Eli Stone: 1.1 ‘Pilot’ Recap
Original Air Date: January 31, 2008
ELI STONE is a Stanford Law School graduate and eighth-year associate at the San Francisco law firm of Wethersby, Posner & Klein. The series opens with him meeting two native guides in India as he sets out to visit the snowcapped Panch Chuli peaks. After explaining that you’ve probably never heard of his employer “unless you own a huge company that’s screwed over a little guy,” Eli reveals that he just might be a prophet, although until recently, he merely worshipped the holy trinity of Armani, accessories, and ambition.
Everyone including Eli thought he was the guy who had it all. Then, one day he began hearing the music, namely George Michael’s ridiculously catchy 1987 hit single “Faith” (which I played over and over again on a loop while editing this recap, incidentally, to get in the proper mood — I don’t think I’ve heard the song in more than a decade). The first hallucination happens when he’s in his office dictating into a tape recorder.
Eli continues to hear strains of the song during his meeting with his client Beutel Pharmaceuticals and the plaintiff, BETH KELLER, who claims the preservative Mercuritol in Beutel’s flu vaccine gave her son Ben autism when he was two years old. The client offers Keller a $60,000 settlement to go away, but she refuses to accept. The problem isn’t that the additive in Beutel’s vaccine causes autism, but that she can’t prove it does. Eli advises Keller to take the settlement and get on with her life since litigation is all about what you can prove in court.
That night while he’s having sex with his fiancée and fellow attorney TAYLOR, Eli finally manages to identify the song he’s been hearing all day as Michael’s “Faith.” As the song’s melody kicks in yet again, he goes into his living room to find the singer jamming to the tune on his coffee table, which causes the lawyer to faint straightaway, of course.
Later, Eli gets a check up from his doctor brother NATHAN, who assures him his hallucinations are the result of nothing more than stress and a mild concussion suffered when he fainted and hit his head on a planter. When Eli asks what he should do if George Michael shows up again, his brother flippantly replies, “Get an autograph.”
Back at work, Eli’s sassy and hilarious assistant PATTI—an always divine Loretta Devine—recommends that he see her acupuncturist DR. CHEN in Chinatown, who’s so damn good, he cured her friend’s tennis elbow and constipation all in one visit. Eli doesn’t want to go, though, because he doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff.
Beth then shows up to try and convince Eli to set up something called a Chinese Wall so that he can drop his client Beutel and represent her instead. She feels he’s her only chance to prove the link between the company’s vaccine and her son’s autism in order to get it off the market. Eli declines, however, and after she leaves, he again hears Michael crooning, this time from the office building’s lobby, where Eli arrives to find everyone dancing along as if they’re in a music video.
As he gets into the groove and starts mimicking Michael’s dance moves while lip-synching, the scene suddenly returns to reality, where everyone is looking at Eli like he’s crazy. Now, it’s off to see Dr. Chen, who helps Eli realize that he’s hallucinating about George Michael because the singer has great meaning in his life, even if he can’t remember why.
Thanks to the acupuncturist’s many sharp needles, Eli flashes back on college in 1991 and the night he lost his virginity during a one-night stand with a fellow student. Before the deed, she first put on his roommate’s George Michael tape because she wanted some music to accompany the event.
This memory leads to the connection that Beth Keller, who went by Lizzie back then, is the same girl, which also explains why she looks at him strangely every time they’re together. Eli drops by Beth’s house and meets her son, who seems enthralled with words. The little boy is building a massive structure in the living room with letter blocks, and Eli decides to take his mother’s case when he sees that the boy has spelled out George Michael’s name in two rows.
The next day at work, Eli begins hearing dinging sounds as he argues to switch sides on the Beutel case before the firm’s partners. He manages to convince them by claiming that taking up Beth’s cause pro bono will enrich them through positive public relations and an unaffected bottom line. The dinging bell draws Eli back down to the lobby, where this time he sees a cable car and hears his dead father’s voice.
Back to Dr. Chen, whose needles help Eli to flash back on himself when he was a boy and met up with his alcoholic father on a cable car one day. His father gives him a picture of the Panch Chuli peaks as a gift for winning a debating trophy and suggests that maybe they’ll visit it together some day. The picture is meant to help Eli remember that he’s going to do great things, go to beautiful places, speak inspired words, and help people.
