Damages 1x07 "We Are Not Animals" Summary and Review

"Do you want to play mind games like these people or do you want to be yourself?"

Damages Official Site

A top-form episode of "Damages" sees Patty's home life and the attempt to subpoena Greg Malina both come to a head. With her son refusing to come home from the camp, Patty bluffs him with emancipation papers and manages to get him to return voluntarily. Meanwhile, Fiske tries and fails to stop the subpoena. Greg is essentially kidnapped by Hewes to ensure his presence at a deposition, but flees. And at the office, Patty drives a wedge between Ellen and Tom by asking whether he tried to hire Ellen when he'd quit. Ellen decides to protect Tom and asks him to trust her, and he immediately stabs her in the back by revealing to Patty that he did try to hire Ellen -- and at the same time revealing that Ellen lied to protect him.

But even more exciting, there's a lot of maneuvering in the present. Ellen tells Nye what happened to bring her to this situation -- she was staying in Patty's apartment after a fight with David when she was attacked -- but no one can find Hewes. Then Ellen asks Tom to help her find Patty. He says he has no idea where to find her, but leaves and immediately calls Patty, telling her not to return. Ellen, however, is on the phone herself -- to Nye, to whom she says, "He's full of shit. Stay on him: he'll lead you to Patty."

Great episode this week. The present and past storylines have sometimes seemed unrelated except in the most basic causal sense in past episodes, but with this episode's emphasis on the mind games being played with Ellen by both Tom and Patty, the present and past meshed in far more meaningful ways than they ever have.

Three Patty Hewes character moments of note this week. The first was her inability to work a DVR remote, which she insists on trying to handle herself despite her husband offering to do it (eventually tossing it at him in irritation, but only after screaming at him that she can do it herself). The second was the tapping of fingers while waiting for Greg to show up for the deposition -- a hint of not only impatience, but the vulnerability that she accidentally displays by showing her impatience. And the third was the naked gladness in her eyes when her son returned.

Meanwhile, we see Ellen at two different stages of her metamorphosis into a clone of Hewes. Damages is doing a great job of showing the dangers and manipulations that will eventually prove to Ellen how difficult it is to be naively herself in Patty Hewes' world.

In summary: Maybe the best episode yet.

Related
08/22/07: Damages 1x05 "A Regular Earl Anthony" Summary and Review
08/15/07: Damages 1x04 "Tastes Like a Ho-Ho"

Damages 1x05 "A Regular Earl Anthony" Summary & Review

"I keep thinking baby, someday I'll just, I'll wake up and I'll realize something's missing, but right now, shit...you know? I turn to this one, and I say baby, pinch my dick."

Damages Official Site

In "A Regular Earl Anthony," the current-day plotline squeezes out a tiny bit of information about what's going on: Ellen insists that someone tried to kill her, and that the body is in Patty Hewes' apartment -- but when the police show up, the apartment is suspiciously clean... Meanwhile, the flashbacks, which now hover at 4 months ago, feature Donal Logue as Tom's jogging buddy (and speaker of my line of the week, above). Encouraged by aforementioned Donal Logue, Tom quits, and the clients in the Frobisher case follow him. Tom eventually persuades Patty to give him nearly everything he wants, for his return -- except a name on the door.

There are also some dullish maneuvers with the settlement figure, resulting in no real change, and a little bit of drama between Ellen and David and Katie -- Ellen and Katie are mad at each other, Davidbot tries to mediate, nothing changes. (See a trend?) The major case-related development of this episode: Greg Malina sold his stock on the same day as Frobisher, and he gets beaten up for wanting out of the situation.

I'm going to go ahead and wish that this episode had taken us further, plotwise. It was clear that Tom would never leave Patty, so the A-plot was lame. It was equally predictable that he'd take an unsuccessful shot at bringing Ellen with him, and that cracks were going to start appearing in David and Ellen's relationship. Not enough happened in the present-day plotline, and little changed in the flashbacks.

Nevertheless, it's a pleasure to watch Glenn Close playing Patty's cards close to the vest. When Tom quits, Hewes responds in classic manipulator fashion by pretending not to care, and she does so with majestic, consummate skill. But when Patty tells Tom that he's a "born second," and that's his limitation, it's almost a meta-statement. Tom's character makes a good complement to Patty's, but as the center of his own episode, he just isn't enough.

Another great character moment: Hewes and her personal trainer doing weights. It's amusing to watch her growl, and interesting to be reminded that though she was born strong of will, there are things she has to work at. My other interest is listening to all the bullshit justifications people trot out for their actions. Characters want to convince others, and sometimes themselves, that they're in this for the good of the clients, or their children, or some other noble motive. Rarely do they admit how much ambition and power hunger has to do with it.

In Summary: A filler episode, though still as good as any top-notch episode of most other shows.

Related
08/15/07: Damages Ep 4: Tastes Like a Ho Ho
08/04/07: Damages Review (Warning: Slightly Spoilery

Damages Ep 4: "Tastes Like a Ho Ho"

"Trust no one."

Damages official site

Wait, really, Patty? Trust no one? Hey, ouch. That frying pan is starting to hurt my head a little.

