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The horror, the horror. Remember that strange collection of misfit graphic designers who -- in a previous episode of Ally -- unsuccessfully sued their employer for firing them? Remember them? I know -- you don’t wanna. But you’ve gotta. Because this week they all now reappear for a quirky-but-heartwarming reprise. Turns out that one of their number has been accused of murder. The suspect is the unfortunately named Paul Potts -- get it? A little genocide humor, to lighten up the episode. Next season, Chiquita Mussolini, Golf Hitler, and Slobodan Mint-Milano-sevic will also guest-star.

And, in the worst-kept secret in sitcom history -- trumpeted by everyone from the National Enquirer to Ally-maven websites -- it turns out that, yes, Billy is going to die. Of a brain tumor. Really slowly. So that we can watch as Ally watches her soulmate decline, fall, and -- eventually -- snort dirt. The pathos. The bathos. The ratings.... As viewers weep, David E. Kelley must, somewhere, be laughing.

Paul Potts’ weirdness -- as viewers may recall from the episode in which he and his friends lost their civil case -- is that he has some strange variant of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, manifesting itself in an uncontrollable need to clap four times in a row, every so often. Annoying, yes, but the writers should be happy: since at least someone is clapping. A better response to this episode would have been four helpless, shrill screams of pain in a row, every so often.

Potts is accused of murdering his boss -- one Mr. Schofield. So as his life hangs in the balance he elects to retain Fish & Cage as his defense counsel -- the very firm that managed to recover for him and his colleagues, in their civil case against his boss, an impressive total of $0.

After a pouty squabble between Ally and Fish about who will second chair (Hint to Ally: Probably best to defer to the partner on this one), the case is staffed with Cage, Fish, and Ally. Cage’s first strategic move is to ask for a probable cause hearing before the long-suffering Judge Walsh, who has to hear every ridiculous case on this show. Oh wait. But then I do too. At the time Cage requests the hearing, he believes Potts has an alibi -- he claims to have been at the movies with a friend. Unfortunately, the friend says he wasn’t at the movie after all, and Cage (properly refusing to suborn perjury at the upcoming hearing) confronts Potts and gets him to abandon the lie.

At the probable cause hearing, Mrs. Schofield testifies, conjuring up a Psycho-like scenario in which she is surprised in the shower by a masked intruder with a knife, who scares her and eventually kills her husband. Meanwhile, Ally -- driven yet again by her boundless narcissism -- imagines herself, rather than Mrs. Schofield, in the Psycho-like scene and screams aloud.

Mrs. Schofield’s testimony inculpates Potts because she claims to have heard "four crisp claps" from the intruder. Cage doesn’t cross-examine Mrs. Schofield because, he explains, he doesn’t want to tip his hand concerning the defense strategy in a probable cause hearing. His decision is wise. The "four crisp claps" testimony, combined with Potts’ motive (anger over his firing), and Potts’ OCD modus operandi of four crisp claps, together would amount to probable cause in my book. Since Cage is going to lose the hearing, there’s no reason for him to also make the government’s life easier by previewing his cross-examination for the prosecution.

The plot thickens. Fish, Cage and Ally learn that there were rumors that Mr. Schofield was having an affair with a woman named Nancy. When confronted, Nancy (ridiculously) immediately admits the affair but reflects aloud that she’ll be "sullied" in court. If all witnesses were this easy, lawyers wouldn’t make the big bucks, of course: in real life, Nancy would probably slam the door in their faces if she had been involved in an extramarital affair. (When we learn, later in the episode, that Nancy is involved not only in an extramarital affair, but also in Schofield’s murder, Nancy ingenuousness in agreeing to speak to the defense team is, in retrospect, even more implausible.)

Reconvening the probable cause hearing, Cage confronts Mrs. Schofield with the affair. But his decision to drag the affair out at this stage, makes no sense -- it only gives the prosecution the type of preview of the defense case that he sought to avoid earlier in the episode. And the downside of tipping off the prosecutors as to their defense strategy isn’t balanced by much upside here. Potts still isn’t going to prevail in this hearing.

That’s because, given the "four crisp claps" evidence, the fact of the affair, alone, is extremely unlikely to convince the judge to dismiss the charges against Potts on the ground that probable cause is lacking. The affair -- because it provides Nancy with a motive to murder -- might foreclose proof beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. (Simply because a jury might be hesitant to convict Potts on slim evidence when another possible suspect -- Nancy -- had an even stronger grudge against the dead man.) In any case, the point is moot: the prosecution reveals its ace in the hole: a pen found at the crime scene bears Potts’ fingerprints. Hearing this extra evidence, Judge Walsh promptly -- and properly -- finds that probable cause exists.

