocking reveals... it shows hints of ordinariness. Take Ellen's confab with Greg at the postcard rack. It totally felt like two actors reading a script, barely a genuine line of dialogue to be found. Didn't she say something like, "We can only trust in ourselves"? Who says that? And Ellen going all "hardcore," hair pulled back and talking tough? I didn't come within a country mile of buying that. "Don't they teach you [lying] in law school?" Ooh, you're so edgy, honey.Ted Danson, on the other hand, is owning this show as of late. Frobisher is so desperate to be somebody he is not, he can barely tell if he is coming or going, and is shooting himself in the foot along the way. The instant he crashed the ghost writer's quiet night with the girlfriend, you knew it was ending badly. Maybe not as badly as it did, but......
read more
(Sorry for the delay; rough commute.)Tom, Tom, Tom....Tomahawk, Tomahawk, Tomahawk.I'm not sure who should feel more jerked around — Tom, who went through all sorts of crises of conscience and blunt introspection only to wind up where he started, or us the viewers, who went along for the one-hour circuitous ride.That said, it's good to have Tom back on the team, officially. What would have really made my heart grin would have been for him to show up for work just hours after "negotiating" with Patty to find his name being added to the door. But Patty and Damages isn't about grinning hearts.This episode didn't advance the case or the story much, but we nonetheless cobbled together a few clues:• Ellen, it was reiterated in more flashbacks, is ultimately attacked (and in turn kills) a man with dark, sleek hair (though I suspect he's just a hired gun and no one we will ever get to know over the next eight episodes). • Katie, Ray told Frobisher, "is just one small piece of...
read more
Things we learned or had confirmed this week on FX's Damages:• Frobisher robbed his employees' retirement accounts to the tune of $1.4 billion dollars.• Katie saw whatever it is she did or didn't see five years ago, in June 2002.• Katie, speak of the devil, used to be a bad, bad girl.This episode (No. 4 of 13) was one of my favorites thus far, if only because I am a sucker for a "Pygmalion story," and I loved seeing Katie be made over from a craptastic witness ("Wow, she's not ready") to a sassy deposition-giver. How about her preemptive strike against the inevitable invasive line of questioning, capped with, "If these past few answers make you blush, Mr. Fisk, I apologize." I was practically cheering her on from my sofa.Katie, though — poor, poor Katie — was unwittingly being set up for a fall. She was fed bogus information from Greg (I saw that coming) and her worthless testimony was in turn used by Patty to give the defense a false sense of security. Risk...
read more
I hope none of you shut off the TV after that first, post-elevator fade to black, and thus didn't see that final quick-cut montage of Ellen's struggle with... whomever. (Careful freeze-framing and slo-mo play deciphered little about her ultimate attacker, save for he has a seemingly full head of dark hair.) I almost thought the episode was over, but I guess The Sopranos taught me to wait out the empty screens.As I sat here two-thirds of the way through, I was readying to write here that nothing much of the twisty or twisted sort happened this week. And then the hubby's sweeeeeet ride got smacked, the son got abducted — by Mom's doing! — we learned Michael was behind the grenade, and we saw poor Ellen get screwed yet again. (And not in the same way as Katie... by Greg.)What a sobering salvo of scenes!What else have we learned?• Greg is married, and apparently has no tie to Frobisher.• Patty doesn't suffer slackers spooked by bomb threats.• Patty agrees with m...
read more
As I previewed in the latest TV Guide Talk podcast, this episode of FX's Damages, though lighter on the jaw-dropping twists, was a welcome second outing in that many of the characters were steered into areas of gray. Almost in a Rashomon (or, for the younger folk, Courage Under Fire) fashion, we are being made privy to conversations and motivations not entirely divulged in the pilot.Take Frobisher. Last week's episode had us believing that he was utterly ruthless, and probably would not hesitate to put out a hit on poor Katie (the lying beyotch). But now we see the crisis of conscience he went through, and more than once, upon learning that his Achilles heel was talking to Patty. A week ago, whodathunk I'd be feeling for the tycoon who, if this case isn't nipped in the bud and soon, will lose his kids and wife. I found myself in Frobisher's head, weighing the pros and cons: sacrifice half my vast fortune and my priceless kids, or pay a huge settlement I probably swindled from my emp...
read more
FX's Damages, which premiered on Tuesday, is simply too good a show not to have a "watercooler" blog, so I am stepping up to the plate and authoring one. In exchange, you will give me some leeway if each week's recap doesn't get posted until, say, 8 am the morning after. (Recapping 10 o'clockers is tough for a tired father of 4-year-old twins!)As I said in the title, what a pilot episode, right?This is not a courtroom drama.This is not a legal drama.This is not a procedural.What this is — and Michael Nouri (who plays Glenn Close's hubby) first spun it this way when I saw him at a function last month — is a psychological thriller. And a darn good one.I've already screened Episode 2, so I must be careful here not to cover too much ground. But I love the setup, how up-and-coming legal eagle Ellen is seen fleeing the grisly scene of god-knows-what, and then we proceed to flash forward and back and forward and back, piecing together — throughout the entire first season, mi...
read more
