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At this rate the Christmas episode will see everyone committing suicide. "I-have-no-gifts-to-bring, a-rum-pum-pum-pum . . . ."

Happily, though, there was no law in this episode at all - the trend by which vestigial hints of the law in Ally gradually disappear, finally completing itself. So don't blame me for failing to explain any.

You know what? I didn't miss the law. (Shhh! Don't tell Findlaw! ™) But I did miss Carwash Guy. Those cheekbones, those pecs, that meaningless, meaningless sex. Instead, we got meaningful, meaningful (nay, theatrical) family interactions. A little saline with your cranberry sauce? Yes, please. And please pass the semen. But I'll get to that later.

I. Marshmelo-drama

Just as everyone on Ally is tucking in to their sweet potatoes and marshmallows, disaster strikes.

Both Georgia and Ally's dad both show up at Ally's Thanksgiving dinner party, then stare one another down until everyone in the room knows something's wrong - including Ally's mom (a.k.a. Jill Clayburgh: turtlenecked-weeper-flick babe of the Seventies). It turns out Ally's dad - a man who has yet to be informed that Botox can solve those creases in his forehead - is. . . drumroll please . . . the same smoothie-voiced older man with whom Georgia has been flirting (and even kissing) in the bar.

So Georgia confronts Dad. Then Ally - so self-involved she believes everything must really be about her even when it's about four other people (Mom, Dad, Georgia and Billy) - confronts Dad too. Dad confesses to once cheating on Mom (but not with Georgia, yet). Mom confesses she cheated on Dad, in retaliation.

Her affair, she insists, was only with "the penis attached to the man." (Didn't Wordsworth once say "the penis is father of the man"? Oh sorry, it's the child that's father to the man. Oops.). Leading your Reviewer to visualize a huge penis running loose, much like the huge breast in Philip Roth.

Mom then demands Ally abandon her "Romeo and Juliet" fantasies about love.

In response to which Ally points out Romeo and Juliet are both dead (and also fictional, but no one mentions that) - so how romantic can that fantasy be?

Mom counters that at least Romeo and Juliet "checked out" still believing in love.

Ally nevertheless defends her romantic dream-universe on the grounds that, "I don't live there, I just retreat to it sometimes." I sympathize. My dream life is a nice place to visit, too. But you wouldn't want to live there either.

Ally then decides - sua sponte (to use a little legalese) - to recount to both Mom and Dad the Freudian scene wherein she once saw Mom boffing another man when she was three - in an as-yet-undisclosed third extramarital affair. (Anyone out there still counting?)

Okay. Now in my opinion, Ally now qualifies as a serial-blurter as well as serious exhibitionist. Having ruined the wedding of Risa and Carwash Guy with her dramatic announcement about sex, she now decides to ruin her parents' thirty-year marriage with a different dramatic announcement about sex. This girl just enjoys dramatic announcements about sex. In any event, Dad responds to this one by asking for a divorce.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast takes off with Ally's family's turkey dinner, giving the whole family melodrama an additional tragic, Donner party aspect.

II. Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Part One: McBeal-o-drama

Once everyone else has left, the McBeal family consults Ally's shrink Tracey Ullman - a woman blessed with both a remote-control zapper and an Epcot-People-Mover-like couch with which to stop patients from fleeing family therapy. (Couldn't she have imported Epcot's Space Mountain into her practice instead? Much more fun.) Tracey sports some mighty geeky Occhialli (Armani's word for ugly glasses), a cross between Elvis Costello's and the ones your high school math teacher wore. These glasses are so geeky, they're almost cool. But not quite.

It occurs to me, as I survey Ms. Ullman's high-tech boy-toys, that my shrink hasn't started using a cattle prod or stun gun on me (or even a modified Nintendo,) and yet I generally manage to sit there and sob for the whole 50 minutes, without lighting out for the hills. But since it may be just a matter of time until my shrink goes high-tech like Ally's I wonder if she could please invest in a really great vibrator? Maybe a Pokemon model? (Santa - are you listening?)

But maybe she doesn't need toys to keep me there, given that my own therapy is, thankfully, one-on-one; and there's no one like family to make you want to run screaming from the room.

Back to therapy, where we learn Dad emotionally abandoned Mom because he fell in love with . . . well, Ally. This resulted in Mom becoming jealous of her own daughter. Hearing this, the therapist opines that Ally and Dad have ended up with a relationship with "a little pain" (yes, and a lot of sexual tension) while Dad and Mom have ended up with a relationship that may simply be kaput (wanting to shtup your own daughter can do that to a marriage). This is probably as close to televising Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss" (her artful, insightful memoir of incest with her father) as network TV will ever go.

Mom later tells Ally she's been "magic" since childhood; this is why her father fell in love with her, and why Mom's been so jealous, it seems. As the Ally-mania gets more and more nauseating, your trusty Reviewer is reminded of a short story by Nabokov called, I believe, "Signs and Symbols." In the story, a strange autistic man believes the whole world -- its every pattern and jar of jelly -- refers to him. My point: Ally is that strange autistic man (albeit more of a babe and a hottie than the guy in Nabokov). However, Ally's self-referential delusions are only fostered by the fact that, on the show, everything really does refer to her.

