[There was a video here]

Ever watch Harry's Law starring the stout lady who's Stephen King's biggest fan? Me neither. Except I knew last night's episode was going to be a special one, thanks to commercials (no really, thank you, NBC Creative). In it, a grade school sued to get its student Natalie expelled because of her fits resulting from her conversion disorder. The school argued that she was distracting and then the episode confirmed it.

In two outbursts that framed the episode (as seen above), stress triggers laryngeal spasms that sound like wordless Exorcist babbling, as well as ocular spasms that cause Natalie's pupils to rotate and cloud over. It's very Drag Me to Hell, and it seems bent on doing just that as it's over-the-top enough to be hilarious. (Unless you are terribly sensitive to fictional child anguish and convincing CGI.) This is something that would have stayed branded in my brain had I saw it as a child. A Harry's Law episode to live in infamy!

In the end, Harry (Kathy Bates) ended up getting the judge to rule against Natalie for the good of her fellow students. And that was it. Natalie's storyline basically ended with a, "Bye, girl!" So the episode trotted this child out, had her contort herself without so much as a found-footage scenario to dignify it, showed a bunch of adults recoiling in disgust at her spasms and then threw her ass out on the curb. Take that, conversion girl. Thanks for playing.

By the way, you may remember conversion disorder from a recent New York Times Magazine cover story (and our prior coverage) about a group of girls in the upstate New York town of LeRoy who've come down with a series of tics and twitches in what is being called "mass hysteria." Conversion disorder: So hot right now. It's not just a health trend, but a media one, too.