By Brandon Nolta

I have to admit something up front: I’m looking forward to the end of DAMAGES. Not because I don’t like the show, but because it’s just so damn exhausting. The narrative has so many twists it could run up a spiral staircase without making any turns, and more plots than a graveyard. Trying to review any given episode requires notes and captioning just to stay even. Oy. Having said that, though, I should point out that is part of its fun from a viewer’s standpoint. Whatever else you might say, it never fails to entertain.

This week’s episode is no exception. In the present timeline, Patty (Glenn Close) is missing, Ellen (Rose Byrne) is on the verge of some disturbing revelation, and Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan) is wandering around with a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. In the past timeline, about a month before, David (Noah Bean) is having disturbing dreams involving Ellen and Patty being the same person, while Patty, Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson) and Frobisher’s lawyer Ray Fiske (Zeljko Ivanek) prepare the battleground for the major disposition of the case.

Meanwhile, Gregory Malina (Peter Facinelli) is still dead, putting a serious crimp in Patty’s case. However, Patty is not without weapons or resources. Speaking of people with weapons, we still have George Moore (Peter Riegert), a former SEC investigator on the government case against Frobisher, running around loose. It’s hard to say what he does or doesn’t know, but he radiates menace like sunlight, and whatever he knows, it spells bad news for somebody. Meanwhile, as a pair of scenes reveal, blood evidence leaves a trail, and the points it connects point to a rather disturbing conclusion.


For a legal drama that has a seriously intellectual bent, the tone for this episode seems a lot closer to FRIDAY THE 13TH than any of its forebears. Dread and menace are the themes for the day, and it’s to the show’s credit that a simple delivery of papers or a whispered conversation carries more hair rising on the nape of the neck moments than any three films starring an idiot in a hockey mask hunting idiotic teens. Close is still good, but Byrne’s catching up in the icy hot sweepstakes. Ivanek and Danson carry the bulk of this episode, and it’s no burden to either of them. Danson’s gotten pretty good at flipping between charming and scary, sometimes in the course of a sentence, and this reviewer’s looking forward to whatever he gets to do in the season finale.

Ivanek, meanwhile, is playing his role as a symphony of regret and desperation. During the deposition scenes, I kept thinking it was a good thing the camera was trained on Frobisher and not Ray Fiske, because the flickerings of pain behind his poker face would have sunk the case for sure. Once more, DAMAGES earns its money in throwing enough devious characters and plot against the fourth wall to anchor any three mortal shows, and we still haven’t reached the finale yet. Things are definitely coming to a close, though, and it’ll be a hell of a ride until then.