During the first six-minute increment I thought we'd taken a daring turn into the suspense–mystery–thriller genre as Nick struggled through rush hour traffic and battled his own inner demons to find an answer to the burning question, “Who paged me?” This was not to be; however, we did get putty eyebrows and other strange things. We did get Agnes in retail. (Please don't tell me Doris is flogging lint rollers at the local mall.)

One thing you can always count on when you see sad, cruel, pathetic people through Nick's eyes is that you're never going to dislike them quite as much as you thought you should. (No, I'm not talking about Lulu. Not yet.) Could it be that The Guardian is making me a better person? Surely not. It must be the Nick Fix. It's amazing what a good Nick Fix can do to a woman. (Unless you are Lulu. But I'm not talking about that. Not yet.)

Now, the worst thing my parents ever did to me was tell me my dead hamster wasn't going to heaven. I don't know what's working here or why, but something's working right if I can start to sympathise with a man who pushed his kid through barbed wire, a kid who burned his sister while she slept and wants to kill Bambi, a girl who won't take a needle in the hip to save her brother's life, and perhaps the saddest of all, a mother whose immediate reaction to her son's request for help is wariness. I do feel for this fractured family. Even if I didn't, anything that causes the appearance of that vertical crease between Nick's brows is worth any amount of pain and suffering.

After three months of intensive research, I have devised a top secret scientific formula that predicts the long-term development of this vertical forehead crease, which is determined by genes, personality type, stress levels and a dozen other factors acting in conjunction over the passage of time. The resulting figure is massaged until it's weeping, square-rooted for good measure and is, incidentally, significantly correlated to the inverse proportion of the number of pets owned during a lifetime. Due to the classified nature of the formula, I cannot divulge it here. However, the following photographs demonstrate my point:

At the present time, Burton's forehead crease is precisely 2.45 times longer than Nick's, and he is precisely 2.13 times older. Make of it what you will, but meanwhile Nick has a cultural trust meeting to attend and an intervention to arrange. In a moment of weakness he organises a group hug for the sad family and stands well back (and I do mean well back – he does not play well with others and Mrs Fante's already given him the idea to petition his local representative to make hugging illegal) then he goes home and has a nightmare about opening his front door to Burton, who trips over the sappy incidental music and says: “I know you're angry at me for some reason. Let's get drunk together, have a Really Big Laugh and just talk about things, whadda ya say, son?”

I'm going to talk about that girl now. Maybe it's just my bias against passive-aggressive people, but the way Lulu strikes out at random when she's having a bad day is unlikely to endear her to my heart. In the past such behaviour from others has induced many a NWO, but Nick takes it from her because he's still after her pretty-hot-pretty-married tush – though he does get more than he bargained for when the word “gynaecologist” comes out of her mouth. Eek. And Dale takes it from her because – well, much the same reason, I guess.

So, Lulu's home life is falling down around her ears and she tells Nick he has bigger concerns. I know I sure as hell have bigger concerns than Lulu's home life. My $100 cash-back for changing electricity providers is a bigger concern to me than Lulu's home life. (What on earth do you do with a hundred bucks you didn't plan for?) As we know, she was nervous and curious and confused and relieved and didn't know what to expect, and now she finally realises after many years that she doesn't love the love of her life and she's angry and embarrassed and doesn't want to go home tonight. This pretty hot girl is pretty mad, quite frankly. And in addition to being short with Nick she's also short-sighted. She may think she knows one thing about the man but so do I, and it's this: he does not get food on his face. He does not get spinach between his teeth or spaghetti sauce on his tie or toilet paper on his shoe. Nick Fallin does not get food on his face. So, first the girl is mad and then she starts hallucinating and now she wants to talk about it. Any wonder Nick finally walks out, and magnificently so.

Nick may squirm under Henry Thomas's bug-eyed glare but I get the feeling he's more sure-footed in this creepy Room 101 than with Mrs Olson. Mind you, he has no sense of fun or he'd have worn green just to see what would happen. And I love watching Nick squirm – it's the same sort of guilty pleasure, as, say (hypothetically speaking), turning up the car radio when Def Leppard comes on.

Henry uses lawyers for the same reason Nick pees into a cup for an audience – only because he has to. Henry doesn't shake hands, wants forty-nine a share, worries he might fall through the floor and at one point, and I'm sure I'm reading way too much into this, Harold, but at one point I think he likens himself to a herd of cattle. He needs more than his lucky socks and shirt, this guy. He needs help. He needs to get arrested. He needs to stop scaring himself with theoretical physics. (Let me tell you, I have never slept so well as the night after I burned all my books on relativistic quantum mechanics.)

Nick doesn't know his sub-atomic particles from his superstring theory but Mrs Thomas nevertheless wants him to build bird cages for the good of mankind. Nick figures he already does his share of unpaid charity work and changes the subject, smoooooth as honey, with steepled fingers and a vacuous smile to match. It warms the cockles of Mrs Thomas's cold, empty, socialite heart.

Nick makes the attempt to warm the cockles of Burton's heart, too, or at least prick his conscience. He's giving him a delicious Oh, Nicholas moment while searching for some recognition from his father that the bottom line doesn't always have to be the deal itself. Nick may be working hard on that complementary crease in his forehead, but when it comes to business is business and money is money he doesn't want to be like his daddy any more. Maybe the cold, empty, driven life of Henry Thomas is what he sees in his own future – and he does not want to end up stranded in therapy doing business by fax while his well-groomed well-bred wife (who spent the formative years of her career slumming it for legal aid and now runs a junk food kitchen for the homeless) plays tennis with Jeannie Nicholson, and where his only remaining comfort in life is a good pair of hand warmers.

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* Takes Dale to see his father in jail.

* Expresses concern to Mrs Thomas about Henry's ability to take on more responsibility.

* Asks Laurie to arrange a family meeting.

* Mediates the meeting and takes a photo (can you imagine Nick saying “Smile, please”?).

Nick tells Dale he has to stop off to see a client before they go to the jail, which he does. But then he also stops off at F&F to see Burton! – he could've rung.

Doc tells Penny she's a match the same day she has the tests.

Dale is lucky – there is only a one in four chance that a sibling's bone marrow will match.

Dale tells Lulu she wasn't there when he was at LSP "in the spring". He must mean two springs ago, because last spring Lulu was there (and Penny would have been visibly pregnant – yet no one knew about the baby). The problem is that Nick wasn't at LSP two springs ago, either, but was supposed to have handled their case. Nick started in September. Maybe Nick picked up Dale and Penny's ongoing case halfway through, after someone else started it.

I'm pickin' nits but that's what I do: Lulu introduces herself to Dale as "Louisa Olson" and Dale never hears her called Lulu. Nick later refers to her as "Lulu" and Dale doesn't query it.

KEY

Nick Fix Percentage of screentime allocated to Nick.

NWO (Nick Walks Out / Nick Walks Off) The number of times Nick leaves the room without first ending the conversation in a socially acceptable manner.

Indicates hot stuff (generally, Nick engaging in amorous activities or taking off his shirt).