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“The Good Wife” recap (5.9): Whack-a-Mole

Last week on The Good Wife we saw Florrick Agos finally starting to settle into themselves, finding offices and actually doing some law work. This week continues the trend, as Alicia takes a call from an old client, Zayeed, who has been targeted in a jihadist bombing scheme a la the Reddit conspiracies after the Boston Marathon.

Lockhart Gardner, meanwhile, apparently continues to prosper, while taking the route more and more of doing whatever it can to make a buck, with Will firmly at the helm. While a rift between Will and Diane begins to take root, the David v. Goliath nature of Lockhart Gardner and Florrick Agos really starts to make itself clear with this episode. And maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard at this point to not fully be on the Florrick Agos train.

Will’s reign is made clear at the beginning of the episode, as LG begins the process of hiring new associates. While three intelligent, strong women sit in a room going through possibilities, it’s Will that all decisions appear to be deferred to, as he dismisses or approves choices according to his own random whims, without caring much about any of the women’s opinions, and with little protest from any of them. I know Kalinda has always stayed away from making active decisions for the firm because it’s not her role, but what happened to the beautiful, defiant Diane Lockhart of earlier this season?

Naturally, the one lawyer that Will decides he wants is the one that the women are all leary of–an Irishman by the name of Damian Boyle, a dude who has laid low in the Chicago lawyerly world while representing All the Bad Guys, but who is now interested in having a more permanent base to work from. Will checks him out in court, likes his swagger, and then follows him to a bar and buys him a beer, making an offer without consulting any of the partners. Shockingly, this pisses them off, particularly David Lee, and here’s the thing about David Lee: when he’s wrong in his brutish disdain, he just appears vile, but when you agree with his anger, you are suddenly with him all. the. way. Diane does confront Will about his totalitarianism, but he’s just like, “Psssh, democracy is boring and time consuming, who needs it.”

So Damian Boyle ends up strutting around the Lockhart Gardner offices, and as he does, I know immediately and absolutely that I can’t stand him. I am suffering from déjà vu of Kalinda’s horrible husband. He spends his first ten minutes flirting with a pretty woman in the office, bossily ordering strangers around, and then going to Florrick Agos headquarters while the team is out, snooping around their files and then stealing all their furniture. You know, just for some extra flare.

I mean, this is highly illegal, right?

This snooping leads Damian to discover the Zayeed case, where Alicia and Cary are trying to bring Reddit–here called the site “Scabbit”–to trial, first to take down the posts that declare Zayeed a terrorist, and then when that doesn’t work because of the finicky nature of the Internet, for defamation after Zayeed loses his job because of it. While Scabbit doesn’t show up in court at first, presumably because they are too busy being Scabbity, after Damian raides Alicia’s desk, guess who waltzes in? Damian and Will, representing Scabbit. Oh joy.

And guess what Damian is wearing on his lapel, aside from his incredible, sleazy ego? The “#1 Mom” pin that he had just yoinked from Alicia’s desk. Bold move, that. Damian is smirky and full of faux innocence when she confronts him. I’ll whack-a-mole your FACE, Irish bro.

Alicia asks Will if this is what they’re reduced to now, high school pranks. He responds, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And this is all certainly adding fuel to the fire for the Willicia shippers out there, but my overall feeling is simply, oh, for goodness sakes. Grow up, Will.

Just thinking about this new duo of horribleness in the Will and Damian show is giving me hives, so let’s move on to better parts of this episode, such as the fact that it forced Alicia and Robyn to go out on the beat together, which I very much enjoyed. I mean, it’s no Robyn and Kalinda combo of superpowers, but still, I’ll take it.

Ay ay, captain.

And when we’re not focused on Damian and Scabbit, a separate drama is unfolding between Eli and Jackie, and oh, how delicious these always are! AND this one involves Miss Idgie Threadgoode herself, Mary Stuart Masterson, here playing a lawyer named Rachel. Rachel is who Eli has picked out to replace Diane Lockhart for the vacant judgeship position. But when Jackie happens to see a meeting between Rachel and Eli at a restaurant, she pulls Eli aside to say, sternly and assuredly, “I don’t think so, buster.”

