Spoilers

“Witches of Mass Destruction”

“Truly, Madly, Deeply”

Two Boston Legal episodes, one that I thought was a typically strong one, and one that I found ridiculous.

“Witches of Mass Destruction” had two main story arcs. One was about the death of a young man in the military whose sister brought a case against the government that during recruitment, the recruiters committed fraud by what the told him. Alan stepped up to take the case despite Denny’s objections and direct orders to drop it. The other arc on this episode was a Christian couple and a Wiccan couple joining forces to sue to stop a Halloween pageant at a public school. This tale, though bizarre, at the heart is about religious freedom and schools keeping religion out. Both of these stories were solid and the military one in particular was extremely emotional.

“Truly, Madly, Deeply,” on the other hand, had two silly arcs and one of Denny Crane. Alan and Brad defended a station manager who fired their clown who was talking about global warming on air. The thing is, the man was attending the court in his clown makeup and Alan was afraid of clowns. It made Alan look bad as he could not do cross or even look in the clown’s direction. The second arc featured Michael McKeon, who I love as an actor, trying to prevent his wife from getting an annulment on grounds that he had sex with a cow. If one of these to stories had been opposed by something more solid, I don’t think that I would have felt as… icky. Then, Denny Crane decided to shoot his client that he had been assigned to defend by the judge in the knees. The client was a child rapist and murderer and Denny did not want to defend him. He tried many other tricks to get off the case and then he ended up shooting him, claiming to be defending himself.

To be fair, all three of these storylines had positive resolutions, but by that time, I had checked out on them.

To me, the second of these episodes only served to make some of the lawyers at Crane, Poole & Schmidt look foolish, in particular Alan and Shirley (who couldn’t defend the cow lover). Denny always looked that way so it was no big deal for his character.

Oh, and the first episode was the one where Denny and Alan famously dressed as flamingos for their firm’s Halloween party (which is an image on the banner above the post).

Boston Legal has shown the ability to go from deadly serious to over-the-top absurdity in a blink of an eye. Episode seven just did not work for me.