Episode Report Card LuluBates: A- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Flippin’ Right
By LuluBates | Season 2 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.14.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Despite the fact that if you listen to the musical score (which may be the only trustworthy source on this show) William Hurt a.k.a. Daniel Purcell is loony tunes, Patty agrees to help him fight off the accusations that he throttled his wife. She puts him up in a top-secret location with a security detail, but he is still being followed. The police can’t find any evidence of an intruder, but Purcell claims that’s, like, totally expected. Besides, he told the cops that he doesn't know of anyone who would want to hurt him -- ummmm, right. Patty is skeptical of it all, and would totally cock an eyebrow if Botox injections would allow such a maneuver. She may or may not believe that Purcell did it, but she definitely knows he needs help. I guess she thinks she owes him something after all.
Ellen owes somebody something, too. She owes Frobisher a head-bashing, for starters, but she couldn’t do it last week. So this week she finds Timothy Olyphant to vent over that fact. Of course he has some (okay a lot) of handy, problem-solving guns and a whole file of Frobisher clippings, so if she changes her mind, he’s there to help. My boyfriend may be more than a little creepy, which does nothing to diminish my crush! Ellen also owes Patty a takedown, but unfortunately Purcell’s case may be getting in the way of that, since Patty has decided she doesn’t have time to take the bait-case the FBI sent her way. Ellen’s peeved, but the FBI isn’t too troubled. They decide to focus on entrapping Tom instead and then making him flip and dish all the dirt he undoubtedly has on Patty. How will they do this? No, not through a crafty legal case, but through legal ethics 101, e.g.: Do not pay your clients off. Tom considers having to retake the MPRE (that’s law school stuff, don’t worry your li'l head over it), but Patty wants him on the Purcell case.
You know who else is on the Purcell case? Marcia Gay Harden. She is a badass, hard-nosed corporate lawyer who is either out to get Purcell or sleeping with him or both. She is fixing to be tough competition for Patty and even plays a mean game of handball (which is a critical skill for corporate lawyers). She uses her athletic prowess to convince a judge to issue a warrant for the box of documents Purcell sent to Patty’s office. This is shaping up to be quite the showdown, although Marcia and Patty may both want to know what Purcell was torching in his backyard. Who has a backyard in New York City? Crazy people, that’s who.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Language and sexual situations and violence, oh my! Got to love late-night cable! I don't know about your viewing experience, but over in these parts, there is something off about the sound of this show. It is extremely quiet and I have to turn the volume way up so whenever it goes to commercials it gets really loud and I have to lunge for the remote control. Maybe it is just a scheme to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Does anyone else have this problem? Anyway, the camera quietly swoops down the hallway of a hotel or apartment complex. Something about the swoop reminds me of Evil Dead 2, which is actually the second thing on this show to remind me of that movie, which I haven't seen since 1995. The other thing is the wishy windy music they play whenever Daniel Purcell is in the scene. Maybe Daniel Purcell's hand was possessed by an ancient Aztecan evil and that's why he throttled his wife, but he can't mention it for fear of waking the evil. Or maybe Frobisher will get raped by trees. Who knows? It's a crazy show. Back to the camera swooping down the hallway, it zooms in on room number 1910 and maybe I spent too much time recapping Lost, but I can't help but think that has to mean something and is not just the Fibonacci sequence or a cryptosymbological hint of thing to come. Cut to Ellen of the future, hair loose, eyeliner smudgy, chugging whiskey like a lumberjack or a Republican, admitting that she lied and firing off two shots. Cut to Ellen "today" sitting in the back of the FBI's car after her failed attempt to wear a wire and capture incriminating evidence of Patty's evil ways. Patty is calling her on her BlackBerry and she is unsure of what to do. The way she looks at her phone, you can tell she is worried that Patty has been having her followed or implanted a GPS locator in her phone or something. She answers and Patty, who is at Purcell's house, tells her there has been an emergency and she wants her to come to the office. Ellen agrees, hangs up and looks anxiously at the G-men as if they could help her figure out why Patty wants to meet her at the office in the middle of the night.
At Daniel Purcell's house, Patty dabs her eyes (who knew she was so emotional? Honestly, it's unexpected and it may show a new more sensitive side of Patty. Maybe a side that only showed up after the Ghost of Lawyers Past started lurking around her office chaise.) The police are at Daniel's house photographing his wife's body and looking for forensic evidence. Before CSI and its beleaguered progeny hit primetime, I wonder if they would have bothered doing close ups of the wife's fingernails, petechial hemorrhaging, and the bruising around the neck. Now that we know phrases like "petechial hemorrhaging," we may not know how to spell it and have to Google around to find it, but we know it. And we know that it means: Murder! We also know helpful facts like strangulations are usually crimes of passion and that means husbands are suspect numero uno. Anyway, thanks CSI! Patty comes back into the room where the wife's body lies. The detective asks her why Purcell wanted them to call her, since she's not representing him. She shrugs and says she saw him at a charity event earlier and that's probably why he thought of her. The detective wants to ask her and Purcell some questions. The detective apparently doesn't believe Patty; why else would he want to ask someone who claims to totally unrelated questions. Purcell and Patty sit and Purcell recounts his tale as the EMT patches up his bleeding forehead. Purcell dropped his wife off around midnight, returned home and found the door open, he called her name, some guy he never saw before ran past him, slammed him against the door and ran. Purcell chased him for a second, then went to find his wife. The detective asks whether anyone would want to hurt him. He claims no, but the editing team disagrees with him and we are treated to a montage of all the threats made against Purcell last week and all of his paranoid actions. As his wife's body is wheeled out, Purcell flips out and starts screaming and shaking and demanding that the cops go after the guy who did it. He collapses on the couch in a diabetic low blood sugar attack and Patty calls off the interview. She's representing him now.