Episode Report Card Deborah: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Law And Order: Special Virgins Unit
By Deborah | Season 2 | Episode 19 | Aired on 03.31.2005
Grace and Adam are sitting outside on the stairs. She's rehearsing her client, who's mighty morose. She asks him to state his name. He does, and asks, "My last name isn't Beanstalk, is it?" Grace says no. She keeps asking her polite little questions but Adam quickly gets up and says he can't do this right now. He takes off, and she chases after him, asking, "Hey! Did your girlfriend get to you?" He says, "No. It's just…" Grace: "What?" Without stopping or breaking stride, he says, "I cheated on Joan." Grace stops short, but Adam keeps going for a moment, and then stops, and turns. He keeps his eyes down, though, afraid to meet Grace's expression, whatever it is. She looks sad and troubled and surprised. He finally looks at her. She sighs, at a loss for words. Adam: "Say something." How about "You dick"? Grace: "What? What do you want from me?" He marches over to her and says, "It was just sex, a couple of times. It didn't mean anything." Uh…huh. I guess he thought he'd see how that went over with Grace before he unloads it on Joan. I also take this opportunity to gloat to Frink about being right that it wasn't their first time. Grace: "And you had to tell me this…why?" Frink: "Lawyer-client privilege." Adam doesn't know: "But I had to tell someone. I figured you'd understand." Not too selfish…or misguided. So often confession is about making the confessor feel better without regard for how it makes the confessee feel. And here I can see the use of priests. They're professionals. Get yourself to a confessional, Adam. He elaborates, "I mean, you're the one with the whole view on relationships not being possessive and everything." Grace: "So I'm supposed to tell you it's okay?" Adam shrugs a bit: "Yeah…yeah -- no…" Grace tells him not to drag her into this, although it's a little late for that. Even if I bought this unconvincing turn in his character -- which I don't -- I would have a lot of trouble buying his casual attitude about it, and this confession to Grace, with an expectation of support riding on its coattails. I could believe he'd admit to her what he'd done, but only because he found it unbearable to keep to himself and had no one else to tell, not because he almost blithely assumed her support. Come on -- he's madly in love with clingy-clingy Joan, and he's a virgin (or was, anyway), and he's pretty sensitive to boot. This is not the Adam they've been writing for two seasons, no matter how many "horny seventeen-year-old boy" explanations people offer up. The only possible explanation I'm entertaining is a self-sabotaging impulse driven by depression secondary to being in a suffocating and unfulfilling relationship. Still, even that just doesn't sit right with me, because the writers are making it about the sex. And I just don't believe that's the greatest driving force in Adam's personality.
Adam: "So you think people are supposed to own each other?" Oh, come on. That's not what this is about. Don't go trying to peddle some non-monogamy ideology all of a sudden, because ain't nobody buying it. Grace: "It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what you think and what Girardi thinks, and I think you know what that's gonna be." Adam: "I'm sorry, okay? But it's over. It was Bonnie, and --" Grace definitely doesn't want the details. He asks if she's going to say anything. She says she's not: "But thanks for putting me in the middle of this. I've missed this in my life." I don't really have much evidence for this, but I suspect that remark is about her relationship with her parents, as much as it refers to any of the previous hassles between Adam and Joan. Grace goes off to write a letter to The Vine. "Dear Sars: My idiot horndog best friend couldn't keep it in his pants and screwed around on his clingy girlfriend who is my other best friend and then told me about it and besides, everyone knows that relationships don't work…"