Expected complexity aside, something still seems to be missing from Damages this time around: last season’s urgent (emphasis intended) sense of mystery that arose the moment bloody, dazed, and nearly naked Ellen Parsons appeared onscreen and meandered through the streets of Manhattan before winding up at a police station, where she was questioned by two perplexed detectives.

This season, we get a far less intriguing opening with Ellen again, who, in contrast to Season One, is cool, calm, collected, blood-free, and fully clothed, yet typically gloomy. She tells someone we can’t see that they shouldn’t be scared and then corrects herself. The person should be scared — terrified, in fact. And, she has the perfect solution to their problem, namely a gun aimed their way that just might help the truth set them free.

After this one-sided exchange, the episode reverts to six months ago, a time-jumping device that sometimes made me dizzy during the freshman season since it, along with jumps forward, was employed so much. Too much, some might say.

Six months ago is just a month after Ellen’s fiancé David was murdered. Ellen is now collaborating with FBI Agents Harrison (Mario Van Peebles) and Werner (Glen Kessler, a co-creator of and writer for the series) to bring her boss Patty Hewes down from the inside. The strategy is to convince her to take on what currently seems like a harmless HMO infant mortality case set up by the FBI. Patty, on the other hand, is literally going insane with guilt over her role in Ray Fiske’s suicide and related events during last season’s Arthur Frobisher case.

When Ray’s ghost shows up in her office during one particularly vivid waking nightmare about his suicide, Patty follows his advice to relieve her conscience by coming clean to Ellen about certain unrevealed details of the Frobisher case. Ellen, thinking this will be the big confession that will finally help her destroy the woman she holds partially responsible for her fiancé’s murder, arranges to secretly record the conversation for the FBI.

All she gets out of the exchange, however, is an admission that Patty had a stillborn daughter named Julia over 30 years ago and Patty’s suspicion that whoever attacked Ellen at Patty’s home near the end of the Frobisher case was actually looking to kill her, not Ellen. Neither is anywhere near the smoking gun Ellen desperately wants, and she seems to resign herself to the two to three years the FBI agents claim are required to take Patty down their way…

…until the end of the episode, when we go forward six months, back to the opening scene. Ellen tells whomever she’s talking to that it’s just the two of them, face to face, but it looks like the other person’s not going to tell the truth after all. As a result, Ellen admits she lied, too, and then she fires two shots at the still-unseen person. Intriguing, yes, but not to the same extent as the previous season-long mystery.

As for the other peripheral characters, there’s no Marcia Gay Harden in this episode — she debuts on next week’s “Burn It, Shred It, I Don’t Care” — but we do meet newcomers Danny Purcell (William Hurt), a man who shares a tense past with Patty and comes to her for help that she initially refuses to give, as well as Ellen’s fellow Post Traumatic Stress group therapy member Wes Krulik (Timothy Olyphant), a kindred spirit in despair over a nonsensically murdered loved one who understands exactly what the young lawyer is going through.

Thus far — before the inevitable labyrinthine plot twists go into overdrive and nothing is what it seems to be — Danny appears to be struggling with how to reveal damaging information he has that can bring down an entire industry, all without getting his family killed. He fails at the last part since his wife Christine (lovely Paige Turco, wife of Lost on Mars’ Jason O’Mara, who I really wanted to hang around — alive — for the entire season) is murdered at the end of the episode.

One final plot thread — besides Frobisher hiding out in a New York hospital to recuperate from almost getting murdered — involves wealthy Independent politician Sam Arsenault (James Naughton). He’s set to fund Patty’s New York-based charitable foundation to fight hunger, which results from her guilty conscience and her law firm’s share of the huge Frobisher settlement.

Sam suddenly reneges, though, when Republicans, who loathe Patty, offer to back him for Governor. Eventually, Sam’s Yale-bound daughter Lily makes headlines when she’s busted for coke, and the Republicans immediately withdraw their support.

By now, we longtime viewers know Patty well, and it’s obvious before the PR disaster even happens that she set the whole thing up to force Sam to come crawling back to her, which he does. So, before Danny calls her to the scene of his wife’s murder, we get a very, very happy Patty with her name at the front of a major foundation — the Hewes/Arsenault Children’s Hunger Initiative instead of the original Arsenault/Hewes Children’s Hunger Initiative— whose endowment has been doubled by Sam.

Patty may be predictable, but she’s damn good, too, although she does seem much softer these days than I ever imagined possible. That could be a problem down the road if viewers get tired of enduring teary-eyed scenes where the tough-as-nails broad they know and love sees dead people and looks scared out of her mind.

Damages airs Wednesdays on FX at 10pm EST.

Post from: Grrl TV

If nothing else, these photos scream: “Yeah, we know we look good, and we’ve got a kick-ass drama for grownups to prove it!”

Bring it on, Team Patty — I’m ready.

Glenn Close as Patty Hewes

Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons

Anastasia Griffith as Katie Connor

Marcia Gay Harden as Claire Maddox

Tate Donovan as Tom Shayes

William Hurt as Daniel Purcell

Timothy Olyphant as Wes Krulik

Post from: Grrl TV