You and Owen both.  Yes, he’s back, nosier and noisier than ever about what his sister’s getting up to.  I wasn’t sure about Owen at first, but I kind of love the fact he’s so different from Alicia now – their relationship is believable and quite tender underneath the teasing, and it’s all as beautifully drawn as the rest of the major relationships on this show.

Talking of relationships though, Will has both old and new to deal with, as his ex-girlfriend, Celeste – played by Lisa “Dr Cuddy” Edelstein (pause to allow Jed to collect himself) – is counsel for the other side and has no qualms about using their apparently dark past in any way that might help.  Although Alicia apparently can’t (or doesn’t want to) see it, Celeste is just like I would imagine Will’s ex-girlfriend to be – ie very sharp, very clever and quite annoying – so, thankfully, her scenes in the episode are sensibly short and bring out the best in her opposition without going overboard about it.  Team Alicia FTW!  Celeste is going to be back, though, so nobody should get too comfortable.  Except Jed.

The case itself isn’t ground-breaking but it’s interesting enough, and once again the writers succeed in the almost impossible task of making alternative dispute resolution kind of fun.  Especially the scene when Will reads out the patent application.  Ha!  In your face, opposing counsel!  But the major laughs belong to designated comic relief Eli’s sub-plot again (where in the world is David Lee?), as he battles “Listeria Hysteria!” – an outbreak of food poisoning causing havoc at schools and disaster for the cheese industry.  Diane and Eli spar, the cheese lady is hopelessly and humourously out of her depth, and there’s a video of kids vomiting that reminded me of the seminal rat video in style, speed and sheer comedy value.  Three episodes into the new season and we’re not at the top of the show’s game yet, but, as ever, it’s still great stuff.

That’s the theme of the week in a nutshell, as Bo tries to help a magic porcupine woman (seriously) re-connect with her lost love before said magic porcupine woman (no, really) is hunted down and killed as part of the selection process for the new Ash: the primary is a cocktail party where people use shiny coins to pick their candidates, the main election is a sub-Running Man-style hunt.  Insert your own topical jokes about Super-PACs and campaign trails here.

Against all the odds, both plotlines work pretty well and it’s all a lot more enjoyable than last week’s rubbishy opener, thanks (as usual) to the supporting cast.  Bo makes Hale stand in the election, ostensibly to help magic porcupine woman (no really, I am not kidding), although he has no role in the rescuing part of the plan whatsoever, but that’s good because it means more Hale.  Yay!  Any Kenzi time is of course time well-spent too, and also cool is visiting dignitary The Black Thorn and his sparring with Trick.  Both miles more interesting than the Ash ever was, or is likely to be given who won the election in the end but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Less cool is Bo, of course, busy projecting for all she’s worth and pulling out everything short of quills herself to try and hang onto Dyson, who – face set to sulk - is still being an ass rather than a wolf about the whole “my love for you is GONE” business.  Dude.  It’s not her fault.  She might be kind of desperate and daft this week, but it makes her a little less annoying than usual and I can’t really blame her for not understanding your problem when I can’t quite get my head around it myself.  So just stop being a big jerk about it, okay?

Anyway, the main political action of the episode revolved around a Government-led initiative to require companies to have a quota of women in the boardroom. Fronting this was minister for business affairs Henriette, the next-in-line of Denmark’s apparently steady supply of MILF politicians. She has a Past of the sort which wouldn’t greatly bother anyone in a male politician (apart, I suppose, from the lingerie modelling), and Birgitte holds the line pretty firmly when old adversary Laugesen tries to make trouble. Entertainingly, though, it’s pretty obvious from the first couple of minutes that, years ago, someone very close to the Prime Minister went there, and Birgitte finds out that even when you’re the most powerful elected politican in the land you can still be the last to know that sort of thing.

The threat to the Government comes from shady plutocrat Crohne, who doesn’t want too much oestrogen in his boardrooms, and tells Birgitte that he’ll be obliged to remove his companies from Denmark if the initiative becomes law, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Danish economy. So the question is whether Birgitte can find a way to balance the competing interests, keep everyone happy, and still sleep at night.

And in episode 6 it’s human rights which are up for grabs: President Grozin, of fictional Turgisia, is in the house, offering to purchase lots and lots of lovely Danish windmills. Grozin and Turgisia have a complicated relationship with democracy, though, and high-profile dissident Bayanov is also in town making trouble. The leader of one of the other parties observes that once upon a time Birgitte would have been joining the anti-Grozin protests “before you got all pragmatic”. Then Bayanov is arrested on suspicion of terrorism in Turgisia, and there’s a more or less explicit link made by Grozin between the windmill purchase and the extradition of Bayanov. Slightly disconcertingly, the conversations between Birgitte and Grozin take place in English – where are my subtitles? –  from which we find out that Sidse Babett Knudsen has a phenomenally good English accent.

At home, though, the First Marriage is under a little more stress in both episodes. I’m calling this one a score-draw – I’m more fed up than I can say with the recurring device in TV drama which requires the partner of someone in a demanding job to resent the situation. (We even got it in The West Wing, and sooner or later it turns up in every police drama ever.) So Philip doesn’t come out of this one smelling of roses, but Birgitte is, perhaps, unnecessarily mean to him. And Philip has to put up with Birgitte’s annoying father. There are, though, the usual beautifully written and acted scenes between the two of them – my personal favourite being the one where Birgitte insists that she’s never sought the approval of men before playfully asking Philip how she looks.

