Yes, it goes on in Utah. And Arizona. And California. And Texas. And, like the folks in Texas, Kelley is under the misapprehension that there's an easy answer to a horrible problem of underage marriage.

The irony is that Melvin got Alan and Denny off by urging the judge to dismiss the case because "you'll be spoon-feeding him the soapbox of a lifetime."

"Boston Legal" used to be entertaining. Now it's just strident. And this is not a conclusion I came to last week. In September, after viewing the final-season premiere, I wrote that "It's time for this show to go" and that "Kelley should have called it quits" last May.

And Kelley undercuts all the soapbox appeals he's made against everything from Big Tobacco to pharmaceutical companies to the Supreme Court with episodes like last week's. If he does a slipshod job on the Utah episode, it's hard to have any confidence that he got it right any of those other times.

---

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com