BULL 2x09 "Thanksgiving"

"Thanksgiving" ran against the tide of everything that Bull is in terms of its general lack of emphasis on the core characters (which has admittedly improved in season 2). When the synopsis for the episode read that Bull was to get pulled into a case over the Thanksgiving holiday, I groaned with my assumption that this would be an episode devoted to ruining everyone's holiday. Yet Bull's writers had the decency to ruin only one person's holiday: Bull's. Everybody else's plans ran uninterrupted, and in doing so we learnt a tremendous amount about the people Bull surrounds himself with.

Additionally, the stories were so wildly varied in their outcomes - some positive, some negative, some emotional, some shocking - that oftentimes it felt like the better drama was in these plots than the case Bull accepted.

Cable made the decision to spend Thanksgiving with her friends instead of her family, but ended up regretting it when she grew bored at a party and decided to check in with her parents. Chunk visited two ladies I presumed to be his sister and niece, and spent it trying to convince his sister that his niece should be allowed to go to New York University despite the city's dangers, only for it to be revealed that this is not his niece but his daughter, from whom the truth of her father's identity had been kept secret for 18 years. Benny's flight to Dallas was delayed, but at the airport he bonded with a young lady named Grace, and after sacrificing his seat to her she thanked him with a promising text. And Marissa's holiday was ruined when she discovered her credit cards were inexplicably maxed out and Kyle, on a flight to China, was unreachable.

Not only was this devotion to character unusual, but the constant tonal shifts as the story transitioned between all of the above and Bull's court case were very unlike Bull. The show has never tried to incorporate quite so many emotive character-driven subplots into an episode before, and the impact on the quality of this standout episode was phenomenal. I really hope that Bull can carry the necessary plots forward from this point. (Of course, not all of these storylines need revisiting, but I expect Benny to meet with Grace in the future and it would be quite the oversight not to follow the aftermath of Chunk's family revelation. Marissa's plot with her boyfriend Kyle should return.)

Unfortunately, the overwhelming strengths of these character subplots only overshadowed the court case. It was certainly devised to step outside the normal Bull boundaries (after all, there was never really a point in the case where Bull seemed likely to prove Bobby Lewis's innocence), but this wasn't the showcase for a solo Bull that it could have been. That isn't a criticism - the writers didn't want to showcase solo Bull and that's absolutely fine - but the premise of Bull as alone in court as he could possibly be seemed wasted on a murder case that required only a shady deal to be made with the mob for them to cease framing Bobby and the case to be dismissed.

This plot did have its moments, however, and one such moment involved voir dire. The length of time allotted for this each episode depends on whether voir dire plays an important role, and in "Thanksgiving" it did. Already under pressure without his team backing him up, a lengthy voir dire scene showed how Bull isn't the same person without Cable or Marissa talking in his ear. It's a smart reminder of what this season has emphasised numerous times: that Bull is fallible, and relies on his team far more than they rely on him. And really, that (plus the fact that Bull spent the holidays near enough alone and buried in his work) might be the saddest conclusion to a plotline in this episode.

RATING: 9/10

POINTS OF NOTE

• The introductory scenes were a full 6 minutes long. That's insane.
• Geneva Carr was brilliant as Marissa, whose Thanksgiving delight gradually morphed into heartbreak.
• On a similar subject, I now think I badly misjudged Kyle initially. He seems like a bad dude.