Not remarkably original in subject-matter, then, but Borgen has more than enough about it to make it a must-see.

Despite that, though, the show continued to fall frustratingly short of what it could be: Laura Linney, Oliver Platt, and John Benjamin Hickey are still terrific actors and engaging screen presences, but the unevenness of the first season was repeated in this episode. And given my long-standing distaste for dream sequences and dogs, having Marlene (dead) and her dog (alive, just about) hanging around contributing major emotional beats really didn’t work for me. So, y’know, OK.

As usual, it was smart stuff and there was plenty of enjoyment to be found in the minutiae of legal politics and rivalry on show. I was apprehensive at the idea of an English/US law crossover episode, but the show – again, it’s The Good Wife, I needn’t have worried – deftly sidestepped the usual accents and crumpets hell that US tv falls into so often when portraying posh English people.  Eddie Izzard was great as the objectionable James Thrush, barrister, and Simon Delaney lovely as the slightly bumbling but sweet Timothy Ash Bannon, solicitor.  Both played against Will and Alicia brilliantly – Josh Charles’ face in response to his anagram was just fantastic – and the proceedings were far more entertaining than they had any right to be.

Elsewhere, pairing Kalinda with Eli is infinitely better than pairing her with the wretched Blake or last week’s appalling Sophia, so that made a nice little diversion, and Peter’s surprisingly mature chat with Zach was beautifully handled by all concerned.  I do have one quibble though.  Diane’s scenes with Alicia and Will about the audit issue were fabulously played in every way, except one: her remark that “We can’t be the enemy of the State’s Attorney.”  Um, really?  Have Lockhart Gardner not been the enemy of the State’s Attorney since episode 1 of season 1?  A different State’s Attorney, sure, but still.  It was an uncharacteristically sloppy moment in an otherwise well-crafted episode.

Sherlock and The Mentalist prove that in the right hands that’s not always true, but sadly Suits is no Sherlock or The Mentalist, and that throwaway line from one of its irritating characters may well encapsulate the problem with it.

Main character Mike is some sort of super-brain who was kicked out of law school for selling answers to a test. Since then, he’s scraped a living of sorts doing similar things, but his grandmother’s nursing home bills mean he needs money quick and fast. Rather than get an actual job, Mike decides to play drug courier for his wastrel best friend (who also thought up the brilliant scheme which got boy genius kicked out of college in the first place). Of course, Mike isn’t as clever as he thinks he is, or he’d know that the drug delivery scheme was going to go badly wrong as well. Duh, Mike.  As a result, via circumstances far too tedious to narrate, he ends up joining super-slimy attorney Harvey as his associate at a firm which only hires Harvard graduates, the joke being of course that Mike is neither a Harvard graduate nor indeed an actual lawyer.

By this time, unfortunately, what feels like hours have gone by, and I’m past caring about Mike, Harvey or anything but when this feature-length first episode will END.  Long on set-up, short on charm… and every main character was indeed a showoff – lawyers, paralegals, wastrel best friends, Mike – but none of them were remotely likeable or indeed interesting. They were all just full of themselves.

The sexual harassment case Mike and Harvey took on was okay  – it had to be a pro bono case, of course, because, a whole series on mergers and acquisitions cases would be insanely boring – and there was quite a funny courtroom scene with Hermann the bailiff, but for a pilot presumably meant to grab people from the off, this was neither engaging nor entertaining.  And like the characters, it was nowhere near as smart or funny as it thought it was, either.  I have a feeling that the show may get better once the characters settle down, stop shouting about how amazing they are and start concetrating on some quirky cases of the week instead, so I’ll stick with it for now anyway, but, at the moment, these Suits are on a very shaky peg.

Susan, in the meantime, feels so guilty that she – hilariously! – keeps committing misdemeanours in the hope that someone will punish her, but no-one bites. It’s utterly atrocious, of course, and also odd: I would happily punish her, and not in a good way. And with the revelation that Chuck might have known about the letter to Mary Alice, and thus written the letter to Bree, the writers have skilfully linked him to a key piece of Housewives mythology, made him just a tiny bit interesting, and given Bree something to do. Except it can’t be Chuck, of course. I mean, why would he? Why not just arrest them, unless he’s some sort of sociopath?

We can pass over Renee and The New Guy for now, I think, which leaves us with Lynette and Tom. There’s a good moment early on, when Tom is receiving the usual lecture, and suddenly realises that he “used to have to stand here and listen to this”, but now doesn’t. As it happens, they both have right on their sides, although Lynette perhaps a little more, and by the end they both realise this. They are so getting back together by the end of the series. A very good episode.

And there’s good news for Covert Affairs fans, of which I am one. We had to wait long enough to see season 1 in the UK, but now that it’s finished we’re going straight into season 2, which might mean that by the summer we’ll have caught up, more or less, with US transmission (Monday 23 January, 9pm, Really).

Um, not quite.  While I enjoyed Hale getting more to do, and the wee harbinger of death girl was nice and scary, the episode as a whole was pretty underwhelming.  Fae politics are always a bit dull, Dyson’s moody introvert schtick is getting very old, and the writers are clearly going to use the break-up with Bo to shove Lauren even further down our throats despite her being less exciting than lettuce.  Doesn’t bode well for the rest of the season, does it?