"My approval rating went up in that room. I'm a hero to those people. I couldn't be more popular if I got kids to smoke cigarettes."
The world's most lively attorneys return for their fifth and final go-around in Boston Legal: Season Five, a four-disc set from Fox Home Entertainment. Returning to the Emmy-award winning series for one final fling in the courtroom are stars James Spader, William Shatner, Candice Bergen, John Larroquette, Christian Clemenson, and Tara Summers.
It's last call for the gang at Crane, Poole & Schmidt, the reputedly "prestigious" law firm in the Massachusetts capital of Boston. The firm is going broke (an unfortunate victim of the economy) and could very well wind up being bought out by the Chinese. The ever-inimitable Alan Shore (James Spader) begins to wonder if he may objectify the opposite sex a bit while his partner-in-crime, the one and only Denny Crane (played by the one and only William Shatner), worries about what the future will hold (and more importantly, whether or not his penis will continue to perform correctly) due to his self-diagnosed Mad Cow disease. The boss-lady, Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen), is ready to announce her clandestine relationship with senior partner Carl Sack (John Larroquette) — but how will Denny take it when he's still madly in love with Shirley? Meanwhile, the talented and quirky Jerry Espenson (Christian Clemenson, who has always reminded me of Andrew Fletcher from Depeche Mode for some reason) finally gets his day in court (in several ways) as he makes progress against his otherwise debilitating Asperger syndrome with the help of his co-worker Katie Lloyd (Tara Summers).
For any other series, that may all seem like an awful lot of character and plot development for a season that is only 13 episodes long (or 12 if you will; the DVD preserves the back-to-back pairing of the final two episodes as they originally aired). However, since the writers of Boston Legal knew full well that this would be their final hoorah with the show, they decided to go for broke by not only "maturing" their characters, but by having them take on some of the most unimaginable and outrageous cases. Sadly, these cases would never make the cut if presented to the courts in real life, but one can dream, right?
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