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HERC Gives Tonight's PRACTICE Finale ****!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
The Practice 5.22 FAQ
What’s it called?
“Public Servants.”
Who’s responsible?
Teleplay is credited to series creator David E. Kelley.
What’s TV Guide say?
“Thorny issues involving the conduct - and conscience - of prosecutor Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle) and defense attorney Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton) are raised in the compelling fifth-season finale. One case finds Helen on a personal vendetta against the vicious, accused killer she blames for setting up the shooting of Richard Bay - an attack that has left Bobby (Dylan McDermott) especially shaken and remorseful. This storyline plays out with even more violence. In a parallel plot, Rebecca faces shattering revelations about the troubled past of her client, a seeming milquetoast on trial for murdering his wife. Cahill: Doug Hutchison. Forsley: Henri Lubatti.”
Would you give last week’s episode four stars as well?
I would. The final scene with the nervous little district attorney riddled with mobster gunfire put it right over the top.
Is this week’s episode even better?
It is.
The Big News?
Despite widespread rumors that Jason Kravitz has signed for two more years on “The Practice,” this episode ends with the funeral of Kravitz’s character, Richard Bay.
Not that we don’t trust David E. Kelley, but do we see Bay’s body?
We do not. Just the casket. So one supposes there’s a possibility, however slight (did you see the way those bullets made Bay jerk back and forth?), that Bay’s funeral was faked so vengeful mobster Jackie Cahill wouldn’t be tempted to make a second attempt on Bay’s life.
What’s good?
The steely and utterly fearless resolve stillettoed, 96-pound glamourpuss Helen Gamble finds to avenge Bay’s murder. It’s both scary and gratifying to see the kind of legal terminator Gamble can turn into when she’s given the courage of her convictions; in my view, tonight’s episode marks the best use Kelley has made of the character to date. And the fact that Bay was one of the show’s most complex and fascinating characters just makes us root for her all the more.
What else is good?
The entire firm is shaken by Bay’s death, but no one more so than Cahill’s own attorney, Bobby Donnell. Dylan McDermott’s rendering of Bobby’s emotional and moral devastation makes us clutch our armrests for fear of what his next encounter with Helen will bring.
What about Rebecca’s story?
This, too, is enormously compelling, and it fits perfectly with the Cahill story. Horrified at her firm’s role in Bay’s death, Rebecca is grateful at first to take on the case of a seemingly innocent man accused of strangling to death a woman he clearly loved.
What’s not so good?
Nothing. This fifth-season finale, vastly superior to the wedding episode that closed season four, fires on all cylinders. The show-closing funeral, with its flashbacks to Bay’s life, left a sober Hercules the Strong in tears. It is Kelley the dramatist as good as we’ve ever seen him.
Herc’s rating for “The Practice” 5.22?
****
The Hercules T. Strong Rating System:
**** better than most motion pictures
*** actually worth your valuable time
** as horrible as most stuff on TV
* makes you quietly pray for bulletins
I warn you not to defy me!
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Can't wait to see more of that Boyle chick. Maybe I can talk her out of her Nicholson fetish...
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I must admit I will miss the little weasel
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Best shows on TV:
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2. The West Wing
3. ER
4. The Practice
5. The X-files -
...I dunno what was more shocking last week, that Bay got killed, or that this 80-year-old woman was the driver. less than 4 hours!!!! Incidentally, for a creepy coincidence, check out any episode of "Transformers: Beast Machines" and look at Rattrap's robot face (not Beast Wars, only in Machines). Maybe it's just me, but he bears an eerie resemblance to Jason Kravitz...
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After finally promoting Richard to a full time character- and one character growing more interesting at that- why did he have to die???? I will miss him. A lot.
Also, it was nice to see Rebecca finally have something to do. She deserves more.
But the one thing I had a little problem with: Did we really need the "Boston Public" plug in a scene with one of the two lawyers who guested on "Boston Public"? I think not.
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Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't emotioanlly attached to the characters, but this is the first episode of the series I have ever seen and I was definitely underwhelmed.
