Episode Report Card Sobell: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Score one for the Darwinists
By Sobell | Season 1 | Episode 10 | Aired on 11.06.2005
Anyway, the reason we find out Dr. Sara's 29 is so she can enforce the idea that 30 = deserves to be put on a ice floe and pushed out to sea, and so she can carp about how her dad's been AWOL on 23 of her birthdays, he sends flowers every year, and then they wither and go away because they're as impermanent and unreliable as Daddy's love. Michael's all, Wow, you have baggage. I like that in a woman. Still doing her best to avoid eye contact with him, Dr. Sara boots Michael from the clinic. As he walks out, he tells her, "I'm sorry you feel that way. About the flowers, I mean." Sara watches him go, but she looks less lovelorn than usual. She must really have birthday issues.
Down in St. Louis, C-Note has just figured out exactly what Michael's been doing with all those pebbles he's dropping in the yard. He looks pretty darn happy as he surveys the hole.
Meanwhile, on the outside...we transition to the Unalawyer cabin, where LJ is sitting outside on a log, wondering why freaky recluses never have washing machines hooked up, while Veronica and Nick fret about him inside. Veronica hypothesizes that it must suck to watch your mom get murdered a week and a half before your father's due to fry. Nick looks at her, but he seems really riveted by the fact that Robin Tunney's face seems to be sliding to the left. Seriously. What is going on? She was so freakin' saucy in Cherish -- also about someone who's wrongly accused of a murder they didn't commit, I might add -- and here, it's like they ran her through a giant Clairol flatiron before each take.
Anyway, Nick heads outside to talk to LJ -- or to seize the opportunity to endlessly blather on about his dad some more. Potato, po-tah-to. The whole point to this scene is to allow Nick to sit around in a wifebeater and extra muscles ("I'm every bit as attractive as those guys in prison! I am! I am!") and preach, "Every day was a lost cause, but we kept fighting. What else you gonna do when you love somebody -- you gonna let them down? So you fight. You keep fighting. You never give up." Then there's a nice moment where Nick claps LJ on the back and the kid leans into the comfort.
Still on the outside...there's a knock on the door of Agents Hale and Kellerman's suite, and when Kellerman opens it up, a very mild-looking man is standing there. He says hello with a curiously amiable reticence, and immediately heads over to the picture window to check the view. Kellerman's left off-balance. Hale, as we all know, is perpetually off-balance, so this is all routine for him. Kellerman asks for a name and the guy says, "Quinn." Kellerman keeps trying to grab control of the situation with, "Would you mind telling me what we're doing here?" Quinn chuckles and says, with no small dollop of self-deprecation, "You can probably tell just by looking at me, I'm not a wave-making sort. Just think of me as a supervisor. Just here to make sure things are under control as we approach -- well, you know. The big event." "I wasn't aware that things were out of control," Kellerman blithely lies. Still playing the role of agreeable bumbler, Quinn says, "Well, you'd be the one that would know, wouldn't you?" There's some nervous laughter.