Just as people may really be out to get the paranoid, so the narcissist may really turn out be the center of everyone else's world (especially when she's the main character of her own sitcom/sit-dram). And that is exactly what happens to Ally. When Ally left, Dad "died inside;" he literally couldn't live without her. And, when Dad confesses all this in therapy in front of his wife, she merely concurs about Ally's "magic" quality. ("Gaggez-moi," as the French say.)

Joining in the lovefest, therapist Tracey demands (perhaps somewhat impoliticly) that Dad confess he "loved Ally more." (But then don't we all?) Instead of offering the confession, Dad walks out of therapy - this despite all the gadgets designed to keep him there.

Ultimately, it seems Mom and Dad, consummate realists, may stay together. Ally, however, is left as the moony Daddy's Girl we now know she's always been - haunted by Frank Capra-like flashbacks ("Zuzu's petals!") to being a little girl playing the piano with her dad. The song they play ("Dulcinea") is, we are told, about being in love with someone you don't know. No one points out that it's difficult to really know someone if, like Ally's Dad, you've wanted to shtup her since she was in her bassinet.

Ally's relationship with her mother is the shoe that never drops. In real life, there would have been a lot more ugliness, I suspect, perhaps ending with a true reconciliation between Ally and Mom, to Dad's detriment. But the family pattern eerily reasserts itself (more psychoanalysis, anyone?) - with Ally, in her dreams, still her father's soulmate and, in her life, still distant from her mother, whose jealousy is never really addressed. It is strange to end with Ally sentimentalizing her borderline-incestuous Dad with piano ditties, while her mother remains basically alone.

Part Two: I Am Not Your Barbie, Baby!

Billy and Georgia's marriage is also on the rocks. In case you care. (I don't particularly, but I feel a responsibility as a journalist to inform you, the public, about these weighty matters).

Georgia complains she's spent her whole life trying not to be seen as a Barbie, but (*sob!*) a Barbie is all the "new Billy" wants. (Chorus here: But Courtney, you are a Barbie!) Since the "new Billy" is about as delicious as new Coke, Georgia and Billy decide to separate.

Believe me, I usually try to suppress my ardent-feminist side in order to get more play with the Johnny Depp-ian men I've always favored (you know, high cheekbones, tattoos . . . ). But I just can't help mentioning that strong women and "older" women don't fare too well on Ally - and by "older", the show, like Hollywood itself, seems to mean over thirty. (No, this doesn't bother your thirty-one year old Reviewer one bit.)

Case in point: Billy is hardly separated from Georgia five minutes before he starts to seduce his nubile, bright-eyed assistant at Starbucks. (Girls: If he's willing to order the Grande, he really likes you. If Venti, caution to the wind; sleep with him on the first date. If Tall, breast augmentation may well be in order.)

Similarly, Richard Fish elects to stay with the tart Ling - despite his confession that Whipper is his soulmate - because, as he so charmingly tells Whipper, he is more into sex than "companionship" and "emotional support," both of which, according to him, lead to time-consuming conversations that lead, in turn, to falling asleep before you get to have sex. Fish also maintains that women are "beasts of insecurity" from whom he must be emotionally withholding on principle, so that they will keep seeking whatever it is he pretends to withhold. (So that's guys' strategy! I thought they were emotionally withholding by nature. Note to self . . . ). Whipper calls Fish an "emotional coward." But Fish reaffirms he "prefers to swim in the shallow end." With the nubile young fishies.

I rest my case. I know, you'll buy me an Americano for my trouble. Can I at least get it with whipped cream? (And, if what I hear is true and this website really gets millions of hits, could everyone please send me a Starbucks coupon? I'd be in Venti for life.)

Watching the joint ad for Ally and Jennifer Love Hewitt's show, I began to fear for us all (particularly for myself; hey, I get to be narcissistic too). Both Jennifer Love and Ally McB. are such pouffy little fluffballs - the kind of cotton candy you want to put your tongue right through. And, continuing my Ally Anorexia-Watch, I have to point out her arms looked about as wide as drumsticks this week. But perhaps I was just hungry, after all their dinner was so rudely interrupted.

Let your cry reverberate across the land - and into the office of David E. Kelley: where are the kick-ass women? You know, the ones who became their dads instead of just falling in love with them. Or as Gloria Steinem said, we girls who are becoming the men our mothers wanted us to marry?

Where are the kick-ass women? Where are they? There is still a spot on my couch for them, any Monday of the month.

Next week on Ally: Farrah Fawcett. (Billy in The Burning Bed? That deserves a one word review: Acquitted.).

And, Georgia quits the firm. Damn. No one quite understood federal jurisdiction the way Georgia did. Who will write the habeas petitions now? Hard to assess, in retrospect, if this is a greater personal or intellectual loss. But don't worry about your Reviewer. I'll make it through . . . .

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