We get to know Marshall Pittman better on this week’s Necessary Roughness. A lot better. And I am loving it because he comes across as unhinged, but in a totally calculated way. After firing the GM and taking on the job himself, he tries to play Nico, Dani and Matt in turn with booze in order to get them on his side, but without much success. In fact, I am pretty sure he’s drinking or wanted to in every scene. He keeps threatening to pull the team option on TK due to the injury, and things look bad when TK is not recovering quickly enough for Pittman’s deadline. Instead, Pittman ends up bluffing: he keeps TK, but gets rid of “half the secondary for a player that can’t run,” as Coach puts it. Nico surmises that this is all to devalue the team so he can pay his wife less. I am guessing nothing is as it seems with Pittman, so I can’t wait to see this plot line develop.
TK starts off the episode by keeping to his apartment. Even though Nico gets rid of his guns, gets him a security detail, and gets him out of the house and on to the field, TK still seems depressed about his shooting and won’t talk to anyone about it. Making the usually ebullient TK quiet and sullen is actually a bit frightening; he really seems to be in trouble now. The fact that he ends the episode hanging out with his gun-selling childhood friend is probably not a good sign.
Compared to the story surrounding the Hawks, which took up a fair bit of the episode, the Case of the Week seems even more perfunctory than usual. It was neat to see some Roller Derby — not surprising that the show would eventually get to such a sexy sport. Dani does some nice detective work with the marker, though. Of course, the case parallels Dani’s struggles with wanting to protect her son from sex. The big upshot of the case is that it makes her … buy the kid condoms! Uh, Dani, I bet he already knew about them…. While this story was pleasant enough, though, it definitely took away from the meatier stuff with the Hawks, which I liked quite a bit. I understand that these procedural elements are required for a show like this, though.
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