The reason behind her defiance is a personal one, which elicits some fantastic and emotional acting on the part of Mary Beth Peil. Rachel apparently carried on an affair with Jackie’s husband way back in the day, and Jackie’ll be damned if she gets appointed to judgeship under her own son’s governorship. When she explains all this to Eli and he still won’t back down, she takes matters into her own hands, threatening Rachel that she’ll spill the beans about the affair to Rachel’s husband, even as he lays in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. Listen, y’all: you don’t mess with Jackie Florrick. Rachel backs away from the judgeship, to Eli’s chagrin.

You really never learn, do you, Eli?

Diane, meanwhile, attempts to take some modicum of control by calling a meeting to recall Damian the Douchebag, an idea which had originally been David Lee’s. But then when she calls for the votes, both David Lee and Howard Lyman are like, “We changed our minds. We discovered that he’s a funny guy who affirms all of our misogynistic, moral-less personality traits, so, let’s keep him!” Diane reclines into her leather chair in defeat. God, Diane’s current life makes me so sad.

Damian also pushes Kalinda more into the spotlight, as a creeped out and suspicious Diane tells her to vet their newest member. The first thing Damian does when he sits down with Kalinda is to tell her that he “doesn’t believe” in female investigators. Ha! Ha!

Kalinda’s smirk is the only thing holding this shit together right now.

He continues to give condescending, false answers to every one of Kalinda’s questions. She confronts him later as he gets into the elevator, informing him that she’s going to call him out on his bull sooner or later, so be ready for it. I know that Damian’s continuing presence, and his conflicts with Kalinda, will be a main thread for her for the rest of the season, according to the Kings. I mean, going after him with a baseball bat as she did to her husband would be enjoyable to see, and I always like Kalinda making fools out of dumb men. But good gracious, isn’t it time we gave her a storyline that involved things other than butting heads with dumb white men? Because seriously, there is so much else she could be doing, you guys.

I also only just noticed the “LG” in the background. It is bad.

Back in Florrick Agos land, after a whole bunch of Internet/law wrangling, Alicia and Cary end up essentially winning the Scabbit thing, bringing Diane and Will to the t-shirt factory office for the first time to negotiate a settlement across cheap card tables. As they walk into the fledgling center of Florrick Agos, Will is full of nothing but gleeful derision, but Diane is almost wistful, seeing memories of themselves in the scene, in the early days of Lockhart Gardner. Will shrugs this sentimentality off. Whatever, Will. Diane is wiser than you, and Alicia and Cary still beat you.

I have a surprising amount of issues about this case o’ the week, though, at the end. There was potential for so much good material. The fact that the FBI/CIA are possibly using social media and crowdsourcing as part of their investigative tactics is a big, slippery, dangerous deal, and while this was brought up at the beginning of the episode, it then lost all traction as the case honed in on the Scabbit site itself, focusing on lots of complicated but in the end somewhat boring Internet freedom and anonymity legal issues, very similar to Chumhum cases of the week. Meanwhile, a Muslim scholar was completely racially profiled, harassed by both the federal government and countless hacks on the Internet, leading to a somewhat complete destruction of his life, via the loss of his job and the unraveling of his book deal.

Yet, again, he doesn’t even appear after the first half of the episode, as we become more involved in the destructive drama of Damian instead of the totally upsetting injustice of Zayeed’s life. Sure, it appears that he will receive a substantial settlement, but in the end the blame is still focused on Scabbit, instead of a societal and systemic pattern of prejudice and discrimination. I know the beauty of The Good Wife is that it doesn’t always delve into moralistic preachiness, but, well, sometimes I want it to.

Anyhow, the judge in the case was once again played brilliantly by Jeffrey Tambor, George Senior, and the episode ends somewhat strangely as a phone call from him tears Alicia away from the negotiating Zayeed’s settlement with Will and Diane. Alicia greets him with a smile over the phone at first, as he has been kind to her during their time in court, but her smile falters slightly when he asks her out for a cup of coffee.

While this clearly seems like an invitation to a date, it may not be–Judge George had also offered encouragement to Alicia in court over her new firm, as it reminded him of when he himself was in the trenches of starting a new firm. Perhaps he wants to offer her some business advice? I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see where that one heads. I love his character on the show, and will be happy to see more of him.

So what are your thoughts on this Damian guy? Am I being too harsh in my assessment? What methods should Kalinda employ to kick his ass?

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