(1/02 "Brothers & Sisters:" Nora Walker Dumps Her Beau While Justin Walker Dives in Again

"Brothers & Sisters," 1/02/2011, ABC, 9:00 p.m. (CDT): The January 2nd episode shows the mismatch between Nora (Sally Field) and her current beau, the radio advice-giver who has never had any children. The two plan a quiet dinner alone together, but Nora unexpectedly invites Scotty, Kevin, Kitty and Seth to dine with them, upping the intimate dinner for 2 to 6. (I hate when that happens!)

One of the reasons Nora invited daughter Kitty (Calista Flockhart): romantic trouble on the horizon. Taking a page out of "Desperate Housewives'" playbook, there is a May/December pairing between Kitty Walker McCallister (widow of Rob Lowe, following last season's car crash) and Seth, the Dean's son at the college where Kitty is now employed. The news of the student/teacher pairing has hit the airwaves and the paparazzi are working overtime. [There's little talk of Kitty's cancer from previous seasons and no talk at all of the McCallisters' adopted child.] Kitty fears the repercussions and expects that the Dean, her boss and the boy's mother, will disapprove.

SCOTTY & KEVIN:

There is talk of A child in this episode, but it involves the gay couple, Kevin Walker (Matthew Rhys) and his civil union partner Scotty (Luke Mcfarlane). The pair had been planning to adopt a child of their own, who was to be carried for them by a surrogate. That plan did not go well. In this episode, they instead attend an Adoption Fair. We can see that the young girl who greets them, introduces them to other children and hugs them as they leave is coming aboard as a new cast member, the gay duo's adopted daughter. The girl of about 11 certainly has aggressively courted the boys, and that does not go unremarked. For such an important life decision, it seems that Scotty and Kevin only needed about 5 minutes to decide.

JUSTIN:

The episode focused a great deal on Justin Walker (Dave Annable). Justin seems to have almost no memory at all of his (defunct) marriage to Rebecca. [Emily VanCamp.] (I saw Emily VanCamp in the indie film "Norman" recently and she was terrific.) Once we finally learned that Rebecca was not, in fact, Justin's half-sister (via Holly), the 2 were instantly smitten, but "easy come, easy go."

Justin has a new girlfriend now, a brunette (Annie), and is working as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). He tells Annie, "I've been trying to move forward for a long time -- I really want to make this relationship work." (Wow! Talk about a short shelf life for women in Justin's life. He should just install a revolving door on his bedroom and forget about tying the knot so often.)

The pair is shown saving a car accident victim's life inside an ambulance, primarily because Justin performs a surgical procedure to re-inflate the man's collapsed lung. (Later, this act of mercy will come back to haunt him, as Justin does not have the best luck with jobs or women and apparently his re-inflating the black victim's lung was verboten, as the Germans would say).

"Why is this beautiful girl so interested in Justin?"

Yes, he's cute, but he is a recovering drug addict, recently was married (unsuccessfully), could not cut it in medical school and is working as an EMT. (My former cleaning lady became an EMT. This is not a promising career path for someone who was supposed to be becoming a doctor.) His girlfriend, Annie, tells him, "You deserve to have someone take care of you for a while," since the usually not-very-hard-working Justin has been taking many extra shifts in the ambulance-that-never-moves-when-onscreen.

A minor plot point: my husband and I once rode in an ambulance, trying to revive a heart attack victim. We were thrown around like popcorn inside a popcorn popper. It is interesting that the ambulance in which Justin and Annie perform their heroic lifesaving act is completely stable. It never seems to move AT ALL. Very odd. At one point an emergency medical call comes in while Justin and Annie are playing H-O-R-S-E on a basketball court. By the time the two quit flirting and get around to responding to it, (said my spouse), "The guy would have been dead by now!" Point well taken.

KITTY & SETH:

Kitty is called into the female Dean's office of Wexler, the university where she is now a professor. Seth---her 27-year-old lover---is also a graduate student at Wexler, but Kitty learns (from his mother, the Dean) that he has been "working on his Master's degree for the past 5 years" and that he also is writing short stories and a novel. This sounds like almost as winning a career game plan as Justin's EMT career path, but there is a lot of effort spent in portraying the Dean as the Wicked Witch of the West, always putting her son down, while Kitty will raise him up to success.

Seth's mom thinks that Kitty can do better (and openly says so). Seemed reasonable to me. While open-minded about her son's romantic liaison with an older woman and planning to release a supportive statement, Mom says, "Is Seth someone you see yourself with long term?" The Mom seemed to give an accurate assessment of what Seth has accomplished, to date, but you just know that we are supposed to now view Kitty as Seth's savior from the put-downs of his evil mother, the Dean. [We shall root for Seth to write "War & Peace" and show that mean administrator that he is made of sterner stuff. At the rate Seth is going, Kitty will be 70, as in the short story Seth has Kitty read, when he finally succeeds and both will be as rail-thin as Calista from lack of food, but never mind about that -- .] This couple also has zero chemistry. If we're lucky, maybe Harrison Ford will agree to do a guest shot romancing either Nora or Calista. That would be interesting.

The most important development on tonight's show was Nora breaking up with her radio station Dr. Phil-like beau while talking to him on her call-in show as Dear Mom. That seems like a wise move. The antique lover seems to hate being around the Walker children and leaves the dinner party protesting that he feels awkward. He's also steamed that Nora let the entire family in on the fact that he is a control freak, which he had told her in confidence. To paraphrase the Dean of Wexler, Nora can do better. (Where's Treat Williams when we really need him?)

Interesting that there was no story line tonight for Rachel Griffiths (Sarah Walker, late of "Six Feet Under"), that we neither heard about nor saw Saul (Ron Rifkin), that Patricia Wettig (Holly Harper) is on the boards next episode but MIA this night and that we haven't seen nor heard from "Tommy" in ages. The show has written off not just Rob Lowe's character, but Rebecca, as played by Emily VanCamp and Balthazar Getty is MIA ever since he hit all the tabloids for leaving his real-life wife and kiddies to run around with the beautiful blonde actress Sienna Miller.

YOUNG GIRLS ON THE SHOW

I'm not sure that we need another female character about the age of Kerris Dorsey's Paige Whedon, who is about as annoying as "T.J." on "Desperate Housewives." I'm already worried about plastic surgery for Paige's nose at some future point, and the fact that this little girl at the Adoption Fair was very aggressive in approaching the gay couple is not automatically a good thing. (I remember that one of the worst cats I ever owned was the one that seemed the most charming---and aggressively friendly--- initially. Later, Sam the Siamese hid in a woodpile for over a week, causing us to have to dismantle the entire thing.)

GAY SUBPLOT

I'm also not ready for more of the gay subplot that the show laid on us a couple of shows back that involved Richard Chamberlain and Saul (Ron Rifkin) reuniting years after a gay encounter that Saul claims not to remember (?), and with Richard Chamberlain diagnosed with AIDS. As another watcher wrote, "If I had slept with Richard Chamberlain, I think I'd remember it." Richard just drifted through, as though off the set of "The Thorn Birds," his face frozen in plastic surgically-altered ways. Chamberlain has also not been seen or heard from again. (Perhaps he is visiting Tommy, who reappeared very briefly in episode 13 with a new girlfriend, but, last time we saw him, was helping build mission facilities in Mexico).

ROMANCE

My advice to Justin would be to take it more slowly in his romantic rush. That goes double for Kitty and Seth. As for Sarah, Holly, Nora and the rest of the cast: steady as you go isn't bad advice there, either.