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“The Good Wife” recap (5.16): The Last Call

Grief is a strange beast that affects us all differently, unknowable and indecipherable. This episode of The Good Wife, the first after the shocking death of Will Gardner, reveals that, strangely, grief can also often bring out people’s best. Many of our favorite characters were at their finest, kicking ass in spite of, or more probably because of, their sadness.

Except for, unsurprisingly, Alicia, who is unable to rise up to the level of badassery of the other characters because she is too busy being numb, shocked at a deeper level, swimming through murky waters with no sign of a shore. We start this episode where we left off last Sunday, with Kalinda breaking the news to Alicia over the phone. Alicia stutters. Eli puts his hand on her shoulder. She slinks away from it. Kalinda has to leave to talk to the police; Eli urges Alicia to go, and he takes her place at the horrible Correspondents Luncheon.

Even Eli Gold is so off-kilter that he reads almost-blindly from the teleprompter, stuttering awkwardly through jokes that were meant for Alicia, jokey woman-ish things about dresses and diapers. Women, right? But this isn’t even funny, the closest moment to humor that exists in this whole episode. It’s just awful, because everything about Will Gardner’s death is awful.

Alicia drives blankly down the street in silence, her eyes occasionally focusing on random snapshots around her, nonsensical and bright: a flock of birds in the sky, a mother protecting her child at a crosswalk outside of a CVS. And then, eventually, she cries.

Diane returns to the LG offices, which are still bubbly and full of life, bizarrely unaware, the partners waiting for Diane’s presence at a meeting about the LA office. Diane takes a moment to compose herself in her office, and then quickly walks in and shares the news, silencing the squawking David Lee. In perhaps the most shocking grief of the entire episode, David Lee hastily exits the room. He maintains his consistent David Lee sneer all the way down the hall until he finds a conference room to walk into, shouting at the girls occupying it to leave. And then, even David Lee’s face collapses. Even David Lee is broken.

As the news spreads, some intern who’s only been there for a week is wailing up a storm, being comforted by her friends, her sobs echoing through the offices, grating, offensive. Diane MF-ing Lockhart walks up to her with a stone cold look and asks if she’s done crying yet. Crying Intern looks shocked and confused, says she doesn’t know. Diane Lockhart tells her to pack up her things and go home.

This may seem insensitive, but as someone who’s experienced That Person before, That Person Who Capitalizes on a Grief That Isn’t Theirs, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen.

And then the elevator doors open, and Alicia walks in, looking lost and small. Diane sees her mere seconds after firing Crying Intern, and her face changes immediately, changes to the truth. She walks to Alicia, and they fall into one another.

They sit in Diane’s office, and Diane shares that it was Jeffrey. That was supposed to be my case, Alicia says, contemplating. And then David snatches Diane away for a moment to talk LG business. That’s when Alicia looks at her phone and sees she has three missed calls. One from Kalinda and one from Diane, when they were trying to reach her from the hospital. And then, one from Will Gardner, at 11:32 AM.

It’s one of those horrible messages that are full of nothing. “Alicia.” His voice, rising out of the ashes. There’s a pause, the shuffling of papers, a distant warning from the judge in the background. He says, “Hold on, I’ll call you back.” And it’s over. These type of voicemails always make me want to yell, “Just tell me what you need so I don’t think someone’s died or something, for goodness sakes!” But in this case, someone has died, and Alicia can’t call Will back.

She’ll spend the rest of the episode replaying this message over and over, either just to hear his voice or to discern why he was calling her, or a combination of the two. She goes to the courtroom and speaks to the judge, who for some reason is still there in his office, and he replays the scene. Jeffrey had first shot the witness, the math tutor; killed him. Will went to try and take the gun away; he was shot next. The prosecutor, Finn Polmar, grabbed Will’s body, drug him across the courtroom to hide behind a desk; he was also shot in the process. He waited with Will until the medics came, holding his hand. Alicia heads to the hospital to talk to Finn Polmar.

