Dan Gallagher is a main character in the Paramount+ series Fatal Attraction portrayed by Joshua Jackson
History[]
Season 1[]
In the Pilot, in present day, an older Dan enters a courtroom with a panel of judges listing the charges against him, including murder, in what appears to be a parole hearing. He speaks about empathy and forgiveness during his time in jail. Years earlier, Dan is working his day-to-day job and coming home to his wife and daughter. He apologizes for how he acted toward his wife and smoothes things with his charm. They talk about him getting the job as the next Judge, which she mentions he should not take, but he wants it. Eventually, Dan's birthday comes around, and his wife throws him a little birthday party that ends with him singing karaoke. He shows up late to work the next day, but his assistant tells him the 12th floor has called, and he is excited. However, it isn't good news since he is informed that he isn’t getting the Judge job. The job went to Gus, who got the job because his dad bought the position for him. A visibly frustrated Dan is listening to one of his friends talk about the job and how he needs to worry more about the sympathy that he will get for not getting the job. He then heads to a retirement party of one of his co-workers. Eventually, Dan gets close to Alex Forrest, who works in the criminal court building. The two end up back at the offices, where they began to openly flirt on an elevator. They are on the verge of kissing until they are interrupted by someone needing to get on the elevator. After the almost-kissing incident on the elevator, Dan heads home. While he is jamming in the car, singing along to some tunes, something pops up on his windshield, causing him to crash and hit a pole. Since he is under the influence, Dan picks up the phone to call someone who tells him to start walking home and that he will take care of it. Upon coming home, he tells his wife what happened and mentions how he didn’t get the job. His wife begins to question whatt is going to happen with his job. The following day, he arrives at the office, and Mike has taken care of Dan’s car. Back in the present, Dan walks into a restaurant and greets Ellen. The two share some small talk leading to him telling her he didn’t kill Alex. She pushes him about what he said at his parole hearing, but he says he had to get out and prove his innocence.
In The Movie In Your Mind, Dan and Alex are mucking it up over dinner. One of the fellow attorneys comes over to ask him why he is busting his balls on a case. Upon his leaving, Alex leaves him a note saying she went to another bar. The two begin to peel back more layers of each other. Their dinner abruptly ends with sprinklers going off at the restaurant, leading them to head back to her place. Although he tries to leave, he quickly goes back to Alex’s place, where they have sex. In the present, Dan is talking to Mike about finding his case file and where he can find it. Of course, being very good friends, he is more than open to helping him. Mike heads over to talk with Ellen at Beth’s house. They sit down to discuss his plan to help Dan uncover the facts that prove he didn’t kill Alex. Beth questions why they have to help him but says Dan didn’t do it and hopes they can win this time. In the past, Mike meets Alex for the first time while he and Dan are at dinner together discussing a case. He begins questioning his relationship with Alex, and Dan gets super defensive. After another time of sleeping together, Dan says that he should go, but Alex wants him to stay. He tries to tell her that he didn’t think this was how they were doing things (meaning anything more than a fling).
In The Watchful Heart, Dan talks to his fellow attorneys while Alex overhears and purposefully misses the elevator that he is on. Later, at the sentencing phase for one of his cases, things get a little weird in the courtroom between Alex and Dan. In the present, Dan and Ellen are out apartment shopping which gets a little weird when he brings up Arthur, her stepdad, and asks specific questions about their relationship. In the past, Alex arrives at Dan’s office and asks if they could hang out occasionally, but Dan tells her it wouldn’t work. In the present, Beth and Dan sit down for lunch, and he struggles with how she reacts to him being in jail. She tells him that she did exactly what he told her to do because he wouldn’t allow them to see him in prison and told her to move on, and she did. In the past, Dan arrives at Alex’s house and goes off on her. He tells her it has to stop right now, but Alex says it won’t stop any time soon. However, she tries to spin it, but Dan grabs her and says he knows about the stunt she pulled at the hospital, and if she comes after his family again, he will end her career. In the present, Mike is helping Dan by allowing him to crash at his house to get himself back on his feet.
In Beautiful Mosaics, Dan goes to Mike about Alex. Dan is unsure of what to do next, from her throwing acid at his car, and to her showing up at the open house. Mike snaps at him for being so incredibly lazy about how he has handled the entire affair. Back in the present day, Dan is dressing up for a job interview. He meets with Frank, who is running a car insurance company, but Dan doesn’t have many nice things to say about him when he was going to prosecute his case. Mike picks up Dan and the two men go to meet with the landlord, who remembered Alex and her doctor neighbor, Paul. The duo then meets with Paul and asks about his fingerprints being found at her apartment. He begins to unpack Alex for the two of them, her issues, and how she used things against him to get her own way. Dan goes to see an old friend from the firm, who isn’t thrilled about meeting with him, but she tells him how someone came to her about Alex and how she was having an affair with a married man and started to stalk him. Regardless of the news being able to help Dan, she withheld it because he was trying to make Alex the person to blame for her murder. She eventually tells him it is Gabriel, the bailiff from one of his cases. In the past, after yet another incident at the Gallagher household involving Beth’s mother and the family dog, Dan knows it is Alex and calls Mike. Mike tells him on the phone that he will meet with her. He asks her if she plans on telling Beth, but she says, “I don’t think I’ll have to.” Thus, Dan decides to talk to Beth and saying he must tell her something.
