‘Damages’: Girls just want to have fun, indeed

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Oh, Katie. I’ve warned you before about getting in over your head with Patty and crew, and yet you refuse to listen.

It’s time for Katie’s deposition in the Frobisher case, and Patty took the baptism-by-fire route to prep her for interrogation. All the secrets Katie thought were just between her and Patty -- attorney-client privilege, yadda yadda yadda -- were outed in front of Ellen: namely, the trip to rehab for drug addiction and the abortion that resulted from her affair with Gregory.

And, as it turns out, Katie had more secrets to reveal.

In a flashback to the crucial Palm Beach weekend, we follow Katie through her various indiscretions: doing coke in the stairwell of a club with Gregory, then running out after they hear gunshots. She follows him to his car in the parking lot, where they see Frobisher -- and someone -- getting into a limo in the early hours of the morning. They head to a house, where Katie downs a few more pills with some martini backwash, and then trance out on the couch. While she’s out of it, an older man in the world’s least-stylish hat enters, sees her and mysteriously leaves the room.

Back in the present day, Gregory convinces Katie that the person they saw getting into the cab with Frobisher was one of his broker’s assistants. Katie dutifully reports this to Patty and Ellen -- as though she suddenly remembers who it was after all these years and it wasn’t Gregory who planted the seed in her brain. In the deposition, Katie recites her made-up memory -- and Fiske, Frobisher’s lawyer, calls her on it. It seems as though there was an ATM security cam shot of the broker’s assistant biding his time with a transvestite in Atlantic City at the time Kate placed him in the parking lot. Oops, for all involved.

Patty’s case again seems screwed -- but is it? It turns out that Patty had the ATM photo all along and used Katie as bait, knowing that she’d blow up in the deposition and probably cause Fiske to advise Frobisher to withdraw the settlement offer. And thanks to Tom’s digging, it turns out that Gregory owned some stock in Frobisher’s company -- and sold it very quickly after the incident in Palm Beach.

And the man in the ugly hat who spied Katie all those years ago? He’s on to Gregory, and he likes to take disconcerting walks with a baby in a stroller in the middle of the night in New York. (Really, the character is something out of a David Lynch movie. You almost expect to see an ear in the grass in Central Park.) Maybe it’s for the best that at the end of the episode Katie packs up her car -- leaving behind a furious David and a frustrated Ellen -- and gets the heck out of Dodge.

-- Ann Donahue