Is that Legal?
Since I made such a big deal of it, I thought I’d follow up my last post with just a couple thoughts after last night’s Boston Legal finale:
Small spoilers ahead!
1. I didn’t get my wish about Alan shooting Denny. Both survived to share the balcony together one last time, fulfilling Imamess’ competing prediction (in the comments to my original post). What I didn’t expect, however, was that the two characters would be sharing their usual cigars as husband and husband. I really couldn’t decide whether this same-sex marriage based in strong friendship (and a desire to transfer wealth tax-free) was a revolutionary representation of a non-normative social alternative, or whether it dangerously provided ammunition to slippery-slope arguments about the wacky anything-goes arrangements to follow in the wake of legalized gay marriage. To its credit, the episode acknowledges this objection, but I wonder whether opponents of gay marriage would read this as a satire of same-sex unions. Then again, few such opponents were probably watching anyway, long ago turned off by David E. Kelley’s liberal soapboxing.
2. I did get my wish for one final bout of intra-firm conflict, most notably in the return of Rene Auberjonois as Paul Lewiston, the managing partner who had sought to impose order on the chaos brought by Denny and Alan, but after three seasons of idle threats, quietly disappeared. In the finale, Paul returns with a vengeance as a proponent of a merger that will stave off Crane, Poole, and Schmidt’s bankruptcy. This too lead to some uncomfortable, seemingly xenophobic moments, where Denny, Alan, and Candance Bergen’s Shirley Schmidt fight Paul’s initiative on the sole basis of the fact that the buyers are Chinese. It reminded me a little too much of 80s films like Gung Ho that articulated overblown fears about Japanese invasion and take over of the economy. That said, the episode also acknowledged to at least some degree the potential bigotry in its characters’ behaviors, and raised some very interesting question about national public policy in a globalizing world.
3. Finally, while the merger storyline brought a sense of change and finality to the series, Boston Legal managed to die in very much the same way that it had lived–refusing long term plot pay offs in favor of character study. Paul returns and finally brings order to the firm, and in implementing the new owners’ interests, he confided to Shirley that he didn’t think he’d be able to save Denny. Denny successfully wins his Supreme Court case to gain access to an experimental Alzheimer’s treatment. But the episode doesn’t leave any time for us to find out whether Denny ultimately gets booted from the firm, or whether his deteriorating condition can be medically reversed. The same plot questions that drove the pilot come back but still remain unanswered in the finale. Even the marriage of Denny and Alan is not a major change, so much as an the distallation of the characters’ relationship into a single expression.
So while I always wanted to see something like a conflict between Denny and Paul that would truly introduce change and storyarc into a season, I clearly never entirely understood that the series was produced with far different goals in mind. This final season has made it clear to me that Boston Legal has really always been about exploring the status quo. My guess is that it doesn’t matter what other characters, lawsuits, and illnesses come and go in the longterm if your focus is on the committed, unconditional relationship between two characters.
Recent Comments