Formula Phantoms

I watched an oddly lame episode of Ally McBeal last night, "In Search of Pygmies" from February, 2000. It has two plots; one in which Ally intentionally gets into a fender bender in order to ask out the cute guy in the car ahead of her, and one in which Ling, Lucy Liu's character, is trying to save Orson Bean from getting thrown out of a retirement home.

That's right, the Rankin Bass Bilbo Baggins himself. And he's still fighting dragons, having convinced everyone in the nursing home that such monsters are lurking in the shadows. Ling's heartlessness is usually played for laughs so it's kind of abrupt that she's so passionate about helping this old man. It feels like a stock plot from a standard drama while Ally's plot feels more like something from Seinfeld. It really feels like a phoned in episode, but phoned in from two different eras.

Here's Bean in better times: