Once again, the TV drama makes a bid for being renamed Boston Pharmaceutical. In the latest episode of this dressed-up soap opera, a leading character at the Brahmin law firm played by William Shatner is diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer’s and wants to get an experimental Pfizer drug, which appears to be Dimebon.

But Shatner is denied - his doctor won’t get the drug for him and the clinical trial appears to be closed. And so he goes to court, where the judge is sympathetic: “A patient, even a dying patient, has no constitutional right to an experimental treatment. Do I agree with that precedent? Not really.” Even so, she boots the case, which the US Supreme Court agrees to hear, although in real life, we know the court earlier this year refused this morning to review a ruling that terminally ill patients have no constitutional right to be treated with experimental drugs (back story).

Another plot running through the episode involves a young woman who sues Harvard University, because she was denied admission after it became known she used Ritalin to boost her chances of getting high SAT scores. The university admissions officer tells the court that a ‘moral’ decision was made about the use of ‘brain-enhancement drugs.’ One of her defenders admits to the court that he also uses medication to get through the day and declares that we are an overmedicated society.

Maybe. But meds certainly make for good drama these days. Two months ago, Boston Legal mentioned an unnamed Harvard Univerity psychiatrist who helped fuel the boom in antipsychotics for kids and took more than $1 million from drugmakers, but failed to report the income to his employer. Sound familiar? The US Senate Finance Committee is investigating several academics for allegedly violating disclosure rules.

{To watch the latest episode, please go to this link, although you may need to install a plug-in).