Let me just start this week by saying how great The Good Wife‘s cold openings are. I don’t think I’ve really given proper tribute to them before. So let’s all say it together: The Good Wife‘s cold openings are SO GREAT! In that blink of darkness between the last commercial and the first shot at 9PM on Sunday nights, you never know what’s going to appear on the screen. It’s almost certainly not going to be a main character doing something you expect, but some type of disparate action displayed with no context at all but accompanied by some amazing musical selection, until eventually it segues into our people and our stories and things make sense. This week, it’s someone making a cream pie, accompanied by a song called “You’re Gonna Get What’s Coming To You.” This song, by the way, is performed by Nerf Herder, as in, Buffy theme song Nerf Herder. Nerf Herder, you guys! A+ to this episode already!
We then see a fancy brunch meeting in the board room of the Paisley Group. James Paisley is played by that-guy-who’s-been-in-everything, Tom Skerritt, and he’s talking about some merger while protesters chant outside. People at the meeting bring up the amount of jobs that will be headed overseas after the merger, and a current lawsuit dragging down the Paisley Group’s stock value. The current lawsuit is where Alicia comes in.
Someone’s suing Mr. Paisley for wrongful termination, claiming he was fired because he was gay. Alicia’s says it’s not true. And it’s right then that the infiltrator in the room stands up and shoves the pie in Mr. Paisley’s face, shouting, “Down with corporate imperialism!” as he’s dragged away. A++.
The person on the opposite side of this lawsuit, of course, is Louis Canning, who comes down to Florrick Agos to make a few disparaging comments about their decor and discuss a settlement with Alicia. It seems like they settle on $140,000 for the gay guy, and Alicia eventually gets Mr. Paisley to agree, so it seems like that little matter is ironed out pretty nicely. Until. Until! Until Mr. Paisley gets on a Financial Times news show and, when asked about the protests over his upcoming merger, including the pie incident, he compares the persecution of the 1% to Jews living in Nazi Germany. He is like Anne Frank, he says! Ha! Hahahahaha. It’d be funnier if there weren’t living and breathing human beings that actually think these things. In fact, as the episode itself literally calls attention to, James Paisley is a nod to Tom Perkins, the real life one-percenter who made this very comparison, and who also called for voting rights to be tied to tax brackets.
Alicia immediately calls Louis Canning, who has been watching this interview with relish, but Kalinda’s sitting at the desk and picks up the phone first. “He’s already seen it,” she warns Alicia, because Kalinda is still on Alicia’s side, quietly but always, never forget. “Well, that was crappy,” Canning comments as he takes the phone back, meriting the tiniest of Kalinda tiny smiles as she says, “I know.” See, now that Mr. Paisley has proved himself a verified jackass on national TV, having a jury trial against him will be easy peasy for Louis Canning. He ups the settlement offer to $3 million. Alicia and Cary groan. Much of the rest of the episode will be a back-and-forth between Canning and Alicia during jury selection, battling for or against people’s prejudices depending on which side screws up the most.
Some other political things have happened in between these scenes: Eli meets with Alicia and Finn Polmar to share the official Jeffrey Grant rulings, which clear Finn of any wrongdoing in the case, placing the blame solely on the State Attorney. This is good! But Eli warns that the SA will now bring out anything he can against Finn as a distraction. Finn seems continually overjoyed to suddenly be in the political game. Just kidding, he always looks like he hates it!
Jill Hennessy is also back as Rayna Hecht, meeting with Diane to work on a class action lawsuit, which Canning is being super weird about. Presumably, it’s because he’s working on bringing on the company that the class action lawsuit is against as a client, but it seems pretty obvious that he also just doesn’t like Diane working on anything powerful without him.
“Be a dear and find out why Canning is so mad at me this time. Also, let’s make out later. Cool? Cool.”
As a bit of comic relief, good ol’ Howard Lyman is brought in this episode to ask Canning, as both of them peer into the ladies-only Diane and Rayna meeting, what he should refer to him as. Canning looks at him and says he should just call him Louis. No, no, Lyman says, his old man face furrowed, as if his brain is working overtime, what should he CALL him, like to other people? “Crippled? Handicapped?” Suddenly his face lights up as his mind stumbles across an answer. “I know. Challenged!” Oh, Lyman. Dear old Lyman. While Canning himself is the worst, the jokes the writers have squeezed in about Michael J. Fox’s disease are pretty spot-on.Jerky State Attorney, meanwhile, has followed through on Eli’s promise of coming at Finn, but instead of taking it to Finn directly, he takes it to Peter Florrick, bringing Peter a photo of Finn leaving Alicia’s apartment. Peter thinks it’s from the night of his and Alicia’s blowout, months ago, when Alicia had been advising Finn in the midst of her grief. But when the SA says that the photo’s from two weeks ago, Peter is obviously taken aback, like really taken aback for some reason. And when the SA refers to Finn as Alicia’s “lover”-come on, SA, gross-Peter throws not one, but two glasses of water in his face.
These are the moments you both love and hate Peter Florrick. Love because that water throwing was pretty badass, and well-deserved. Hate because Peter so quickly buys what the SA is selling. I understand that it’s tough because he can’t ask Alicia about it himself, because she specifically laid out those rules of not talking about these things ever with each other anymore. But it’s clear he believes that Finn is Alicia’s lover because he 1) delays moving forward with his official endorsement of Finn, and 2) starts stupid-flirting with some new girl in the office. Either have a little more faith in your wife, Peter, or at least be able to handle life with some level of maturity.
