My Favorite Moment From The Good Wife's Episode "Hearing"

Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick

The moment after Diane Lockhart tells Alicia Florrick that, like Will Gardner, "You can slice an opponent to shreds and they come back thanking you. I need someone," says Diane, "who can outrace me." 

It's a lovely, complicated moment that represents the best of what the Good Wife used to offer: complex grief. Complex pride. The offer is to push out Alicia's friend and one-time partner, Cary Agos, but Cary has proven that he's willing to push Alicia around now that she's an underling. Diane has been mentor and enemy, and since Alicia has come back to coming to the firm, she's treated her, again, like the underling she now is. 

There's so much that's silly about this episode. Not that I don't like silly, and fun.  I'm not so nuts about the character of Jason Crouse, because a) long ago, the writers set him up as a potential psychopath and b) I thought that moment last week where he tries to teach Alicia relaxation rather than drinking was, as I said before, past the verge of Yick. 

Makenzie Vega as Grace

I'll be intrigued, though, to find out if Peter Florrick has a love-child. Maybe Grace lives with her half-brother now--daughter Grace seems to have vanished from Alicia's life long before going to college.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan

And by the way, how can tattoos still be used as a symbol of wild manliness when babies can hardly leave the hospital before they get their first one and middle-aged women waiting to pick up their kids from school sport new ones every day?

Oh, hell. Truth is, I'll just miss the show. It can mess up, and it can get sloppy, but damn it, it was--is-- a woman's show. Like in the 1930's and '40's when producers actually used to make women's pictures, not films where women were arm candy or adoring wives, or cheated on spouses or somebody to be rescued, but shows where women did things, made decisions, messed up, learned from it--or didn't.  The Good Wife has always been a show that showed women in intense, interesting and complex ways. And you know me: I love complexity.