But before you go looking all that up in your psychobabble textbooks, there's something else you should know: I like to watch Nick being a bad boy. Petulance may be unforgivable in anyone over the age of five, and this week Nick has petulance down to a fine art – but that's okay because he loved his mother, and I can never forget my own dear mother's words of wisdom when it came to men: “O, daughter,” Mother Soup used to say, “Iconic, my love, don't you ever look twice at a man who doesn't love his mother.” Then she would break into an off-key rendition of Que sera, sera, while I hugged my pillow and dreamed of being a good girl who fell for a bad boy who loved his mother (at the time, I admit, I was thinking more motorcycles than coke habits).

Nick being bad is necessary to redress an imbalance in the universe. Last week he suffered. This week he gets his revenge, right down to the insistence that he “knows” Lulu, just as she figures she “knows” him, only he gets to say it in public. Of course, everything goes kind of screwy at the end when the scales tip the other way again, but the life of corporate attorney Nick Fallin was never meant to be in equilibrium.

Back to what Nick thinks he wants: it's Lulu. Plot contrivances aside, it seems just right, to me, that he's fallen for a woman who is unavailable, uninterested and possibly incompatible. Since when did Nick shy away from the impossible? He sets about wooing her just as he would woo any potential client (not that I'm suggesting he'd buy them a bouquet). He doesn't even care if the entire staff of Legal Services of Pittsburgh sees him marching into the office on Monday morning with an ugly bunch of flowers.

They say that a gift is supposed to express the personality of the giver, and since these flowers symbolise Nick's hopes we can assume that he assumes he will succeed in a brash, bold, hot pink sort of way. As if to confirm this, to Barbara's question, “Who's the lucky lady?” he replies not with the obvious, if grammatically non-sequiturian, “They're for Lulu”, but with: “It's Lulu.” In other words, “It's Lulu who is the lucky lady and who this morning will enjoy the great honour of having these flowers bestowed upon her by me.” Nick has displayed occasional moments of endearing humility in the past, to counteract his arrogance and help us love him. This is not one of those moments.

Alvin thwarts his plans by assigning him Mrs Braczyk, a sweet lady who has a sweet son and who thinks Nick is a good lawyer even after he mispronounces her name, leaves her hanging after a 41-second consultation, throws up his hands in frustration in court at her rose-coloured glasses, discovers a convenient conflict of interest and passes the buck to his colleague, the lucky lady (or “that girl”, as Minette prefers it). Mrs Braczyk is unfazed. She takes a shine to him, teaches him how to be civil, offers top secret information about the strike that is threatening to put his F&A client out of business, and even bakes him kukla-somethings and leaves them on his desk. (He doesn't have a desk. I bet Lulu eats them!) Okay, so he does eventually learn to say her name and even rolls the “r” quite beautifully, but he plays no part in her son coming home. I think her bewitchment has more to do with the way he forms an “o” with his thumb and forefinger as he makes a point in the courthouse corridors. Worked for me, and you know I'm not easy to please when the Nick Fix drops below 75%.

Speaking of gestures, Nick and Burton are sure looking like they're related these days. Burton hasn't quite pinned down his son's cocky grin, and Nick has only once, to my recollection, looked as deadly as his father usually does across the conference room table (and he needed a chemical boost to achieve it), but check out these Fallins - from hands running through hair and down faces, to fingers across top lips, to flat palms chopping the air... it's uncanny.

Let's get back on track. The more discouraging reason why Nick's plans are thwarted is the appearance of Brian, who doesn't have flowers but calls Lulu “sweetheart”, and that does the trick. Nick watches and learns. Brian is a smiley, happy sort of person, which Nick is not, and has no intention of being because he has to suffer. Despite this, Minette thinks that Nick could be the cure for her feeling depressed about doing Ibsen in Pittsburgh in winter, so she drops by. Nick has not given her a second thought over the past five years, but since she's right here in front of him now, he is of course wondering if she has thirty minutes. She does.

Once upon a time, Minette was the lucky lady. Now she has donned Nick's blue shirt, the one I covet, and has buttoned it right up just so we won't start worrying that halfway through this scene (or rather, that scene) he will want it back to cover his, you know, naked chest and stuff. She's just as sweet as Mrs Braczyk and just as bewitched, not even bothering to establish whether he's seeing anyone before boinking him, but she doesn't have a clue about Nick. She misreads him at every turn, thinking now might be a good time to talk about relationships and babies, and he blanches and falls back on the best defence a post-coital man can offer when he remembers all over again that he comes from Mars and she comes from Venus: monosyllabic grunts. Minette is unperturbed and presses forth regardless, eventually driving him to total silence.

