Eli Stone: Owner of a Lonely Heart (Episode 208)

You are the move you make People are breaking up this week, it seems. After twenty years of marriage, Jordan and Ellen are officially breaking ties, and Taylor's manipulated her dad into letting her represent him. Ellen wants more than Jordan can afford, given the sheer amount of money the new firm is costing him, but she stands firm. When Matt advises Taylor to try to talk to her stepmom as a friend--given how cordial, if not super-close, their relationship has always been--and try to reason with her. Taylor reminds him that Ellen's not exactly her mom, and Matt reminds her that said mom left her high and dry at the age of fourteen. Taylor relents and meets with Ellen, trying to persuade her. But Ellen says she's protecting herself and preventing Jordan from pulling the same crap he pulled with Taylor's mother when he left her for Ellen. Taylor: "Whu?"

When he divorced Taylor's mom, Jordan hid a lot of his wealth in off-shore accounts and made it impossible for her to get any sizeable amount of support. He also sued for full custody of their daughter, given that his soon to be ex wasn't financially capable of supporting her. Taylor, about to be a mom herself, is wrecked, trying to fathom that the dad who is, for all intents and purposes, her best friend, drove her mother away. She talks to his old divorce lawyer to confirm it, and when she confronts Jordan, she tells him that severing ties with her mom the way she did has affected every part of her adult life. This is a betrayal to big to wrap up neatly in one week.

Meanwhile, Eli and Keith are trying their big case, which involves another loyal daughter and the burden of her father's legacy. After his first overnight with Ashley, Eli has a vision of someone named Genny North winning the 2049 Nobel Peace price for her work on cold fusion, presented to her by one Irving Wallender. Eli tracks Genny down just as she's being arrested for alleged terrorist activities. She's a college drop out who's been working at a home improvement store called the Workbench, where she purchased tons of items with small radioactive parts that she then dismantled. She also has a notebook full of complicated, cryptic math. The government thinks she's building "nucular" bombs, and Genny says she's just doing theoretical work right now on the possibility of cold fusion. She's also virulently anti-establishment: when she was a kid, her father invented an automobile engine that could get 59 miles of gas to the gallon, but big oil killed it. She didn't want anything like that to happen to her own attempts to find clean energy, so she kept it under wraps.

The judge pulls counsel out of the courtroom. Clearly, he says, Genny was trying to do something other than build a bomb, but her use of materials is still illegal. He tasks Eli with finding a solution: he doesn't want to be the judge to put the next Einsten in prison, but Genny is technically guilty of a crime that could garner the maximum penalty of 25 years in jail. It's up to Eli to figure his way out of the pickle. He's still working on it when Keith tells him that, according to Irving Wallender, the leading authority on cold fusion, it's more than the 40 years off Eli saw in his vision. Eli remembers the name, and he sends Genny's notebook to Wallender, the man who will give her the Nobel Peace prize in the possible future. Wallender gets the AUSA to drop the charges if Genny will come work with him at Los Alamos. Genny absolutely does not want to work for the Man. Eli gives her a beautiful speech about having a gift. "A gift is something that is given, you don't own it. The world does. The world is asking you to use it, and you don't get to say no. No matter how much you might want to," he tells her.

This comes on the heels of getting dumped by Ashley, who is in no way looking for something serious, which is what she gets when Eli tells her, on their fourth date, about his visions, and how God directs him to the right cases. Maggie tries to warn him that Ashely's not really equipped for that, since her attention span is rather short, but Eli's riding the high of having had a really good, normal dating experience. No one's suprised when Ashley bolts, especially when she stands up a dinner engagement Eli's made with Beth and Nate. Beth assures Eli that he's a catch. He also finds out that his bro and deflowerer are eloping to Las Vegas shortly, with Eli coming along as best man. Eli goes to chen and tells his sad story, which is mostly that, as a man with a higher calling, he's very lonely. (He is also well and truly blind to the ways Maggie Dekker would fall all over herself if he wanted to be more than friends again.) He wants Chen to perform the Dark Truth on him again. He wants to know there's something in the future for him, that happiness is a possibility and that he won't be alone forever. Chen's like, dude, that is dangerous crap for a man with a deathly aneurysm in his brain, for one, and for two, it's flat out scary. You don't get to choose the future you see, either, so you  might not like it. But as it turns out, chen's old classmate, Dr. Lee (JULIE COOPER I STILL MISS YOU), has opened up a practice not far away. Given a little monetary greasing, she agrees to perform the Dark Truth for Eli, after warning him about its dangers. And with some needles ranging redly in his forest of chest hair, Eli falls into a vision of Nate and Beth in Las Vegas, in which Beth, distraught, tells Nate that she's sorry, but she can't marry him.