FindLaw | Legal News & Information

This week's Ally McBeal featured an arty shot of Ally reflected in her cup of coffee. For my part, I don't want anyone looking at me before I've had my morning cup of coffee-not even my own reflection. But Ally, that prima donna, enjoys it. She's sort of like Narcissus, but with a caffeine headache. And narcissistic Ally continues to be - entering into a friendship with a homeless man not because of her compassion for him, but rather due to his near-psychic insights into the only thing that interests her, namely her. Next week, Ally will visit terminally ill patients to ask them if she is having a bad hair day.

I. Homeless But Not Babe-Less

In case you questioned whether Ally has been totally desperate for affection since her tryst with Carwash Guy, this week she is picked up by one of the homeless. Perhaps she was tired of clean men and - like Calvin Klein with his new "dirty denim" ads - decided that ground-in dirt is kind of sexy.

With Homeless Guy, Ally falls for the old "I alone understand you" routine (this is Franglais for, "You don't understand how much I want to sleep with you."). Homeless Guy, with incredible insight, perceives - as who has not - that Ally is a "desperate, lonely lawyer" who, rather than having the professionals' "cold hard driven look, like they're meant to be lawyers," has, instead, a "look of how did I get here, how did I turn out how I promised myself I wouldn't turn out?"

Ally, failing to realize that she might as well be advertising on the Internet that she's a teary, panting little ball of neurosis, is amazed by Homeless Guy's insight. And, because Ally sexualizes every interaction, she and Homeless Guy eventually end up dating - but only after he reappears in natty clothes and tells her he's really an insurance agent who is writing a book on the "homeless experience." He even complains that she "skewed the experience" by being too nice to him and asking him out for coffee, rather than ignoring him and stiffing him on the street.

Homeless Guy - now we can call him Faux-Homeless Guy - thus joins the growing ranks of what may be called "homelessness tourists": the real-life students and reporters who (as reported recently by Washington's City Paper and The New York Post) impersonate the homeless, purportedly to see what it's like to be them. At least for 24 hours.

Eventually, there will be a Homelessness section of Epcot, by the folks who brought you Disney's (cancelled) SlaveryLand. For a short time, you can be personally harassed by Rudy Giuliani; rave to your heart's content; and urinate in ATMs until no-one will withdraw money even on the very eve of Y2K. Want to buy your way out of the theme park? Beg for money.

What Ally doesn't realize is that finding out someone is a homelessness tourist is actually more troubling than finding out he is homeless. Faux Homeless Guy also seems to belong to two particularly disturbing subgenres: academic homelessness tourists and homeless tourists-slash-masochists - making him an even less appealing prospect. Ally, however, decides he's the man of her dreams, or at least the first "genuine legitimate maybe" she's met in months. Carwash Guy, of course, was much more than just a "maybe." As you'll recall from the season opener, he was a "Yes, yes, yes, Oh God yes, oh baby please."

Unfortunately, Ally ultimately discovers that Faux-Homeless Guy actually (and somewhat confusingly) is homeless. His lie about his homelessness all being a lie was -- it turns out -- a lie. This makes him Faux-Faux Homeless Guy, and also makes him a homeless homelessness tourist - which I assume must be the next next thing. Turns out F.F.H.G. has "paranoid personality disorder" unless he's on medication. Inexplicably, just being an insurance agent didn't provide him with a sufficiently compelling justification to self-medicate - but having a crush on Ally now does. Medicated, he's a "maybe." Unmedicated, he's rumpled, vaguely threatening, and always in need of a shave - and not, believe me, in that sexy, Miami Vice kind of way.

Ally ultimately rejects F.F.H.G. although he points out to her, "How many people can look inside you the way I can?" Wisely, she does not go there, but instead simply blows him off. Being Ally, she feels bad about rejecting him, even though he's lied to her from Day One, and lied about lying to her from Day Two. Eventually they part ways, and she sees him hanging out with other homeless guys (or - possibly homeless - homelessness tourists) over a fire they've set in an aluminum can (the ultimate Homeless Guy T.V. Cliché, and the ultimate Homelessness Tourist tourist trap).

The moral of the story remains, to me, entirely obscure, unless the show is advocating homelessness as a pick-up strategy. It's Just Lunch may develop a spinoff: It's Just Something I Found In A Dumpster, Want To Share?