After the hearing, Ally repeatedly and unwisely presses Potts as to whether he committed the crime -- rather than focusing her energy, as she should, on the government’s ability to prove that he did. Ally is clever, however, in developing the theory that Nancy -- a co-worker of Potts’ -- could have stolen Potts’ pen (and, presumably, clapped four times) to frame Potts for her own crime.

To expose Nancy, Ally concocts a scheme in which she’ll wear a wire and, after some "girl bonding," get Nancy to confess to her. Fish and Cage, wearing baseball caps and hanging out in the car, provide Ally’s backup if things get violent. The whole scheme, of course, has the same whiff of highly dubious legality as Linda Tripp’s innocent forays to Radio Shack.

At Nancy’s house, Ally discovers Mrs. Schofield in the closet and reveals her and Nancy to be "killer lesbians" -- driving the show’s homophobia to inconceivable new, Silence of the Lambs-like heights. Early in the season, Ally and Ling freaked out after their little kiss, both insisting that they needed and wanted, to put it bluntly, "a penis." Recently, Ally rejected the charming, admittedly bisexual judge she was otherwise crazy about, solely due to his sexual orientation. And now "killer lesbians" are afoot.

But the show’s new fascination with homophobia does, at least, save the day for Paul Potts. The prosecution recommends the charges against him be dropped, and Judge Walsh dismisses the charges. Although probable cause technically still exists (merely mentioning "killer lesbians" does not, as a matter of law, defeat probable cause), the judge was reasonable to defer to the prosecution’s recommendation.

Ah, Claymation. The malleability of Play-Doh meets the flexibility of porno. Some envision silvery robot-androids that will bring us into the future. But I envision a world of Claymation, where we are kept immortal, yet are vulnerable to being periodically squished.

Ally resorts to Claymation this week. Has the show no shame? But I understand -- really, some things can be expressed only through Claymation. Don’t say it with monologues, with characterization, with emotion recollected in tranquillity. Say it, instead, with little figures that can grow "hair" when you pump clay through their heads. If Shakespeare were alive, I know he’d be using Claymation, too. Oh, that this too, too squishy flesh would melt....

Claymation rears its ugly, blue-clay tresses when Billy hallucinates a Claymation Ally, squeaking "Marry me!", and a Claymation Georgia, squeaking "Divorce me!". Why not a Claymation Sandy, squeaking "Fuck me!", I wonder? Or a Claymation viewer, squeaking, "Save me from this existential hell!"

Unfortunately for Billy, these are not his only hallucinations. He also hallucinates that the Halfback/Transvestite guy from the group of weird graphic designers is a beautiful woman; that Nell is Sandy; that his doctor is Georgia; and so on. The hallucinations cause Nell to send Billy to a neurologist (so that she can sub for him at a client meeting and try to steal his client, it turns out). The hallucinations cause Billy to be concerned for his own well-being. And eventually they turn out to be symptoms of a brain tumor that might kill him. In the last scene of the show, Billy tells Georgia of his plight.

The writers’ use of all of these hallucinations to be an indicia of serious illness, is bizarre, for an obvious reason: on this show, people who aren’t sick -- or, at least, aren’t physically sick --hallucinate all the time too. Especially Ally, whose Al Green fantasies caused her to see a psychiatrist, not a neurologist, earlier in the season.

The show is a cornucopia of hallucinations -- bizarre fantasies seen by the characters (as with Ling’s elderly friend’s pygmies), by the viewer (as when Ling and Ally breathe fire at each other), or by both (as Ally imagines herself shrinking to a tiny size, in shame, when her Prozac prescription’s readiness is loudly announced). As a result, Billy’s hallucinations fail to shock: they’re business as usual in Ally McBeal-land.

The only interesting thing about Billy’s hallucinations, in the end, is the way in which they may reflect the writers’ psyches: it bears comment that the writers have identified the very hallmark of their show as a symptom of the terminal illness of one of its main characters. Even more interestingly, the writers’ decision to kill off Billy is a decision to kill the show’s very premise -- for if Billy is no longer there for Ally to long for, how can she be a thwarted thirty-something woman anymore? Her whole character is defined by unrequited love, and when the love object dies, she too fails, in some sense, to exist. And so too the show?

Tune in next week... with the pizzicato portion of the Love Story theme on the CD player in the background.

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