Spoilers

“The Black Widow”

“Schadenfreude”

“Finding Nemmo”

“A Whiff and a Prayer”

“Men to Boys”

The start of season two was a strange one. At the end of season one, they gave a preview for the next episode which dealt with Lori’s sexual harassment and an discomfort in the workplace. Then, in episode one there was no sign of these scenes and we do not see Lori again until a brief moment in episode four.

The scenes showed up in episode five, which was the end of Lori’s run on the show.

You could tell that Boston Legal had gone in a different direction. We had new characters such as Denise Bauer played by Julie Bowen, Sara Holt, played by Ryan Michelle Bathe, and Garrett Wells, played by Justin Mentell.

This season had one of my favorite episodes of the whole series, which was when Denny took Alan to Nemmo Bay in Canada to fly fish. Their interactions in the room after the day of fishing was hilarious. It had one of my favorite low-brow jokes of all time when Denny and Alan are going to sleep in their room and Denny says, “Don’t take this personal” and then lets out a fart. I am not a fart joke fan, but that was unbelievably funny.

We also have the storyline of Bernard come to a close at the end of a skillet by the hand of Betty White’s Katherine Piper. Katherine was afraid that Bernard, who had killed his mother and a neighbor at the end of the first season, was going to kill again. He had been talking about leaving clues for the police like the BTK Killer. She wound up hitting him with the skillet that he had used to kill his victims. In an allusion to Picket Fences (also a David E. Kelly show), she put the body of Bernard in a icebox.

Alan was able to get a “not guilty” verdict for Katherine, though she wound up getting “Schmidt-canned” because of the whole thing.

The Denny-Alan relationship was explored more in these first five episodes of season 2. They build the relationship more than they have last season and this central relationship is vital to the show. And we learn that Alan find the pig noises Denny makes when sleeping to be soothing.

Tara broke up with Alan and she left the firm, being one more of the changes to the cast.

This first five episodes were excellent and are going to build on a long season of 27 episodes.