Kalinda, meanwhile, is doing what Kalinda does best: investigating. When she’s blocked by police, she calls a woman for help, and for the slightest moment, we hope it’s going to be Lana Delaney parting her way through the crowd towards her, but instead it’s Jenna, her cop lady lover from earlier this season. But I’m not complaining about it. While I know I’ve talked about the lack of real chemistry between the two of them, I’m glad Jenna’s with Kalinda during this episode, and she does everything right. She asks Kalinda once or twice if she’s okay, or what she’s thinking, but when Kalinda doesn’t respond, she backs off. She is simply there, leading Kalinda to what she wants to see, and then waiting patiently, respectfully beside her. She’s not comforting her; she’s helping her do her job, and that is exactly what Kalinda needs. In fact, I sort of love Jenna after this episode.

She and Kalinda go to the courtroom, where the cop whose gun Jeffrey stole is admitting that he’s horrible at his job. They go to the jail where Jeffrey’s being held, rocking back and forth and sobbing while his family lawyer continues to argue for his innocence. They go to the morgue, where they confirm from the mortician that it was Jeffrey’s fire that killed Will, not any crossfire from the police. She takes one last look at his body. And then Alicia calls her.

Alicia says that she’s going crazy, that she doesn’t know what to do. Kalinda commiserates. But when she says she doesn’t know what to do either, Alicia objects, knowing the tone of Kalinda’s voice: “It sounds like you do.” But Kalinda says she’ll talk to her later, and hurries off the phone. I don’t know what’s happening in Kalinda’s head at this moment. Perhaps she’s been brushed off by Alicia too many times to have these heart to hearts anymore, even now. Or maybe there’s not enough room for Alicia’s grief in Kalinda’s head when it’s already too busy dealing with her own. Or maybe she just really is too anxious to continue her investigation than to talk to Alicia right now. In any case, it’s hard to blame her, no matter how we all wish their conversation could have gone to other, warmer places.

Cary has been stuck at the offices of Florrick Agos during all this, tied down in a deposition for a client they just recently poached from LG, that woman who was fired for being too pretty. He tried to delay it after hearing the news, but the opposing counsel refused the delay, even after hearing that it was because of a death. Because he is a horrible person. So Cary says fine, let’s do this, let’s do this now. And when the sleazy doctor who fired the woman for being too pretty blows off the accusation, Cary gets angry. Cary gets angry and dirty and calls out the doctor for being a sleaze and isn’t sorry about a second of it. When the doctor and his schmuck of a lawyer get up to leave, Cary asks them, simmering, to sit the hell down. I like Angry Cary Agos. Angry Cary Agos is good.

This client, the pretty woman, has actually been part of Alicia’s nightmare this whole episode. Like a devil and an angel sitting on opposite sides of her shoulders, she envisions two scenarios behind Will’s last voicemail. He was calling angrily, to yell at her for taking another one of his clients. Or he was calling with love and repentance, about to say, forget it all. This is ridiculous. Let’s be together forever and ever. Just you and me, kiddo.

When Alicia runs into Finn Polmar’s assistant at the hospital while Finn is in surgery, she asks if the assistant remembers Will stepping out to make a phone call at any point that morning. The assistant said she did, while they were meeting with the judge for a possible plea deal. Will stepped out, angry about someone stealing his clients. Alicia’s heart sinks.

But later, while he’s loopy on pain killers, Alicia does get to talk to Finn Polmar, played by Matthew Goode (Heck from Imagine Me and You), in one of the best scenes of the episode. He’s lucid, but has a strange air about him from the pain killers-like he’s happy, but trying to describe a nightmare that happened far, far away. He says that when Will was holding his hand in the courtroom, bleeding out, he kept opening his mouth, like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t. When Alicia asks about the phone call, he suddenly erases all her fears. He was angry, yes, but with a dude that was stealing his clients-a dude, not a woman. In a sudden burst of clarity, Polmar remembers: “Damian.”

