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Ally In Wonderland

Mirabella magazine once proclaimed that "Forty Is The New Thirty," insisting that women can still remain pretty, sexy, vital and happily single despite reaching the big four-oh. Unfortunately, this week’s Ally McBeal suggests exactly the reverse: a young woman’s attractiveness, it implies, radically diminishes at thirty. In Ally’s world, thirty is clearly the new forty, turning Mirabella on its head.

Celebrating her thirtieth birthday, Ally imagines her face in the mirror becoming super-haggard. (The result, however, more closely resembles a blind albino ferret than any future McBeal.) Other characters confirm Ally’s fear when, over and over, they accuse her of being forty - and I do mean accuse. Fearing that she looks "even" older than her age, Ally consults a plastic surgeon to address her supposed crow’s feet and smile lines. Rather than assuring her that she doesn’t need surgery, the doctor chooses to focus on a supposedly more serious flaw instead - her impoverished lips, which he wants to inject with collagen.

Later in the show, Ally becomes so distraught over being thirty and man-less that she consults a minister, who only berates her for seeking male succor from God. When she complains that she has "nothing to show for her twenties," no one bothers to point out that she’s a law school grad with a promising (if ludicrous) career. Only her looks count - as the show underlines when Ally skips a case conference to make her plastic surgery appointment, and then bails on a murder trial in progress because she’s embarrassed about her puffy lips.

While fear of turning thirty is certainly real, and Ally’s insecurities are understandably exaggerated for comic effect, it’s a shame that not one character (even the ghost of Billy!) points out that Ally is beautiful and successful at the age she is - and will remain so for a long time to come. But praying on (oops, I mean exploring) Ally’s weak self-esteem has been a hallmark of the show for years, so why stop now?

Meanwhile, this episode’s so-called legal plot this week also celebrates the sexual power of youth - as Fish & Cage defend a busty blonde Darva Conger-lookalike accused of murdering her 89-year-old husband. The weapon? Her tremendous breasts, which apparently suffocated her husband. It’s as if Philip Roth’s novel The Breast had gone postal. And now they work in gangs of two! Sinister, don’t you think?

Inquiring minds want to know: which is more effective for this diabolical purpose, saline or silicone? For the first time, I’m considering implants.

Please Don’t Confiscate My Breasts

Fish & Cage’s preparation for the Boob Murder trial is, to put it kindly, weak. The main evidence against the defendant, Lorna Flood, is a bite mark on her breast. The prosecution claims the bite mark showed the dead husband fought back as he was suffocated - biting the breast that . . . let’s not go there. But it becomes clear during the show that no one at the firm bothered to check whether the bite mark fit the dead man’s dental records.

If Fish & Cage had done a little denture verification, they would have found a neat little surprise. As Lorna herself admits to Cage and Marc (the new guy at the firm) halfway through the trial, contrary to what she told the police, her dead husband was not the biter. Instead, the nefarious bust-chomper was some guy named Arturo, who then shows up in court.

Amazingly, Cage doesn’t call Arturo as a witness to corroborate Lorna’s story. Or to match Arturo’s dental records to photos of the bite mark. Or at least to demonstrate to the jury that Arturo has teeth.

Instead Cage has the defendant, Lorna, alone testify, thus waiving her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent -and subjecting herself to a devastating cross-examination, during which she must admit that she lied to the police. (Clarence Darrow, Cage ain’t.)

But Cage does score a few points on cross-examination of the dead husband’s attorney, a prosecution witness who testifies that Lorna and her husband sought last-minute changes to his will. Cage smartly establishes that the attorney wouldn’t have changed the husband’s will if he thought the husband lacked mental capacity to do so. (No competent trusts and estates attorney would admit on the stand that he let a demented client change a will.) So Cage undermines the prosecution’s contention that Lorna forced her mentally incompetent husband to alter his will, and then bumped (busted?) him off.

In closing, the prosecution points out that accidental suffocation (which Lorna claims caused her husband’s death) is rare. But Cage makes the oh-so-excellent point that death-by-mammary is even rarer. So the jury comes back with a Not Guilty verdict. Lorna goes free. And the offending breasts rejoice together upon learning that they’ll never have to go to the Big House.

Squish Fulfillment

Meanwhile, the crazy hallucinations, visions and dramatized wishes that have become Ally McBeal’s trademark increasingly obtrude into the show, making interior and exterior realities more and more difficult to distinguish. Daphne Merkin once complimented Ally in The New Yorker for being the only show on TV that tries to show the inner lives of its characters. On this episode, it seems that all the show depicts is those inner lives - run amok.

Ally’s lips, after collagen injections, blow up to such a huge, squishy size that they might be useful to Macy’s for its Mick Jagger Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Strikingly, Ally’s kisser inflates not only in her imagination, but in a way clearly visible to all the other characters: Like Alice in Wonderland actually becoming huge by following a "Drink Me" instruction on a vial, Ally in SitcomLand actually acquires huge lips. (Did the vial say "Give me a blow job" this time?)

In this episode, characters also do pretty much everything they wished they could do. Ally leaps over a conference table to scuffle with new lawyer Marc in a way she’d previously only have imagined doing,. Elaine and Renee fight over who gets to be the lead singer of Ally’s birthday song; the tussle starts out as a dance known as "The Butt" and degenerates into all-female wrestling that would have made Andy Kaufman's day.

Finally, not only weird physicality, but also implausible meanness run rampant this week, as characters blurt out what they might previously have only muttered or said to a friend in the firm’s co-ed bathroom. Smart, incisive lines (the writers were particularly sharp this week) scored "Ouch" points over and over, with characters telling truths they’d never really voice.

Here’s Ally to her plastic surgeon (who also treated Billy before he died): "I’m sure it’s fun to have patients who live."

And Ally to her minister (who questions whether she wants God to be the man in her life): "My friend Mary says He’s amazing in the hay."

And Ally to the dead Billy (after asking him for advice): "I was so hoping you’d be more profound dead." (Never mind speaking ill of the dead, Ally even speaks ill to the dead.)

And Nell on Ally: "In her whole life, she’s only managed to get one man to love her. And he’s dead."

And Nell to Elaine: "With concentration, I can pretend the little people in the world don’t exist . . . amounting to nothing makes you hostile."

Good lines all, but a serious bitch-fest seems to be breaking out on Ally - unintentionally illustrating the virtues of repression, or at least keeping one’s thoughts to oneself. Perhaps realizing this, the writers added a little sugar to the salt at the end of the show - with Cage singing to Ally for her birthday and thanking her for making him more than a "lawyer savant." The treacle-filled ending leads Ally to conclude "I’m not alone."

Not at all. She’s in a world peopled by all the other characters - and by their weird, externalized fantasies, visions and wishes, too. But while there was a time when the sparing use of that material gave the show some quirky appeal, the device has become overused, leading to narrative mayhem. Ally’s writers (like Ally’s literary predecessor, Alice) should beware.

Next Week: Ally tries cybersex. Given her sexual conservatism (just this season, she shunned a lesbian experience with Ling and blew off a bisexual judge), I don’t see her entering into an AOL marriage anytime soon.

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