The first round of court testimony reveals that Beth’s son Ben was normal until he was exposed to the Beutel flu vaccine and that Beutel uses the preservative Mercuritol because it helps them sell the vaccine at a marketable price. In Eli’s office afterwards, Patti makes her dislike of his fiancée Taylor clear when she hints that he should try hooking up with Beth, who’s just leaving. Patti then hands Eli a verboten privileged document she obtained from the paralegal who works for Eli’s previous co-counsel on the Beutel case, MATT DOWD.
The document, the results of a study investigating the connection between Mercuritol and cognitive dysfunctions like autism, shows that even Beutel was once concerned that the preservative might be dangerous. Unfortunately, Eli can’t use the information directly in his case because it’s privileged intel he has no legitimate reason to know about.
At a dinner party later that night for Eli and Taylor’s families, Eli hallucinates about scattering his father’s ashes—carried in a big old Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can—from the top of the Panch Chuli peaks after Taylor’s father, Wethersby, Posner & Klein partner JORDAN WETHERSBY, informs him he’ll be in court the next day since he knows Eli knows about the study through the ill-gotten document. The sound of Taylor and Nathan’s panicked voices calling his name and begging him not to jump brings Eli back to reality, where he’s terrified to find himself standing atop the railing of the apartment’s balcony, dozens of stories above the ground.
Now it’s time for a second checkup with Nathan, who realizes after the balcony incident that his younger brother actually exhibits the same symptoms their father did, which were attributed to alcoholism. The hospital’s chief neurosurgeon confirms that Eli has a possibly hereditary brain aneurysm that can’t be surgically removed. Eli will just have to go on as usual and hope it doesn’t kill him, which is entirely possible since many people never have theirs burst.
Back in court, Eli recalls the Beutel executive to the stand and makes him look like a massive prick by forcing him to admit that he ordered his daughter’s pediatrician not to vaccinate her with a flu shot manufactured by his own company. But, when Jordan Wethersby responds to the turned tables by offering Beth a huge settlement—or, as she calls it, a bribe—of $360,000, the plaintiff still refuses to settle.
Beth wants nothing less than a full admission of guilt and a trust set up for other children who became autistic as a result of receiving the Beutel vaccine. Eli tries to convince her she’ll lose and walk away with nothing if she doesn’t accept the offer, yet Beth hits back that she’ll lose the case only because the jury will know that he doesn’t believe in his own arguments.
Conflicted, Eli heads to Chinatown for an impromptu session with Dr. Chen’s needles, only to have the acupuncturist drop his heavily accented, mysterious Chinaman act when Eli relates his sob story. The doc, whose real name might be Frank Lebakowski (I’m not sure if he was admitting that or just kidding around), counsels Eli that he just might be a prophet sent to help lead the way. His reasoning is that while science can explain Eli’s brain disorder, only the divine can explain why events unfolded the way they did, such as Beth’s son spelling out a message to the lawyer.
Although Eli initially thinks this is impossible since he doesn’t believe in God, Chen explains how, to the contrary, he’s the perfect candidate: a prominent attorney who handles high-profile cases that get the attention of the public. And he does too believe in God, the doctor asserts, since he believes in justice and love and all that other enigmatic stuff that are essentially what God is.
In court for the closing arguments, Eli argues faith: Beth’s faith in Beutel not to harm her child and his lack of faith that Beutel will do the right thing and remove Mercuritol from its vaccines in the absence of a large enough punitive judgment to force the company to. Eli’s mother LENORE drops by the courthouse as he anxiously waits for the jury to return, and she gives him his father’s ashes in the same big old Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can that he saw in his balcony hallucination. His father requested in his will that they be given to Eli because he would know what to do with them.
So, after the jury returns its verdict of $5.2 million in damages to Beth—$2 million to go directly to her and the remainder to a trust for autistic children, plus her specific request for the immediate removal of Mercuritol from Beutel’s flu vaccine and a guarantee that Wethersby, Posner & Klein won’t fire her attorney—Eli visits India to do just what he’s already seen in his hallucinations. Yet, before scattering his father’s ashes, Eli apologizes for blaming him for things he couldn’t control. Now recognizing that he hasn’t become the person his father thought he would be, Eli also promises to change his life and the way he approaches it.
MY TAKE: Eli Stone is very, very nice, really sweet, and often funny, largely due to English star Jonny Lee Miller’s effective performance in the title role. As long as the sweetness doesn’t turn to saccharine and the plots don’t get Ally McBeal silly, the show should be okay.
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