In Medial Woman, Dan sits down to talk to Beth to let her know about his affair with Alex. He apologizes for doing it, and she wonders why he must tell her tonight. He goes onto explain how Alex isn’t taking it well and believes she might have something to do with her mother’s death. She then tells him that this is it for them and walks away. At the office, Dan forgets his keys to the car and goes back upstairs to get them, only to realize that Alex had taken them. She apologizes to him and says don’t worry, I understand. And after she gets in her car, there is a pregnancy test in the passenger seat. Dan’s boss then calls him and says that he wanted to meet with him in the morning. She informs him that she got a handwritten letter from someone who accused him of many things. She told him to take time off until they clear the air. Dan then heads to pick up some papers for his new boss and meets with Gabriel, the man who had a complaint against Alex. He asks him what happened and if he would help, but he tells him he won’t do that. In the present , Dan and Ellen sit down and have a drink together. The conversation gets tricky when Ellen asks her father about Alex and what made him do it. In the past, the investigator clears Dan from wrongdoing because Alex went to bat for him. At dinner, Mike freaks out on him because he is out ruining his career over something stupid. After a fire breaks out on a job site, Beth ends up in the hospital. Dan mentions that the neighbors will be taking care of Ellen. However, they get a phone call stating she isn’t at the house. This leads to Dan and Beth freaking out, and Mike finds her wandering down the street. Dan thinks Alex has something to do with it, so he visits her. Dan throws her down, puts his hands around her throat, and as she gasps, he says he plans to go to the FBI to take her down. Before leaving, he says, “If you want to die, you better hurry up, and you’ll have to do it yourself.
In The Dillingers, yhings start to unravel for Dan as Alex has now gone missing, and Detective Earl is on his back, ready to take him down. Dan and Mike are going back and forth about their next steps in trying to clear his name. Then later, Alex’s neighbor, Emmy, turns out to be the one who saw Dan leaving Alex’s apartment the night he came over to throw her down and threaten her. The cops arrive at Alex’s apartment, finding a pool of blood and no dead body. Detective Earl Booker, the man on the case, tells Dan that Alex filed a police complaint stating he came over and assaulted her. Dan mentions that Alex is a psycho and he has never even been to her house. However, Earl calls him out, saying his fingerprints were all over the apartment. Back to the present day, Mike and Dan talk to Elijah, whose fingerprints were found at Alex’s apartment. Mike and Dan eventually find Clay Bishop to discuss his time with Alex. He explains that he tried to help Alex but couldn’t. Dan asked why he didn’t step up to defend him, but he said he was there every day and didn’t like how Dan and his attorney portrayed Alex. Ellen calls her mom to talk about what her friend said to her at dinner. She mentioned that Dan didn’t bring up his alibi during the case because Beth would’ve had to testify, and if she did, she would’ve committed perjury. So he gave up his alibi to protect his wife. Dan steps outside and gets attacked by a man. Thankfully Mike is there to save him and get him to stop. It turns out to be Artem, Eleanie’s boyfriend, whose house Mike visited earlier. In the past, Dan opens his front door with Detective Earl preparing to arrest him for the murder of Alex.
In Best Friends, during Dan's Trial, each person taking the stand, they unfortunately make him sound more and more guilty. Dan tries to escape the media and head into the car garage to get into the car with Beth. She asks him if they have a body, and he says he has to think they do with him being arrested. Back home, they dissect her going on the stand. Dan then tells her she would have to lie on the stand, and he won’t let her do that. Dan already knows he will be the bad guy, so if he reveals that he had an affair with Alex, the jury will already convict him without hearing the evidence. He explains to Beth that he must use Alex being a stalker, and that will be his case. Later, the District Attorney is dissecting to the jury what she believes went down between Dan and Alex. Inside the courtroom, Dan’s lawyer gets a list of who is testifying, and Alex’s father is on the list, whom Dan thought was dead because Alex said he was. Back in the courtroom, person after person hits the stand taking down Dan’s relationship with Alex. Eventually, Alex's father, Stanley, takes the stand and talks about Alex’s side of her and Dan’s relationship. Dan’s lawyer grills Stanley, saying all of this talks about Alex and Dan, and doesn’t have a single shred of evidence to prove it. However, Stanley tells him that he does, and pulls out his phone and shows the judge and the defense lawyer a picture of Alex and Dan together on the beach. In the present day, Dan brought his application to the judge about clearing his name for the murder of Alex. The judge states that he has lied in the past and denies his motion to reopen the case. Moments later, the jury announce the guilty verdict. Dan heads to talk to Beth about the judge denying his retrial. He mentions that he waited so long to do this to prove that her faith in him this entire time was for the good. However, in the past, Beth goes to a restaurant and meets with Alex.
In Caregiving, in the present, Ellen and Dan are at a bar together, discussing his case being denied a retrial. Of course, she asks if he will appeal, but he is uncertain of his next steps because if denied, he would have to wait another year. In the past, a new lawyer at the firm Dan works for says he wants to use his brain to help him with the case. On his way out, he asks him to tell the real story of him and Alex one day, pissing Dan off. Mike, Detective Earl, and Dan are sitting down and eating lunch. Earl informs him that he read his case file and wonders who they think did it. While thoroughly convinced that Dan did it, Earl says that if he didn’t, he needs to see it for himself, so Mike convinces him to join him on the hunt. After dinner, Ellen tells Dan she never wants him to give up on his appeal. She hugs him, showing an emotion that he hasn’t gotten much from her since getting out of jail.
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