I’ve been wondering where dear old Damian had gone. I feel the Kings must have sensed viewers’ hatred of him, or maybe the actor didn’t want to do it anymore; I care too little about him to even research it. In any case, I’m glad, glad that Damian’s gone (at least, hopefully), and glad that Will wasn’t mad at Alicia in his final hours.

As the drugs are really starting to kick in and Polmar’s about to fall asleep, he says, under his breath, “I wanted to tell you something.” Alicia stops on her way out, asks what, perhaps waiting for the answers she’s been searching for, at long last. But Polmar just looks up at her with blurry eyes and says, “I’m sorry. I really am.”

Back in the law offices of Lockhart and (RIP) Gardner, David Lee has done a seemingly cold but actually good thing, calling all of Will’s clients, making sure they want to stay. Everything has gone smoothly, except for one douche bag who wants to meet with them-today-to make sure everything’s still all good on his accounts. Just to clarify, this is still the same day that Will Gardner has been shot dead. David says he can try to arrange a phone interview instead, but Diane says no, tell him to come in.

And so he comes in. He makes his attempt at being sympathetic before turning to his All Important Law Matters. Diane says yes, she’s up to taking on Will’s caseload. It’s not a problem. But oh, by the way? It doesn’t really matter, because Diane Lockhart is firing your ass. And she’s called around to all the big local firms, including Florrick Agos, and they don’t want your ass, either.

Douche Bag, who is obviously shocked and appalled at this turn of events, tries to twist the knife on his way out the door by stating, “It’s not what Will would do.” Diane doesn’t flinch. “If I were dead? It’s exactly what Will would do.” She closes the door and looks to David Lee, who has been standing by the window, speechless, during this exchange. “That felt good,” she says. In the best line of the episode, he replies, “Turned ME on.” For once, David Lee and I are in agreement.

With nothing left to do but go home and stare into the void, Alicia receives little comfort from her family, no matter how they try. In a scene that marches forthrightly into the Heavy Shit department, poor little Grace tries to talk to her mom about faith and God. To Alicia’s credit, she can’t accept her daughter’s neat explanations about what happens when we die, that Will is in heaven. To Grace’s credit, she doesn’t buckle when her mom rebukes her beliefs.

Alicia: You think God is good. I don’t find any good here. A kid picked up a gun, didn’t even mean to shoot Will. It’s just some stupid accident. What does it mean? Grace: What does it mean if there is no God? Why is that any better? Alicia: It doesn’t make it better. It’s just truer. It’s just not wishful thinking. Grace: Well, maybe always believing the bad-maybe that’s wishful thinking, too.

And in a final act of the Kings proclaiming, “We are really not fucking around in this episode,” Kalinda and Jenna make their way to Jeffrey’s jail cell once more, but this time it’s not swarmed with cops and lawyers. Jenna coerces the cop who’s on suicide watch to look away, and Kalinda approaches Jeff’s cell. He’s lying on his side on a bench, looking distant. Kalinda asks why he killed her friend. He says he didn’t mean to. Then she asks him if he wants to die. Without hesitating, he nods his head.

On the other side of the bars, Kalinda holds up his belt. She took it from his belongings the police are holding. He could do it in under 10 minutes, she says.

Jeffrey suddenly gets up and makes his way to her with purpose, eager, almost desperate, for that belt. But then she pulls her hand away. “No,” she says, “No, you’re going to live with this.” She walks away, and he wails into the night.

Throughout all of this, we’ve also seen Governor Big for the first time in many episodes, although thankfully, not too much. His reaction for Alicia is clearly not as assertive as Jenna’s is for Kalinda: he wants to be the Good Husband, comfort her, hug her, talk to her. But Alicia doesn’t want to talk. She doesn’t want to hug. The closing scene is him hugging her anyway while she stands in her hallway, unmoving as stone, looking past Big’s shoulder, imagining that Will’s last call to her was to tell her that he loved her.

Not surprisingly, this episode was heavier than even the last one was. But it was flawlessly done, the characters reacting in resilient yet true ways, the actors carrying them out with amazing skill. I’m excited to see how things evolve from here. What are your thoughts of the aftermath?

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