Seeing all of this, Eli gets a genuinely concerned look on his face when he realizes that Mommy and Daddy are fighting. He goes to Alicia’s apartment to talk about it, where the Florricks are having a rather warm and fuzzy family moment, with Alicia ooh and ahhing over Zac in his graduation gown. This all seems to break Eli’s heart even further.
Eli is just generally adorable this whole episode. Because the Florricks ARE his family, and he hates seeing his family in trouble. My OTP is Cynical and Cold-Blooded Eli with Soft and Concerned-Eyes Eli. But when Eli approaches Peter to explain that Alicia is in fact not sleeping with Finn Polmar, it still seems that Peter doesn’t quite believe it. Because Peter is a dummy.
Speaking of lovers, though, we get the briefest bit of Kalinda-in-bed-with-Cary action again this episode. These brief bits always seem somewhat jarring to me, like I’ve totally forgotten that it’s still happening and then boom, Kalinda and Cary sex for 3.5 seconds. I don’t think it’s necessarily so jarring just because it’s Kalinda and Cary, though. I think they’re jarring because I’m ABLE to forget that it’s still happening. Because there has been so little development in either of their characters this season, either as individual people or as “lovers.”
And apparently, this stint as lovers is coming to an undeveloped close, weirdly similar to how things ended with them last season, too. Cary takes a call in the middle of sexytimes; Kalinda asks if it was Rayna Hecht; Cary deduces that this is what she’s been after all along, and says that they’re “not doing this anymore.” The next morning, Kalinda confirms her sexy spy game, when she confides the phone call information to Diane.
So Kalinda uses sex to get information. Other than showing true hurt and heart when Will died, this is all Kalinda has been all season: someone who uses sex to get information, whether from Cary or from Jenna. She is a one-dimensional, bisexual robot. I mean, we learned more about Kalinda last season during the Horrible Husband storyline, and everyone hated that storyline! I guess to avoid more Kalinda complaints this season after the husband debacle, they dialed her storylines back so far that she’s just become a caricature of herself. And it’s getting fucking boring. Even her role as an investigator as LG, while being consistent this season, has been rather lackluster. Kalinda is a character with limitless possibilities for a writer. Her past is mysterious, her boundaries are fluid, her strengths innumerable. You guys can do better, Good Wife, and you know it.
And it turns out the information Kalinda got from Cary is useless, anyway. Everyone is after Rayna Hecht, once again, because apparently she’s not satisfied with her new law firm with Elsbeth Tascioni? Which seems ridiculous because who wouldn’t be happy with life with Elsbeth Tascioni?! And does this mean our dreams of an Elsbeth spin-off are dead? Because they were such nice dreams!
Anyway, so Diane had been waiting on Rayna to show up for a vote at LG about the class action lawsuit. The question is whether to go with the lawsuit, or to go with the company the lawsuit is against, that Canning wants to hire, because they can’t do both. Since it appears that the world is against Diane since Will’s death, the only way she can pull successfully for the lawsuit is if she can promise bringing Rayna along with it to LG. But when Rayna doesn’t show up for the vote, it’s clear that Diane has lost. And knowing from Kalinda that Rayna had a meeting with Florrick Agos first, Diane believes that Florrick Agos has stolen Rayna away from her.
“I’m still not exactly sure where I’ll be taking my sexy ass self, but it won’t be here.”
“You don’t say.”
But it’s weird that Diane ever thought this, because the doubts Rayna voices to Diane in their final meeting echo almost exactly the things that David Lee and Louis Canning have been planting into everyone’s minds: that Diane Lockhart isn’t on the top of her game since Will Garner’s death. When Diane angrily storms into Florrick Agos and Cary informs her that Rayna was indeed at their office, but that she left as soon as she got a call from Louis Canning, Diane’s face falls. It’s not Florrick Agos out to get her–in fact, Alicia’s face looks exceedingly sympathetic and sorry-it’s Canning “poisoning the well, at his own firm.” Goddammit, am I ready for Diane Lockhart to come back in Season 6 and just hulk smash all these dudes into the ground.
“Louis Canning screwed you over? We are completely and totally shocked!”
“I hate everything.”
When it comes to the Paisley trial, both sides keep messing up pretty royally: James Paisley continues to be an ass, although he and Alicia share an enjoyable conversation about Ayn Rand which amounts to Alicia basically saying, “Are you shitting me?” and James Paisley serving up some realness to Alicia by informing her that she is, in fact, the 1% too. True, James, true, but you can be the 1% and not be such a dickwad about it. Then Alicia accidentally looks like a racist on TV, and then Canning gets in hot water when the company he beats out Diane in bringing in as a client turns out to be, shockingly, a bunch of dickwads, and in the end they cut their losses and settle anyway, albeit at a much higher amount than originally intended. So hey, maybe the gay guy who lost his job was just extorting James Paisley, but it’s still a gay guy squeezing a million dollars from James Paisley, so I’ll count it as a win.
Our final scene of the episode is Peter Florrick closing down his laptop at the end of the day and staring longingly at his background photo. And yes, his background photo is a particularly gorgeous photo of Alicia, but then the woman he’s been flirting with opens his door and the screen fades to black and good god, Florrick, get a hold of yourself.
Next week brings Season Cinco to a close, and the previews promise both drama and some laughs–Mama Channing AND Mama Jackie, cooking lasagna!-a combination I always enjoy. What are your thoughts on everything as the season finale draws near?
