‘Damages’: It’s a shame about Ray

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That ... was not what I expected.

In the course of an hour, we saw the rather precipitous downfall of Frobisher’s attorney, Ray Fiske. It turns out he was the one to hand over the chunk of Frobisher company stock to Gregory, and then advised him to sell. And if that little bit of insider trading wasn’t enough to land him in a heap o’ trouble, he got Gregory a job, then made a pass at him, which was rebuffed.

And then ... and then ... I’ll put it after the jump to prevent crabby e-mails from folks who haven’t watched the show yet.

Patty found out about Ray’s insider trading and -- no bones about it -- blackmailed him to give up Frobisher. After warning his wife that they had to flee the country, Ray went to Patty’s office, had a nice career-retrospective chat with her, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

As we learned in a flashback, his suicide is what sent Patty off the deep end, causing her to put serious miles on the product-placement Caddy, run to the beach house, have the freak out and tally up 50+ unanswered messages on her voice mail. And it also put her far, far away from the scenes that we know are coming: David getting offed and Ellen being attacked.

All of this reminds me of a tidbit in Matea Gold’s story Tuesday about the future of ‘Damages,’ which made me shudder; she wrote that ‘the show’s writers scrapped their original plan for how to wrap up the season as the series progressed, even changing who will ultimately emerge as the killer (or is it killers?).’ While I know that lots of shows, ahem, ‘transition’ their story lines as the season progresses, it seems to me that the default way to handle seemingly discordant plots is to add a bunch of different characters to explain the loose threads and then whack ‘em one by one. (‘Alias’? Hello Lauren, hello Nadia. Goodbye Lauren, goodbye (sorta) Nadia. ‘Lost’? Hello Tailies. Goodbye Tailies. Sorry, J.J., don’t mean to pick on you.)

To that end, the body count on ‘Damages’ is getting pretty high, between Ray, Gregory and Tuesday night’s other abrupt traveler to the great beyond, Moore. But Ray was one of the central characters, which is why I think his death was so jarring. And, more annoyingly, it seems that out-of-left-field Lila is now the prime suspect in David’s murder. Contrived or clever? What do you think about Ray’s death?

-- Ann Donahue