- Title: Franklin & Bash – Last Dance
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Franklin (Breckin Meyer) and Bash (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) get another unusual case when the widow (Anne Ramsay) of a recently deceased microbiologist asks for their help to stop her late husband’s body being used as a sculpture in a human-body exhibit who plan to pose the scientist as a dancer in one of their traveling shows.
Under the law the closest living relation to the deceased is allowed to decide how they want their loved one laid to rest. However, the Plasticine company produces a divorce lawyer (David Bickford) who the deceased had hired to start the process to dissolve his marriage and the scientist’s former dance partner (Andrea Gabriel), and lover, arguing she was actually the closest to the deceased at the time of death and knew what he wanted done with his remains.
In the episode’s B-story Infeld (Malcolm McDowell) suspects his stalker may be a recently released bank robber (Todd Stashwick) who he was unable to get acquitted. Damien (Reed Diamond) enlists the help of Carmen (Dana Davis) to shadow the man and later hire a pair of thugs to rough him up, but the joke is apparently on all three of them as the person behind Infeld’s harassment (Meagen Fay) has an entirely different motive. Meanwhile, Hanna (Garcelle Beauvais) reconnects with an old boyfriend (Boris Kodjoe) working as a courtroom sketch artist.
Unable to win the case the pair sought to win Franklin and Bash come up with an out-of-the-box solution by having the widow divorce her late husband and claim rights to the human statute under the terms of his divorce papers. To help prove the man’s plasticized remains are indeed art the pair call on Hanna’s friend and a rather large visual aid – a stuffed grizzly bear.
The cases involved in “Last Dance” are certainly odd, but, it turns out, equally entertaining. The show does best when it embraces the absurd and when the lawyers have to take last-minute desperate measures. The bear is a nice touch, a certainly fitting Franklin and Bash’s reputation. It was also fun to watch Damien continue to dig himself in a deeper hole while trying to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.