The Practice virgin’s diary – Always be vigilant about your semen’s whereabouts

(Season 5, Episodes 17-18)

It’s great that Ellenor is having a baby, and I imagine it was probably important in 2001 to have a professional woman on TV choosing to have a baby on her own. But I wonder where the writers intended to go with the story. Not that she can’t juggle work and home, no matter how unfair the balance, but the likelihood is that she will be Ellenor Frutt, Attorney far more than she’s Mommy, so I wonder what this will have been for in the long-term. To compare, Lindsay has been MIA for a bit — not surprising, because she has an infant at home, but she’s either going to be gone because she’s home with the baby, or she’ll be working without much mention of the baby. So when do we see what it looks like for someone to “do it all?”

5.17 “What Child Is This?”

The planted semen trick is pretty cool, but if we’re to believe that the wife did it, that means that Kate Littlefield (Isabella Hofmann) pocketed her husband semen after they had sex, and then planted it on her daughter before or after she murdered her for having an affair with her stepfather. I’m not sure which part of that is the most disturbing, but it definitely made for a fun, and interesting, case. The fact that it was the other, younger daughter, who the stepfather was sleeping with also and who appears to have maybe killed her sister out of jealousy … not a Thanksgiving dinner I would have liked to be at. Or would I?

In more positive news, Ellenor returned from the hospital after her unexplained complications, only to go into labor with only Helen around to escort her. I’ve found myself really enjoying the dynamic between the two, which is much preferable to whatever Lindsay and Helen give me — when Lindsay’s even around. Anyway, many complications later, it’s a girl named Zoe for Ellenor. Is she going to continue living with Helen?

5.18 “The Confession”

This episode came a bit out-of-sequence. Not that we were necessarily following any story in particular, but it was a sudden Helen feature that I just wasn’t really expecting.

If Helen is meant to be representative of all of the DAs that David E. Kelley studied for her role, than Massachusetts has some pretty questionable public servants prosecuting criminals. Not that she can be blamed entirely for Eddie Larson’s (Jeff Cahill) stupidity, but essentially telling him that he was going to die if he didn’t admit the truth about the car jacking and subsequent murder he committed?

And if I’d been Mr. Reed (David Bowe), husband of the deceased, I would have gone completely psycho on Helen for screwing up getting the confession and leading the case to be tossed out of criminal court. Helen’s subsequent scramble to get the case seen before a federal judge was an obvious attempt by her to right that wrong, but it was a rather large stretch.

It was fun to see Zeljko Ivanek before he started guesting on everything (he appeared on The Practice three times over the years, each time as someone else), but as much as I think Eddie needed to go to jail, I’m glad Ivanek’s US Attorney did not get the coercively obtained confession admitted either.

And I should mention that all of this happened up against Jimmy, a friend of Eddie’s sister. Jimmy, your client is all that matters in this situation. How many times did you have to repeat that your anger was because Helen “lied right to my face!”? He sounded like nothing more than a baby.

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Jan 28, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT