Reaction Post - Watch out for that bear!

The Good Wife: 5x14 A Few Words. 

"Use everything to get the job, and don't feel entitled."

Alicia is asked to write a speech for a meeting in NYC which the firm is also using to try and win a new potential partner (played by Jill Hennessy of Crossing Jordan, who would be awesome to have on this show long-term, just saying) - which sends her straight back to four years ago, when she was learning to hold herself straight again after what Peter did, and everyone recognized her name. Apart from the flashbacks - she goes back and forth on them as she writes the story, figures out how she feels about it and about the other people who were involved in it as she goes along, we also see Will's side of things, back then, smiling secretly after meeting her again and seeing a chance to keep seeing her, asking Kalinda (Kalinda!) to look into her past ("Peter Florrick's wife?!", Kalinda asks, and maybe it's the first time Will saw her mask drop) so he can convince the other partners at S/L/G to hire her, and then to bury the information that would hurt her (isn't it awesome that this is the first thing Kalinda ever did for Alicia, and that Will was complicit in it?) She was desperate, a house lease she couldn't possibly pay after a misunderstanding about an unpaid paralegal position, and he saved her, back then, because of their shared past but also because she was the smartest lawyer in her class (and she was going to get fired from her first job as a lawyer because they felt she didn't have that killer instinct, well, look at her now). 

And then said, if you ever find me broken in an alley, do the same for me, and is this where the season is heading, maybe, or where we there already and she didn't? They're having beers in the same café across the street but not together, and he claims he always kept the two things apart. Sometimes they're two entirely different things, how you think about yourself in the past and how you actually were. Alicia doesn't bother to correct him this time. 

• Elsbeth does amazing things to keep Will away from the Peter-investigation but then Will screws it up anyway, presumably because he's set up, but still. Sloppy. 
• The new NY mayor terrorizes poor Clark, who is having an odd sort of weekend, Elsbeth meets an anti-semitic bear, everyone's likely happy to return to Chicago, even if Illinois governors are guilty just by virtue of having gotten the job. 
• Freaking Jackie Florrick haunts Alicia's memories like a monster, stepping out of the shadows, the "you could always move in with me" (which likely did happen, the biggest threat of all if Alicia didn't get a proper job), the "whore" when she goes in to talk to Will about a job (which likely didn't happen, or at least not back then - "you weren't even there"). 
• Kalinda and Elsbeth want to go on more adventures together. Judging from Will's face, he'd very much like to come along (Diane seems to be the only one unfazed by her elven magic).
• "It's so hard to get drunk on beer." / "You just have to try harder."
• "What do YOU want?" / "I want a happy life. And I want to control my fate."
• Jill Hennessy ends up teaming up with Elsbeth Tascioni which OF COURSE, who wouldn't, given the chance. Is this going to be a thing in the future? 
• An interesting episode, about framing a story both for an assumed audience and for Alicia herself, but also just for the incredible contrast between Alicia, four years ago, and Alicia, now. It was intentionally overplayed I guess, since this IS what Alicia would see in herself four years ago, but then there's also that moment of change when she got the job at S/L/G.