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YMMV / Damages

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  • Diagnosed by the Audience: Channing McClaren is bad with social cues and often offends people by accident, lives by a rigid personal code while caring little for other people's rules or notions of politeness, and is often hyper-focused on his work.
  • First Installment Wins: While subsequent seasons (excluding season 2 for some) have been very well regarded it's generally felt by the fanbase and critics alike that none of them have lived up to the intensity and unpredictable nature of the first season.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Joe Tobin might have been completely irredeemable by the end of his story arc, but his parents' role in corrupting him and driving him back to the bottle removes all the satisfaction from seeing him locked away for Tom's murder.
  • Les Yay: Quite a lot between Patty and Ellen. Especially in the third season where Ellen and Patty are treated like exes who can't get over each other, Patty's new associate gets treated as the rebound girl, and we get the memorable line "You're trying to seduce me with bourbon!".
  • Moral Event Horizon: In Season 3, the Tobin's start out as a reasonably sympathetic family, but they get progressively worse as the story progresses. You lose all sympathy with them when they arrange the murder of Tessa, a schoolgirl who hadn't been given a choice about getting involved in the first place, and Marilyn Tobin knew to be her granddaughter.
  • Seasonal Rot: Many fans feel that the second season is inferior to the others due to a less focused plot and a lack of charismatic bad guys.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The whole series is about a bunch of jerks doing their damnedest to tear each other apart because they want to win the lawsuit and nothing else matters, trampling over people, tossing them to the wolves and killing them if needed. The series really has no heroes (and as a demonstration, Ellen Parsons (the Naïve Newcomer Wide-Eyed Idealist protagonist) is a stone-faced sociopath from approximately the middle of Season One onwards—a straightforward example of Break the Cutie).
  • Wangst: An interesting dramatic version. Arthur Frobisher acts as though the world is against him, with him being a poor innocent victim of circumstance. The characters (and hell, the audience) knows he's full of crap, and feels about as much sympathy for him as you'd expect.
  • The Woobie:
    • Tom becomes this in Season 3, as he finds out that he and his in-laws lost an incredible amount of money in the Tobin's pyramid scheme. Additionally, in the finale, he's killed by Joe Tobin via drowning.
    • Season four gives us Chris, who has a major case of PTSD from when, during a top-secret and ultimately illegal mission for Blackwater expy Highstar, the mission went horribly wrong and Chris was the only one who made it back alive. Made worse with the fact that Highstar's CIA contact deems him a "liability", going so far as murdering the shrink Highstar had him talk to (even though the shrink was pretty much bound by privacy rules to not reveal what Chris had done, the CIA agent had him killed because he didn't want anyone in a position to expose the agent's crimes) THEN convincing Highstar CEO Howard Erickson to not only lure Chris back to Afghanistan (where he is promptly held prisoner) and tortured/held in solitary confinement (which compounds his PTSD) and possibly is decapitated on orders of Erikson, who by this point decides that they have to kill Chris in order to ensure that he can't tell anyone what Erikson did to him. He survives.

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