Damages was true to form last night with fantastic Glenn Close, fun twisty backstabbings and lies (although those were somewhat more predictable than in previous weeks), and did I mention Glenn Close and her awesomeness?

The episode is named after an exchange I wanted to use for my headline quotation on this entry, till I realized it was the name of the episode and I didn't want to repeat. Ellen has a snack in the office; Patty takes it and asks what it is; Ellen shamefacedly says, "It's a Ding Dong"; Patty answers with surprise that "It tastes like a Ho-Ho." Ellen laughs (and she has a charming laugh that we don't see much of), and so do I, and it's a clear winner for line of the week because, essentially, it's the only funny one.

That's the thing about a show like Damages, the funny bits are few and far between. I'm a girl who likes a show that doesn't take itself too seriously -- even if it aspires to greatness, as I believe this one does. Like Jack Bauer, these characters unfortunately just don't seem to have a lot of time to be funny.

I've already noted a slight dissatisfaction with Ellen's fiance as a character, and I don't want to repeat myself, but I do desperately want to talk about how bad an actor Noah Bean, who plays him, is. Because, oh my God. Especially during the supposedly climactic scene when he yells at Ellen, where his delivery of "I never wanted her involved in this" is so bad it undermines any impact the fight could have had.

Hewes as a parent is a wonder to behold. How would the Most Powerful Lawyer Ever deal with a rebellious son? She's totally Machiavellian, but totally lost too; you can see it in certain casts of her eyes, an uncertainty that she's not used to. Be glad you did not grow up under Patty Hewes.

#1 thing I was most glad about in this episode: Rose Byrne's telegenic face. She's quite beautiful, sure, but she also has an interesting mix of softness/innocence and a harder edge. As an actress she's winning me over (partly because after a scene with Bean even Mischa Barton would look pretty good).

In Summary: Damages stays golden, and also, TRUST NO ONE. Did you catch that? Seriously, did you?

Related
08/04/07: Damages Review (warning: slightly spoilery)

Damages Review (warning: slightly spoilery)

"Love is nothing. Love's easy. It's what you do after that, that's the hard part."

Damages: official site
Hewes Associates (a cool tie-in site, via Geeks of Doom)

A quick Googling told me that I wasn't the first to come up with a sentiment along the lines of, "It's like The Devil Wears Prada, but with lawyers." So I'm fresh out of cute opening lines and I guess I'll just get to the review.

Damages stars Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, a high-stakes litigator who never loses, and Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons, her newest wide-eyed young protege. Tate Donovan also appears, first as Glenn Close's trusted associate, and then -- well, things change. The first two episodes alternate between a present-day timeline and flashbacks in which the bulk of the story so far has taken place; we see Ellen fresh and idealistic, but we see it from the perspective of a very different situation six months later, when everything is ... hate to say it, but damaged. Ruined, actually, and to explain more would give too much away, even though you'll totally see it coming. There are double-crossings and lies and half-truths galore; everyone's hiding something, and every scene is loaded with subtext that as of yet I have no idea how to interpret. It's exhilarating.

Perhaps because this is only a thirteen-part series, Damages plays more like a long, very complicated movie than a TV show. Rather than having a sense that anything could happen and the story could expand forever, the way you normally feel when you watch a great pilot, I get the feeling that, like a season of 24, there are going to be answers and a tightly-plotted season arc. (Um, by "a season of 24," I obviously mean "an early season of 24"!)

The great thing about Damages is that the characters -- particularly Patty -- are so crafty and dishonest, and the show so well-written, that it's totally unclear what those answers will be. All morality is undercut by the world in which Ellen finds herself. Doing the right thing is almost irrelevant to most of the characters. But there's a certain ethos of strength and vision. Patty Hewes is power-hungry and thick-skinned, low on compassion and high in cold, calculating insight. (Though Glenn Close's performance has a lot of nuance and moments of great humanity, she does give the character a fantastically icy exterior.) But Hewes is great. Weaker, she'd be doomed to mediocrity; ruthless, she's an example of how greatness can coexist with moral ambiguity or even corruptness. That's what makes an interesting contrast with another character, Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), whose corruptness is self-serving and slimy, and whose moral qualms are puny and almost snivelling.

Rose Byrne is an okay actress, but her only interesting scenes are the ones in which she plays off Glenn Close. They have some really fantastic moments together, where there's a mentor-mentee vibe completely laced with distrust and tension. Ellen's character has a lot of potential for development since she's been thrown into a totally foreign environment, and I'm looking forward to how the show will show her changing -- whether for better or worse.

Oh, but Ellen's boyfriend, whose name I can't even recall right now? So. Boring. Bland-looking, bland-personality dude who's basically a cardboard stand-in for the Happiness and Security that Ellen Parson's life supposedly has at the beginning of the show -- we all know the type -- or possibly just a pawn of a plot that requires his sister to actually, you know, do things.

Damages is on FX, Tuesday nights at 10 PM, and about eighty other "encore" times during the week.

In Summary: Watch it! Hooray, strong female characters! Oh, and it's cable, so hooray extra-graphic violence!