Everyone was melodramatic (but I wrote that off to the impact of a major character dying), but much of the writing and acting seemed very one-note and not deep at all.
Not to mention tht horrendous "we're not kids anymore" scene. It's one of those scenes that you can just tell was added in because "we have to show her weak side". The musical cue out of nowhere actually made me laugh out loud.
But I can see this show being decent - the acting by Rebecca and Cahill was definitely good. As for the rest, I just wasn't impressed.
Like I said, maybe it was a terrible first episode to watch, but it just felt like a show that knows it's good and has let it go to it's head. If you love the show (as a lot of people apparently do), that's great. I can definitely understand the emotional impact of losing a main character in such a dramatic way. But I just had to vent somewhere about how I felt upon seeing this show for the first (and probably last) time. -
This show is indeed melodramatic, has always been. Seems to be a problem with Kelley's dramas--cf. Boston Public (and yes, the plug was WAY irritating, and yes, the show is soooo painfully dramatic and the characters soooo painfully earnest). (Ally McB, OTOH, suffers from excess, and excessively self-aware, absurdity as comedy--ooh, the Dancing Baby's back! Horrors!) For me, this show is pretty much done--there are some fine actors, yes, but the stories are getting tired. Oh, we're defense attorneys; oh, we're having moral crises (hey, Rebecca's first!) 'cause we're defense attorneys and our clients are evil. No no no, this was not a four-star ep; the first part, last week's, was much better. The end of that ep, the riddling of Bay's body with bullets--that was pretty intense. The freakin' funereal (no, that's not a misspelling) montage was ridiculous! Cheesy and sentimental when there should have been a more heartfelt dramatic ending; there was fine set-up with the defense lawyer berating Helen, pointing out that Richard would definitively not have approved (though I question that a bit--he did coach a witness in one ep), and the speech about Bay's respect for defense attorneys was pretty good, or at least had a germ of something good. And then that dumb ending. Come on. It was like an awards-show tribute to a dead actor--well-intended but mishandled and not very creative.
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DAMN, but this guy is one terrific actor! I thought he was brilliant as the slimy, cowardly Percy in The Green Mile; and in the last two episodes of The Practice he was even better as the chilling, brutal, and genuinely EVIL Cahill. Hutchinson probably immediately brings to mind Brad Dourif; but I'm hoping that he might become a Richard Widmark for our times--someone who can play psychopathic villains, sympathetic soldiers, and rugged cowboys with equal aplomb. ***Oh, and I was bugged by the plug for Boston Public myself. Don't the characters from both shows inhabit the same fictional universe? Oh, well, it's only TV. . .
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I was really looking forward to the episode, as I've stated above, but that plug for "BP" was disgusting. The only reason I could think of, other than a cheap plug for another Kelley show, was so that they WOULDN'T plug someone ELSE's show (like, what? Dateline? Becker? I've no clue what's on Mondays at 8 except for BP, since I don't watch TV much on Mondays!) Couldn't they have just moved the date of the murder to a Wednesday or something and plugged Drew Carey? I agree with the above poster that it really shattered the feeling of the Kelleyverse. If the guy'd called 911 at 10:41 and had come home 3 minutes to 9pm, would the witness have said she was in a hurry to get back in to watch Ally McBeal???? That would have been worse, since Ally & The Practice have crossed over more than TP and BP, tho the latter pair seems more compatible than the former. plus, as usual, the promos made it out to be some huge episode, that Helen was in danger, that it'd "have you talking all summer". Uh, no. It ended, with a pretty bad montage of clips of Richard (that first one, where he stood still in the courtroom, while the camera panned around him was terrible for a clip segment!) and the only damage to anyone on the show was emotional. I kept expecting some other gunmen to bust in at the funeral, but with so little time left I knew it couldn't happen without a West Wing ending like last year, not to mention the reports of the clips of Richard yet to come. Otherwise I thought it was a good episode, just the ad spin was way off, and the plug really detracted...
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