Damages: Can you spell vindictive without evil?

We open with Ellen receiving the news of Agent Harrison’s “overdose” from Agent Werner and some other FBI agent who is probably on the take.  Ellen asks Werner some smart questions, (Didn’t he take drug tests? Isn’t this happening in the middle of a case suspicious?) but Werner does an adequate job of deflecting them.  We immediately see a flash forward, with Patty coming out of that room (walking! after being shot from, like, 5 feet away!) and collapse in an elevator.  Agent Werner finds her and makes a phone call: “My informant just shot Patty Hewes.”

Yeah, I’m still not buying that Ellen shot Patty.

Back in present day, Ellen sees Phil in her hotel lobby.  Before he sees her, a woman passes by Phil, placing her hand in on his shoulder in a (provocative? overly-friendly? whorish?) conspicuous manner. Ellen then greets Phil, and Phil says he’s in the hotel for a meeting. Ellen knows that no one has meetings in hotels with their pants on unless 1) there’s a convention going on or 2) the meeting is with the hotel’s event coordinator.  In other words, Phil is soooooo busted.

In another corner of New York, Claire is planning to oust Kendrick out of his seat at UNR.  Seems the Board just brought in a number two named Mitch McCullen, who is hungry for Kendrick’s job.  So Claire figures she’ll just tell Mitch to go after Kendrick with her support, tell Kendrick to go after Mitch with her support, and then just wait for them to destroy each other.  Problem is, Claire doesn’t quite seem to grasp just how evil Kendrick is.  Kendrick is, like, the kind of evil mastermind that keeps files on other people so he can pull out crap to blackmail you at a moment’s notice.  (Think the late Papa Bass).  So all Kendrick has to do is hint at something seedy that Mitch apparently did at his last job, and Mitch balks and tells Claire he can’t do it – but maybe she should.

So Claire bites.  I mean, what the hell, she’s mad smart, she’s given the company 20 years, and it’ll be fun to pull the carpet right from under Kendrick’s feet.  She thinks she’s got the votes necessary on the Board and on the day of the Board meeting, she swaggers into that room like Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, right before Sigourney points her crutch at Melanie Griffith and says, “This woman is my secretary!”  Yet didn’t we all know how this was going to turn out?  We’ve got two episodes left; that’s way too early for Kendrick to get his comeuppance.

Predictably, there’s no one in that board room except Kendrick himself, who chuckles in Claire’s face, fires her, and leaves Claire to go home and find a special delivery waiting:  a videotape of she and Daniel Purcell doin’ it.  Seems to me that Claire should have a cause of action against Kendrick on at least two counts: 1) some sort of invasion of privacy/illegal wiretapping claim and 2) exposing the world to William Hurt naked.  Okay, okay, he was never naked, but for a second there was the threat of seeing him naked, and really, that’s wrong enough.

So now, Claire’s on Patty’s side.  Which is like, awesome paired with awesome.  Like, awesome squared, that’s how awesome it is.  Barney needs to come up with a new word for how awesome to describe these women, although if he did they’d probably have to make out to celebrate.

And should Claire and Patty ever make out, they could be the new power lesbian couple to put on the cover of New York Style Magazine.  But, sadly, that won’t happen (yet) because Patty’s two-timing, lying, cheating husband will be on the cover with her for a profile in an upcoming issue.  The reporter who will be writing it is interviewing Tom and Ellen for the story.  Tom sucks up rather predictably, and Ellen gives her best fake smile (which I have a hard time believing any reporter worth her salt would have bought) when she says that Patty is an “inspiration.”  She had a particularly difficult time lying through her teeth this week because Patty pulled the plug on her investigation into Frobisher, and responded with absolutely no regard to Ellen’s feelings when Ellen asked her about it.

So Ellen does a couple of things.  First, she hires a P.I. named Wilcox, who finds out that Calder Securities probably had someone high up in the police force working for Frobisher.  Second, she employs Wilcox to take some pictures of Phil with his chirpy.  Third, she sends those pictures to Patty.  If you’re one of my two diligent readers (Hi Mom and Dad!), you may remember back when I suggested that Patty may know that her husband’s a big ole cheat.   Yup, not so much.

As Ellen’s luck would have it, Patty opens up the pictures right in front of Ellen.  She tries to pass it off as something not so damning, but her reaction is pretty telltale.  Discussing the matter with her new second in command, Malcolm, Malcolm states that whomever sent those pictures must have wanted to hurt her pretty badly.  Patty gives a wry smile, and it’s hard to say that the smile is because she knows exactly who sent the pictures, or because the universe of people who want to hurt her is pretty frackin’ expansive.

Well, the good news for Patty is that Hewes & Associates made pretty significant progress in the UNR litigation.  Malcolm has been watching that car, and when no one touches it for awhile, he steals it.  The car is searched pretty thoroughly, and it’s discovered that some weird latitude numbers have been entered into the navigation system.  Given this and the name Finn Garrity, Patty’s about 70% of the way to nailing Kendrick to the wall.

In the awesome last scene of this episode, Ellen goes to Patty’s apartment after the pictures of Phil and the chirpy are leaked to the press.  Ellen knows that Patty leaked them, and, it turns out, Patty knows that Ellen sent them to her.  But Patty doesn’t know if Ellen was being protective or vindictive; Ellen pretty much confirms it was the latter.

Flash Forward:  Ellen gets arrested for shooting Patty Hewes.  Shyeah, right.

So what did you think?  Wasn’t it awesome when creepy Darryl Hammond couldn’t find the car?  And how much do you think Patty’s head will explode when she finds out Michael never applied to college?  And when Patty said that she wasn’t so much mad at Phil for the cheating, but that he was “sloppy” in getting caught, did you believe her (I did)?  And, lastly, since I’m not even going to pretend that I haven’t seen next week’s episode, isn’t the subsequent scene between Phil and Patty absofrackinlutely awesome?

Season 2, Episode 11: London, Of Course (originally aired March 18, 2009)

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Wednesdays at 10pm E/P on FX

Photograph courtesy of FX and IMDbPro