damages

I've gone back to watching Damages. I don't suppose I ever recorded my brief estrangement from that show during Season 2, when it felt like it was being led way off the track by plot twist upon plot twist, but the important thing is that I'm back. Season 3 was exciting, not least because of the sort of star-studded cast, including Lily Tomlin and Martin Short.

Martin Short played the opposition lawyer. At first I thought he was a bit slimy, as opposition lawyers tend to be, but then I realized that Leonard "Lenny" Winstone was actually rather a sweet, almost a paternal fellow. He genuinely cared for the Tobins, and the scene in which he pulled a suicidal Carol Tobin out of the bathtub, and embraced and comforted her was apt to put the human heart in a state of motion. There is also a serene and agreeable sense of fatalism in the scene where Lenny passes a set of TVs in the window of an electronics store, sees his face appear on each of the screens, and then proceeds to make funny faces into the camera - all while murder is being committed elsewhere. I wasn't terribly familiar with Martin Short before this, but I soon learnt that he's one of the most likeable guys in show business. So of course it was impossible for Lenny Winstone to be other than likeable. I mean, Martin Short's a great actor, so I suppose he could have played an odious character, but the point is that one is glad Lenny Winstone turned out to be likeable.

Anyway, all that was by way of establishing what I really like about the show: the fact that the heroes are not perfectly virtuous, and the villains are not perfectly vicious. One recalls billionaire Arthur Frobisher, who balks at the idea of offing a potential witness against him, because it was a human life they were talking about. (He does authorize an attempt on her life later on, when he was being driven to extremities, but that's a different story altogether.) Or Howard Erickson (John Goodman!), who is the CEO of a private security corporation that's caught up in various illegal missions for the CIA. He's a corrupt man by all accounts, but he is reluctant, to say the least, to harm the whistleblower responsible for the latest and greatest case against his company. He still regards Sanchez as one of his men, even after everything he did to him.

On the flip side, we have Patty Hewes, who is an odious human being by any standard, having destroyed her son's life and made an attempt on her associate's life for the lamest reason. She also induced a miscarriage many years ago, because she didn't want to be encumbered by a child, and ends up killing her son in Season 5, so she has that going for her. The viewer is nevertheless stuck rooting for her, because she always manages to align her cases with conventional morality.

There is no black and white with Damages: It's all shades of gray. Fifty shades - or fifty-one, even.