'Damages' again gets tangled by starting at the end

"Damages" ought to be able to sustain itself just on Glenn Close's Faustian battle between good and evil as high-profile attorney Patty Hewes. Yet it can't resist needless complications such as jumping back and forth in time, creating an endless series of crosses and double-crosses and teasing the audience all along by dribbling out little bits of information.

Many viewers will welcome "Damages" back when it returns for its second season at 9 p.m. Wednesday on FX, considering it averaged an audience of 5 million nationally its first time around, but it's still an unnecessarily painful and painfully complicated show to make time for, especially for the uninitiated. For better or worse, "The Mentalist" it's not.

The first season of "Damages" began at the end and returned to the beginning, if that makes any sense, and the second season follows the same pattern. We first see Rose Byrne's (more or less) altruistic junior attorney Ellen Parsons threatening an unseen witness to "just tell the truth." Then it jumps back six months to the time just after the first season climaxed. The implication is clearly that she's interrogating Hewes herself, especially as it soon turns out Parsons is working on a federal sting to entrap Hewes conducted by an agent played by Mario Van Peebles.

Yet there's always a twist or two, if not more, involved in this series, just as last season began with Parsons seemingly implicated in a murder - a killing that turned out to be of her fiance, and which she was cleared of and continues to attribute to Ted Danson's Arthur Frobisher, who pops up in the season premiere on the brink of death.

Yet all this is only so much blue smoke and mirrors. The real conflict in "Damages" is between Close's ruthless Hewes and Byrne's more naive if not idealistic Parsons, and what the chaotic plot of "Damages" produces, if it produces anything, is a suitable backdrop for Close and Byrne to play out the shifting balance of power and morality between the two.

The second season starts out appearing to offer the transition of Hewes to a more reasonable position, while Parsons becomes more obsessed with getting even with her.

"You think I'm doing this to clear my conscience," Hewes explains some minor good deed done for her assistant, "because of what we did to win the Frobisher case." Yet when Parsons, with the help of the feds, sets a trap to involve Hewes in a case lined with the usual shortcuts and misdeeds she has a penchant for - a case involving a seemingly corrupt HMO with a high incidence of infant mortality - the question becomes, "Who's zooming who?"

Much of the appeal of "Damages" depends on whether a viewer likes this sort of moral conflict - which can easily become not a black-and-white battle of good and evil, but one swirling cesspool of gray - yet the other appeal is that it just features fine acting. Close is in her element with a character who's never allowed to be too evil, and Byrne does a fine job of playing a neophyte, even as it seems she'll shift from babe in the woods to lone she-wolf on the hunt this season.

William Hurt - yes, Close's old co-star in "The Big Chill" - joins the cast in his first real stab at series TV as Daniel Purcell, a mysterious wheeler-dealer who drops a box of documents on Hewes, saying, "If I go public with what I know, I can bring down an industry."

Hopefully not the banking or auto industries, because there's nothing left there to bring down, Mr. Big Stuff.

Tate Donovan is also back as Hewes' reluctant personal assistant Tom Shayes, and a studmuffin suddenly shows up in the season premiere with Parsons' lost cell phone. He's clearly too good to be true and a plant of some sort, but by whom, for what? That's the sort of thing a viewer wonders about "Damages," and if you want to know the answer watch on, but if you couldn't care less, it's better not to get involved in the first place.