Wednesday 7 March 2012

Reaction Post - You need to get back to work.

The Good Wife: 3x16 After the Fall.




  • As the season finale approaches, things are finally coming together: Will's been gone for about a week and while all his friends and family and distant acquaintances think he will possibly die (or "curl up into a ball and cry"), the non-letterhead-partners at the firm start to move towards the vacuum his absence has left behind. Julius teams up with Eli, Eli backstabs him by going to directly to Diane, and David wants it just so neither of the other does. In the end, Will DOES magically reappear, while his colleagues glare and scheme through the ever-present walls of glass. 
  • Kalinda's looking out for Will as well, advising him to get back to work because there is "movement". 
  • Awesomely (and I'd seriously never thought I'd like Caitlin as much as I do now), Caitlin somehow becomes part of David's play for power, and she moves up quickly when she proves her value in court, beating Nancy Crozier at her own game, putting the sexist judge in the impossible position of unfairly favouring only one of the seemingly naive blondes arguing the case. It earned her a promotion (so I guess now she's equal to Alicia AND sharing an assistant!), Diane's praise, and the looming suspicion that she will eventually compete directly against Alicia, because this is Cary all over again, except Caitlin actually seems to be way, way better at all of this than Cary ever was, and who saw that coming? I also like that she plays it by the book and Alicia is utterly unprepared and just stunned how quickly this is unfolding. Also, wow, Anna Camp is doing a marvellous job. 
  • The case, perhaps because it didn't really stick with me for long, was about a film maker who'd put a camera on a bridge to make a movie about suicide and was blamed for not intervening or profiting from the death of someone who'd jumped. 
  • Kalinda managed to shift the blame to the boyfriend / the city / that didn't respond in time / Kurt Cobain's suicide letter / the victim's dad. Whatever it was, it was helpful enough for Alicia (trying to prove that she was just as good as Will to a client who didn't actually want her representing him) to break the ice a little more. A conversation about the looming tax files on Alicia's desk was postponed, as the things these two need to discuss pile up some more. 
  • Will tells Kalinda that he didn't give her files to Alicia to fix things between them (what exactly does Will know about what happened between Alicia and Kalinda?), but to "save her ass". 
  • Alicia also came to the surprising decision not to divorce Peter, either because she actually cares about his career or because she was pissed off at David for leaking that particular piece of information (which he probably didn't actually do, the whole thing was just orchestrated by Eli, killing two birds with one stone - the looming divorce, and David Lee's relationship with Alicia). 
  • PETER. Wow. He has struggled to do this all the right way, to be the State's Attorney and to keep his hands clean and to follow his political ambition without being the corrupt politician he used to be: and now he is bluntly told that he can't be both. He can't be both the Democratic candidate and remain shiny. So he makes a decision (and I also like that this show is sometimes so quick-moving that it doesn't ponder for episodes and episodes but forces the characters to make decisions within minutes), and gives an important friend an important job, and in the process both manages to pull down Cary into the mess he's been so very glad to have escaped when he left L&G (thereby creating a future enemy, I bet) and save his political career. And all of this after Alicia decided not to divorce him because she likes the person he's become, not romantically anymore, but he's still the father of her children. The Good Wife still isn't Damages, but sometimes I feel like the distance between the two shrinks to just a tiny bit of DMZ (it also fits in well with all the times that Alicia walked out of a situation wishing she still had the liberty to just emerge squeaky clean). It also made me wonder if Alicia had come to a different decision about this if she'd still be on speaking-terms  (PERSONAL conversations, not just professional ones) with Kalinda, but I guess they'll never be able to talk about Peter and his ambitions/his morality ever again?
  • Will's awesome sisters awesomely appeared (played by the awesome Merritt Wever and Nadia Dajani), try to fix his life because owning a multi-million dollar firm isn't worth a thing if all you do is hang out in your fancy apartment and play the guitar and write a novel, and come to the awesomely wrong conclusion that he is dating Kalinda, which almost seems incestuous, in a way, because these two are the most sibling-y of all the characters (to the extent that Alicia likes them both for the same qualities, just in a different way - and if this show weren't on CBS, that last part probably wouldn't even be true). 

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