‘Damages’ on FX

There are no angels in FX’s “Damages,” only brutally ambitious, vengeful characters whose desires occasionally coincide with the greater good.

So no one is expecting a happy ending from tonight’s 90-minute season finale. For one thing, as the show’s signature flash-forwards have made clear, Ellen (Rose Byrne), the once-starry-eyed Every Lawyer, has, apparently, shot someone -- possibly her boss, Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), last seen staggering out of Ellen’s apartment and collapsing to the floor of an elevator.

Is Patty wounded? Dead? Or did someone kill Ellen? And what might this have to do with Ultima National Resources and its energy-market-rigging chief executive, Walter Kendrick (John Doman), who has been Patty’s major opponent this season, or the FBI’s investigation into Hewes & Associates, or Patty’s seesaw relationship with shady scientist Daniel Purcell (William Hurt)? Suffice it to say there will be no easy answers because this is “Damages,” people: no angels, no easy answers.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t miracles. Last year, “Damages” exploded out of FX like a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle made out of shattered fun-house mirrors, sharp enough to slice your fingers open, impossible to ignore.

There was Close, of course, with that sweet smile and those steely eyes, and a deliciously debauched Ted Danson as Chief Executive Arthur Frobisher. Tate Donovan rounded out Patty’s team as the discontented yes man Tom Shayes, while Zeljko Ivanek’s Ray Fisk carried out Frobisher’s bidding until it destroyed him.

Not surprisingly, “Damages” was nominated for seven Emmys and won three, leaving executive producers Daniel Zelman, Mark A. Baker and brothers Glenn and Todd Kessler with that bittersweet question: How do you top that?

Somehow, they did. With the aid of Oscar winners William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, and “The Wire” veteran Doman, Season 2 has followed another twisting, turning, politically themed plot but with characters even more complicated and layered.

But the heart of the story has been Patty and Ellen’s relationship, an ever-shifting yin/yang-like balance of admiration and treachery. Patty experienced regret for her ruthless actions in Season 1, some of which are explained by a rich subplot involving the murderously loyal Uncle Pete (Tom Aldredge), while Ellen is beginning to understand that there is only one way to engage the meat-eaters of the urban jungle, and high ideals don’t have that kind of firepower.

So while Patty did the minuet with crazy Purcell, corrupt Kendrick and the tough-talking UNR lawyer Claire (Harden), Ellen quietly channeled her grief over her fiance’s murder and the Patty-ordered attempt on her own life by acting as a mole for the FBI. Or at least, they say they’re FBI.

Then there’s the very solicitous Wes Krulik (Timothy Olyphant), whom Ellen met in counseling and who is not at all what he seems since: A) he has an entertainment unit full of weaponry and B) he works for Rick Messer (David Costabile), a police detective who moonlights as a hired gun. And that’s not even the half of it. The folks behind “Damages” are all about thwarting our tendency to multi-task, at least while their show is on, presenting an appreciation of nuance, detail and loopy complication that occasionally backfires. This season, for instance, many of the flashbacks and flash-forwards felt forced and there were a few plotlines -- the petty rebellions of Patty’s son, Michael (Zachary Booth), the reappearance of the sister of Ellen’s dead fiance -- that seemed overly red-herringish.

But the “What next?” factor that makes “Damages” so compelling is not so much about plot as it is about character. Just when you think you have a person pegged, he or she does something completely unexpected yet believable within the show’s framework.

Patty is brutal, but her opponents are killing people and rigging the energy market; for all her newfound ruthlessness, Ellen still trusts the system; Claire’s loyalty has its boundaries, formed, unexpectedly, by ethics; and Hurt’s Daniel gives us a man eaten alive by regret and rage, but quietly and terminally, as by cancer.

Character and plot, grand theme and nuance, they are the carpentry and artistry of great drama, and in “Damages” they are allowed to soar.

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‘Damages’

Where: FX

When: 10 tonight

Rating: TV-MA-LV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17 with advisories for coarse language and violence)