By John Maynard
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The first season of the FX legal thriller "Damages" provided enough dizzying plot switcheroos and random time jumps to force even the most loyal and savvy viewer to consult a flow chart.

With tonight's second season debut, and the addition to the cast of William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, one thing is clear: We're going to need a bigger chart.

And so be it. "Damages" remains one of the most compelling -- and certainly mind-bending -- dramas on television today, with no points taken off for the fact that it falls under the category of "legal thriller." (And unlike ABC's "Lost" or NBC's "Heroes," there's no need to visit Web sites or enter chat rooms to understand hidden meanings, magical numbers or other hocus-pocus nonsense.)

Yes, legal thrillers continue to populate the airwaves, but none of the others can boast the skillful writing, eerie camera work and sharp editing that makes "Damages" so riveting.

The fabulous Glenn Close returns as the conniving, calculating and ruthless uber-lawyer Patty Hewes, who, with a single glare or cackle, can reduce foes to act like frightened toddlers. She'll intimidate a U.S. senator on her cellphone and has made enough enemies that she makes her underlings open packages for her at the office, for fear of explosives.

But this season, we also see a hint of vulnerability -- not overplayed by Close -- as she deals with sins of the past. As it happens, there are plenty of those.

Hewes is coming off a banner year for her firm, which, as played out in the first season, won a massive class-action lawsuit against the evil billionaire Arthur Frobisher, ably played by a grizzled Ted Danson. Frobisher returns meekly tonight after getting shot in the chest during the first season finale -- deservedly, given that he murdered the fiance of Hewes's associate Ellen Parsons (the versatile Rose Byrne). Poor Ellen! She lost her fiance and in the same season, her boss, Hewes, tried to kill her, all because she was about to marry a guy who was unwittingly caught up in the lawsuit -- in a fashion that's frankly too exhausting to explain.

Got that flow chart out yet?

This season, Parsons has transformed from a doe-eyed rookie lawyer to a whiskey-swilling, hardened cynic who not only survived the hit but is still dealing with the murder of her fiance. She is all about revenge, which means teaming up with the FBI in an attempt to entrap Hewes in some shady dealings to take her down.

"You just want to arrest Patty Hewes," Parsons tells the G-men (including Mario Van Peebles as Agent Harrison). "I want to destroy her."

She's also got Frobisher in her sights and may just take him out with some help from an unlikely source -- a fellow participant in her grief counseling sessions (the enigmatic Timothy Olyphant).

On top of all this, a whole new plot line emerges early in tonight's opener with the welcome addition of the venerable Hurt as research scientist Daniel Purcell, who shares a long and tortured past with Hewes. He's also sitting on some top-secret information that's got the U.S. government involved -- information that some really bad guys want him to suppress.

It's a reunion for the duo of Close and Hurt, last seen on screen together in 1983's "The Big Chill." And their chemistry works.

Harden plays an adversary of Hewes who also shares a past, or more accurately a present, with Purcell.

Too much star power can sometimes spoil the soup, but in this case no one tries to out-act the others.

One complaint about the first season, that executive producer Daniel Zelman has acknowledged, is that the show careened too jarringly through flashbacks and flash-forwards. While there's some of that in the first few episodes made available for preview, the action does progress in a fairly chronological order.

Regardless, hang on to that chart.

Damages (one hour) returns tonight at 10 on FX.