Close to Home Recap: A House Divided
This episode starts off with a doctor seeing a patient in his home office while the family mills about all around - not in the office, exactly, but all around the house. Then we see his wife walking the dog and coming inside, and then it's the next morning and one son is coming downstairs to check on his dad, and he finds him dead in his office. Suddenly the wife is confessing to murder, but there is a problem - the officer didn't read her her rights, so the confession might get tossed, especially when Doug Hellman (Bruce Davison) gets called on to act as her lawyer.
I love Hellman's character, and I'm glad that he wasn't eliminated in the wholesale changes that were made from last season to this one. Reasonable Doubts from last season with him in it is quite possibly the best episode of this series thus far, and it's purely because of his lines (though his persona helps a great deal as well).
His character isn't as good this time around, but it helps. It also helps that new boss James Conlon takes more of a back seat in this episode, similar to the way that they used John Carroll Lynch last season. The focus should be on the process, and quite frankly he isn't adding much, so keep him in the background.
Anyway - as the trial unfolds, the wife (Cheryl White) actually decides that she wants to defend herself. The judge will allow it, but only if Hellman sits with her, so the trial proceeds. Everything is fairly uneventful, with the kids taking sides, but then she pulls out a whopper - her husband had been performing hypnosis trials on the kids. Unfortunately, this backfires on her, as her daughter confirms that she wishes she had elected to stay with her mom, because then her mom wouldn't have killed her dad. Whoops. Guilty of murder.