II. Lawyers and Other Prostitutes

There was, at least, one purported, supposed, alleged, putative, claimed legal subplot this week, which, incredibly, constituted the second Love-Starved-Teenage-Boy-Redeemed-If-A-Beautiful-Woman-Will-Just-Give-Him-Play subplot on Ally this season. As you may recall, last time, we saw a teenage boy booted from school for kissing a classmate against her will, and Nell rehabilitating him with a kiss that supposedly made him cool. I think we can rest assured that one of Ally's writers did not lose his virginity before college - or, arguably, after.

This time, Ling faces legal trouble for allegedly running a prostitution ring, which she insists was that elusive animal: the purely platonic escort service. It seems that the parents of some teenage boys have gone to the police after discovering that their sons have been having surreptitious sex with some of the escorts. (Sad to say, neither Tom Cruise nor Rebecca DeMornay guest stars.) So Ling appears at a probable cause hearing to try to avert indictment.

Renee, an ex-DA, advises that, while it's unorthodox for Ling to testify at such a hearing - after all, the government must show probable cause regardless of whether she testifies or not - Ling may still want to do so, because it will be the only way to get the case dismissed for lack of evidence. Ling decides to testify. Ling's decision is not that shocking - since Ling, who has no criminal record (fashion crimes don't count), would doubtless testify at trial anyway. As famous D.C. lawyer Edwards Bennett Williams used to say, a defendant ought to testify unless his record is as long as Long Island. The only disadvantage of Ling's testifying at the hearing is that her testimony there will have to be consistent with her trial testimony, and that she will have less time to prepare her version of events than she would had she waited until trial to testify for the first time.

Ling's defense is that the escort service sold (legal) dates, not (illegal) sex. It just happened that some of the escorts, against company policy, slept with clients - including a few sixteen-year-old boys. This is the novel "So He Got Some! Is That A Crime?" Defense.

Why would anyone pay escort service rates for a sexless date? Ling explains that when teenage boys hire escorts, it helps them pick up their female classmates - who judge a boy, she claims, primarily by the girl on his arm. Ling - truly a cunning linguist - emphasizes that "It's not that the girls are lesbians," just because they check out the beautiful girls before they check out the guys they're dating. Instead, she claims, these girls are in some kind of jealousy economy, where "Girls are so stupid. They want whatever other girls have. They like what their friends like. A girl sees a boy with a beautiful woman, she wants him."

Luckily for Ling, the teenage boy's testimony corroborates her defense that only dating, not sex, was sold -since the boy can't be sure the escort who slept with him didn't actually love him. In cross-examining the boy, Cage uses a nice cross-examination technique - getting someone to admit something that is at the same time really helpful to your case, and really embarrassing for him to deny. Here, Cage gets the boy to concede that, of course, a girl might find him sexier than those windswept, tousle-haired pictures of Andrew Jackson-as-Johnny-Depp he gave her at the end of every date.

As Ling is busy winning her case (the indictment is ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence), Cage is busy losing his girlfriend. Nell - decked out in a freaky poncho for no good reason at all - is shocked, shocked to discover that Cage used to have sex with call girls, as Renee gratuitously reveals. Nell complains, bizarrely, that Cage's patronizing a hooker will traumatize any future children he may someday have if they ever learn about it - in the first reported use of the Possible Worlds scenario from physics in a romantic tiff. Nell needs to listen to a tape of John Cheever's confessional journals on a long road trip. No-one's parents are perfect.

John "I Was A John, But Now I'm Reborn" Cage's rationalization for his penchant for call girls is that this occurred "before I knew my character" - suggesting that it actually happened before the show's writers had made him resemble a three-dimensional person (which could be as recently as last week). This little meta-moment - similar to the one where Ling complained, earlier in the season, "I'm tired of my character" after she made Cold Bitch Comment No. 245 - is a healthy little spurt of writer anxiety. But it always keeps me expecting a character to turn to the camera and say: "My God, this whole show is ridiculous!"

Insanely, Cage apologizes to his future children. Insanely, Billy impresses a client by creating his own escort/assistant-entourage of six women who look like Trinity in The Matrix (and who probably bill, en masse, like David Boies on crack). Insanely, the whole cast of women lawyers continues to indulge in fringe, beading, fur, sparkles, transparency and (I'm serious) a big dragonfly necklace that in real life would get them fired and homeless - the real kind - inside of an hour.

Next Week: It comes to Ally in a dream that she's really in love with John Cage. And Pharaoh said to Ally, yea, a plague of litigators shall come to thee…

Past Reviews

Message Boards