Midway through Monday night's Damages finale, there's a scene where disgraced CEO Arthur Frobisher talks with a woman producing a movie about his life.
There's clearly an attraction there, even more so now that she's learned some of his dark secrets.
"A man has to be awful," she tells him, "if we wants to be great."
That could be this show's epitaph.
As of this writing, Damages' future was up in the air, so this episode had to -- and did -- work as both the season or series finale.
If it's the former, fine. A fourth season would be a gift, and it will be interesting to see where the show goes from here. And FX used the term season finale. If it had been cancelled, we'd know about it.
If it's the latter, then Damages went out on the highest of high notes, with a gripping finale that covered many of the series' main themes and storylines as Patty's terrible war of attrition against the Tobin family came to an end.
"Was it worth it?" Ellen asks Patty as they stand on the dock at her shore house, the setting where each season has ended.
It's a question Patty can't answer, but we know what she's thinking about: her dead daughter Julia, and the awful sacrifice Patty made for her career.
When we say sacrifice, think Old Testament: Patty willfully miscarried her daughter so she wouldn't have to stay in the small town where she and the baby's father -- "the only man I ever loved," she says -- were living. With no family, she was free to take a job in New York City, becoming her firm's first female attorney.
Julian Decker (Keith Carradine), the man helping Patty remodel, was actually a figment of her imagination. He was there in 1972 when she miscarried, working on a horse farm where it happened. Mystery of Patty's dream solved.
The whole thing is a little shaky: If her lover at the time was such a great guy, why wouldn't he move? It's not like her new law firm was making her choose; they'd have known she was pregnant when they hired her. But the important thing is that it gives us some idea of why Patty chose Ellen all those years ago: here was a young law school grad who was willing to make -- on a much, much smaller level -- the choice Patty didn't.
(Assuming it's the secret she confessed to Joe Tobin when the microphone was off, it also shows how committed she was to winning the case.)
But that's all history now. The episode ends with Ellen walking away from Patty, leaving her alone in her favorite spot. Maybe she'll come back to work at Hewes and Associates. Maybe it'll be Hewes and Parsons. Maybe she'll get a different job.
Ellen has the weight of Tom's death to carry around, but she's put other pieces of her past behind her, like David's murder. Unfortunately, Wes -- Timothy Olyphant, current star of FX's Justified, making a three-scene cameo -- has other ideas, and wants justice for the woman he still cares for. By the end of the episode, he's turned himself in, and Frobisher is on his way to jail, talking to a phantom Ray Fiske in the back of a cop car. (Who knew that Frobisher's line to the actor playing Ray -- "It's like seeing a ghost" -- was actually foreshadowing?))
Meanwhile, the murder of Tom Shayes played out in a tense, horrifying series of events that showed us -- as Damages always does -- that we didn't know what we thought we knew. Here's how it all goes down.
The night before he's going to meet with Tom, Winstone meets with Ellen and steals her purse. The next day, he goes to Tom's apartment and gives him a bag with the money. Except it's not the money, it's just paper with a few bills to make it look real.
Zedeck's henchman shows up looking for Winstone. He tortures Tom and is about to kill him when Winstone shows up and saves Tom. The henchman chokes Winstone, appears to kill him. Tom kills the henchman, stumbles home.
Winstone has told Joe Tobin -- who's drinking again, and has learned that the ponzi scheme was the result of some failed business moves he had made years earlier -- about the deal he made with Tom. Joe goes to Tom's apartment, confronts him, and they fight. Tom -- already in bad shape from the stab wounds -- loses, and Joe drowns him in his toilet. What a horrible way to go. Goodbye Mr. Shayes, one of the few decent people in the Damages universe.
Goodbye Leonard Winstone/Lester Wiggans, leaving behind the Tobins, the case, and nearly 30 years of a fake life, getting on a plane with a big bag of cash.
Goodbye to the dreadful Tobin family, destroying so many lives just to make things easier on sad, spoiled Joe. In the Tobin parents, we saw the concept of enabling taken to a deadly extreme.
Goodbye Arthur Frobisher, hilarious and villainous.
Goodbye Ellen. I hope you find your way.
And goodbye Patty Hewes. We rarely saw you in the courtroom, but you were frightening and fascinating everywhere else. You were awful, and you were great.
Other thoughts:
- Jill: "I can play power games too." Sure you can. Patty just plays them better. You steal $500,000 from her, she puts you on the Megan's Law list. Advantage, Patty.
- Other flashforward things this episode cleared up: the car crash was caused by Patty's son, who stole the car Tom had bought but Ellen had been driving; the body going off the bridge was Marilyn Tobin; Ellen was telling the truth when she said her bag was stolen.
- It was so, so good to see Ray Fiske again.
- About to die, Frobisher can barely think of anything that proves he's changed. "I volunteer, like, three times a week..."
- And that's it for now. Thanks for reading folks. I'd like to say we'll back next year, but that seems unlikely. So goodbye to Damages, and thanks to Glenn and Todd Kessler and Daniel Zelman for this wonderfully maddening show.
Tom Coombe
Posted by: |