Eli Stone

Just finished watching Episode 7 of Eli Stone. Yes, I am behind time on this – I record the episodes and watch it at my leisure when there is nothing on or when I want a change of genre. It is not a “must-watch” series to me; just one of those "feel good" shows.

Eli Stone is the male equivalent of Ally McBeal. Both are attorneys, with Ally McBeal in Boston and Eli Stone in San Francisco. Whilst Ally McBeal had songs by Vonda Shepard, Eli Stone has songs by George Michael, particularly the track, Faith. The hallucinations that Alley McBeal had were just dramatic representation of her thoughts and wishful thinking, most notably the Dancing Baby sequences. The hallucinations that Eli Stone has are due to his medical condition, brain aneurysm. However these “hallucinations” were many a times some kind of prophecies that guided Eli to do the right (moral) thing.

It is actually these visions that Eli has and the creative ways the script writers used these visions to put each episode in perspective that I find interesting and keep watching. For instance in Episode 7, Eli was chased by a fire-breathing dragon. This convinced him to take a case, even when the odds of winning was low, to sue a Dr Agon for malpractice (DrAgon = dragon). When it seemed Eli would lose the case, he saw his brother dressed as a knight on a horse fighting against the dragon. Eventually his brother provided some information that led to a successful win. At the end of this episode, the plaintiff gave Eli his favourite story book on Medieval Dragons.

Another interesting thing about this series is that every actors and actresses will do a song-dance routine. And Episode 2, in which Victor Garber sang and danced, is reason enough for me to do a review on Eli Stone. Having watched Victor Garber as the no-nonsense-at-many-times-ruthless Jack Bristow, father of Sydney Bristow in Alias for five seasons, it was almost surreal to watch him did that.

Ally McBeal ran for 5 seasons, I wonder how long Eli Stone will last, not that it matters.

Eli Stone is on every Friday at 8.00 pm on Star World (Channel 18).