Let's just hope we're not in a Charlie Brown lining up to kick the football situation here.
Last season, Damages held so much promise: an amazing supporting cast in a suspenseful, twisty story, with enough little idiosyncrasies to move it beyond just a standard thriller.
(Case in point: a scene in the fifth episode of last season in which a CEO -- dressed in drag -- beats the crap out of another executive in a bathroom. It did little to further the plot, but it was so imaginatively staged and set up that it's stuck with me.)
But by the end, it all sort of fell apart. The elaborate storyline just didn't hold together, and a lot of good actors weren't given enough to do.
And here we are, at the start of the third season, with a whole new crop of top notch actors joining the cast (Campbell Scott, Martin Short, Keith Carradine and Lily Tomlin) and whole new Byzantine conspiracy to unravel. (This season, like the previous two, features a flashforward mystery, although this year's is the most promising).
Ready for the kick-off, Charlie Brown?
I am, for a few reasons.
First off, most of this year's cast additions are part of a family. Scott and Tomlin play, respectively, the son and wife of Louis Tobin, a Bernie Madoff type swindler who bilked investors out of $9 billion. Short plays the their attorney, a man close enough to the family to be known as "Uncle Len."
So they're part of one unit, not stranded in various plot threads. We can watch them play off each other and Patty, Ellen, etc. And the search for Tobin's missing money is far more interesting than last year's energy thieves mystery. We'll see this family -- already pretty much broken -- turning against each other even more. There's a bit more humanity at work here than last season. As others have pointed out, Joe Tobin (Scott) may be the closest thing Damages has had to a sympathetic character in a long time.
We'll see Tom Shayes, Patty Hewes' right hand man, sucked into the mess as one of Tobin's investors.
(It may be what ultimately costs Shayes his life. We see him in a body bag at the end of the episode six months in the future. The mystery now is who killed him, and why. I guess Tom will be front and center this season, and then that's it.)
Actually, it's one of several mysteries. The others include:
- How did the fancy purse Patty gave Ellen wind up with the homeless guy, streaked with blood?
- Why did the same homeless guy answer the cell phone Patty called? And who threw that phone away? Who was originally on the other end of the line?
- Who is Julian, and why is he so interested in Patty? What does it mean that he's "sort of an architect?
There might be other questions, but I'll leave those to you.
Other thoughts:
- So happy to have Tom Noonan back as the detective. Again, here was a good actor who showed up last season, but due to the way the story played out, didn't have much to do. Since he's investigating the season's big mystery, I imagine we'll see a bit more of him.
- Loved how everyone spent the episode either under or over-estimating Patty. Ellen's the only one who knows her game.
- All the new cast members were good, but Martin Short was amazing as Leonard.
- I hope Rose Byrne gained a bit of weight since last season. She was painfully, painfully thin.
- Nothing to do with Damages, but dear lord, does Justified look amazing.
Tom Coombe
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