I'd like to think that his reticence comes from the unfamiliar sensation of regret at stringing the poor woman along. However, more likely he's preoccupied with thinking up a term of endearment for Lulu that can top “sweetheart”. Cuddle-pops, sugarpie, honeybun… this is not his forte, you understand... cupcake, muffin, lambkins…

Next day, Jake shows up at Legal Services to try and charm Barbara's U2 tickets off her. He wants to take the girl from the cosmetics counter, which begs the question: what was Jake doing at the cosmetics counter? Nick and Barbara don't ask, so perhaps neither should we. Lulu is under the misapprehension that Nick knows where to go dancing, and before he can say, “Sorry, pumpkin, I never went to finishing school,” Barbara has arranged a nice little social get-together at the Incline, and Nick is forced to either turn up dateless and be the fifth wheel, or upgrade Minette from “once more for old time's sake” to “come along and meet my so-called friends”. The poor girl is almost apoplectic with excitement and spends the afternoon shopping for kitchen appliances and nursery wallpaper.

And while she's doing that, a word about James. Last week I complained that I didn't know anything about James. This week he has no less than ten scenes to tell his life story. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with Nick, and you know how I feel about that – especially since we were given a taste of what these two could do together in very early episodes. What's worse, he also gets almost all the dramatic fade-outs before the ad breaks.

But it's time for Nick to be bad. To put himself in the mood, he blackmails Coker, the shop steward who's encouraging the union to vote down a new contract. He denies that it's blackmail, of course, but I'm not sure what else to call it. Maybe we're only supposed to call it blackmail if it works, but in this case Coker ignores the threat and Nick is forced to play his hand (which may have had no effect on the outcome of the vote, but let's assume that it did, because it makes Nick look good – and, well, bad, because blackmail isn't nice).

So here's Nick being really bad, and he knows he's being bad, and he just doesn't care because, as Minette is about to tell him, he's overwhelmed by the presence of the woman seated across the table. He's working out his frustration on a paper napkin, giving Lulu stricken looks while offering relationship counselling to the happy couple and waiting for the moment to make his move. The two men spar and parry while the object of their affection shifts uncomfortably and Minette looks pretty and chic and tries not to be offended when Brian is disparaging about her choice of career. Nick decides he hates classical music because Lulu does, just to make sure it's clear that Lulu should be with him… You should be with me, Lulu-baby, snookums, bunnykins, bunny-buddy, honey-bunny, honey… honey! That's it! Honey!… and makes a mental note to throw out his Reader's Digest Boston Pops Plays The Classics CD collection when he gets home. If he even has a home.

And then it happens. Brian turns to his sweetheart and calls her “honey”. Hey, that's my line! Nick can't believe his ears. She's your sweetheart, doofus, but she's my honey!

Nick declares war but nobody's interested. Back at the hotel, Minette finally reads something right, and then comes up with the strangest line of dialogue I've ever heard. Even she has trouble getting it out: “You hate yourself for being less than what you think they are to you.” She gives him a sweet kiss and he feels her pain. A bad boy with a conscience who loves his mother. They don't come much better than that.

It's Friday morning and those flowers have not improved in appearance with the passage of time, which is not something you'd necessarily expect a man to notice. As Laurie Solt once told us, Nick is a guy who follows through. Those flowers were bought to bestow upon Lulu, and by god they are going to be bestowed. When Lulu is forced to confront the realisation that Nick feels something that goes beyond looking at her that way and being bratty about her boyfriend – that he has actually lost sleep over her – she doesn't know quite what to do. I realise that, as a woman with a pulse, she should have dumped Brian as soon as she heard the words: “You always behave like this when you're applying for a job?” But let's suppose that for some obscure reason Lulu really does prefer a devoted, cultured young doctor to a petulant coke addict with commitment issues (I know, hard to believe, isn't it?). To have some community service jerk-off walk into her office with his heart on his sleeve and a bunch of dead flowers, after completely humiliating her the night before (even if he is sorry, he was still bad), is not going to incline her towards treading lightly with his feelings.

Not all good girls like bad boys.

Back to episode list

* Tells Jake that Barbara has tickets to U2.

* Gives Minette at least a little of what she wants.

* Rescues Mrs Braczyk's son from a brawl.

* Has the decency to feel badly about disappointing Minette.

* Apologises to Lulu for acting like an idiot.

• Burton wears a wind-up watch.
• James and his sister were raised by Grandma Annie.
• Nick worked at Swann and Cranston (a huge firm) in New York.
• Nick claims that he came to Pittsburgh five years ago because his father offered him a job. Minette thinks he'll never leave.
• Brian and Lulu met at a college mixer, ten days before he left for Columbus. He thinks she is the woman of his dreams.
• Lulu doesn't like classical music. Nick claims not to.
• Brian wants to move to New York with Lulu when he's finished his residency, and thinks Lulu will work part-time.
• Nick has no taste in flowers.

Click here for the timeline of this episode.
Click here for the transcript of this episode.