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“The Good Wife” recap: Death, love and St. Patrick’s Day (4.17)

Suspense! Cold-blooded murder! Sketchy police officers! Fancy dresses! Drunk mother-in-laws! Fist fights! Family secrets! Flashbacks! Love! Lust! Kalinda with a foxy lady in a bar! Catholics! Fireworks! We get it all in this week’s episode of the Good Wife! OK, not the fireworks, but everything else!

We start right where we left off last week, with Alicia still in that red dress looking so wonderful and I can’t stop staring at the place where her shoulder muscles meet her chest muscles and I don’t know exactly what that’s called but she has muscles. Everyone is dressed to the nines for the Shamrock Ball, some type of very-un-Irish seeming event wherein everyone’s restrained and orderly and Eli is very concerned about whether or not the important Catholic guy will hug Peter or Kresteva at the end of the night, which means he blesses you or something. Ah, Catholics and politics. In order to help impress the cardinal, Eli also implores Alicia to continue to play the role of, well, the good wife, the one who stood by her man and never strayed. Which is, of course, precisely when Will walks up. Surrounded by the three main men in her life who each tear her loyalties in different directions, Alicia decides she needs a drink.

Matthew Perry has returned as Kresteva, Peter’s now official Republican opponent for governor, and he and Alicia soon share a lovely back and forth at the bar. Alicia’s in a real taking-no-shit kind of mood, and throws all of her hatred for this slime of a man right in his face. She mocks his sobriety. She asks which lies he’s going to spin this time around the bend. She plain calls him a bad person, saying he does Mein Kampf proud. She tells him that she hopes he dies choking on his own blood. Whoa! Go get ’em, sparky!

Alicia is soon whisked away from this bubbly conversation, however, by a pair of police officers. And here is where the episode gets interesting. She’s needed at the police station to review the tape of one of her clients who has just been murdered, shot point blank in the head while walking down the street. Being that she represented him 18 times, the police think she might be able to help give a lead on who was pissed off enough at this guy to kill him. The police detective also says they have “reason to believe” that the killer is still out there and “not done killing” tonight. They ask for a list of his enemies; she fills a legal pad full of them. And a flashback reel starts to play in her head.

Matthew Ashbaugh, the dead client played by the ever impressive and decidedly creepy John Noble, is an eccentric man with an Eastern European accent who carries around a speaker in order to play the same Bach song over and over, during every conversation wherever he goes. He has a hand in some drug business but also appears to frequently want to sue whoever’s annoying him that day, once including a guy whose dog barked too much. In this instance, Ashbaugh has much in common with a certain Angel and an akita named Evita who won’t shut up, but alas, this isn’t mentioned.

Back in non-flashback reality land, a few things have happened. Alicia’s started to quiet up about Ashbaugh the more the police press her; even though he’s recently deceased, Alicia’s worried about attorney-client privilege. Amanda Peet has shown up as another kind friend of the state to help convince her that it in fact isn’t attorney-client privilege, only she’s much nicer about it. Also, cuter.

At the party, Peter and Eli have sat down Diane to ask her to take the seat of the state Supreme Court justice who died in that car crash we learned about last episode. Diane appears to be genuinely shocked. And flattered. And overjoyed. Me? A Supreme Court judge? Girl power, Diane! Although, of course, this would mean having to leave Lockhart Gardner, where she and Will have invested so much blood and tears and money. Peter and Eli tell her she has until the end of the night to decide. She gives a wonderful, short little “shut-the-fuck-up” laugh before walking away.

Peter then has the opportunity to finally get in a word with the Almighty Catholic; the cardinal gives Peter his condolences about his son. Peter and Eli stare back, unable to hide their confusion. They are unaware that Kresteva has informed the cardinal that the reason the cops showed up to fetch Alicia was because of Zach and his marijuana problems. (Remember when they found that planted smidge of pot residue in his car?) Ah, Kresteva. You sneaky bastard. In other news, let’s discuss what a sweet ass outfit the cardinal gets to wear, amIright?

At the police station, Amanda Peet is about to give Alicia a ride back to the Uptight Shamrock Gala when the police detective runs after them and shuffles them into a room. They found the killer’s car, he says. Yay, good news, right? Sort of, he says. There was a GPS in the car. They ran it to find out the next address in the system it was headed to. And that address was Alicia’s apartment.

Alicia immediately calls home; Grace picks up. Everything is fine there; crazy momma Stockard Channing is even on the scene. Alicia tells her mom to get them out of there; she complies. As they leave the house, they see that both Momma Channing’s and Zach’s cars are blocked in. Welp, guess we’ll all just have to go to a bar! On the way, Momma Channing asks Grace why she’s so into religion all of a sudden. “Is it your father? It’s always the philanderers who go to Jesus.” Ha! The grandmas on this show are the best grandmas of all time. And when I say best, I mean weirdest, which is often the same thing.

Attorney-client privilege now out the window due to her life possibly being in danger, Alicia reveals to Amanda Peet that Ashbaugh once got into an altercation with a specific police officer. The one slightly unrealistic part of this episode for me was the fact that she could remember the officer’s name so clearly from one brief altercation that was presumably quite a while ago, but I’ll forgive it. When they bring in the officer for questioning, Alicia overhears him getting worked up about it all. He says that Ashbaugh’s better off dead, anyway. “He deserved it.” Here, Alicia truly starts to feel uncomfortable. She picks up her phone and calls who she always calls when she’s nervous: Kalinda. Kalinda, who is currently here:

Yes! Finally! Flirting with a hot woman in a bar! Ugh! We have missed you! The woman tells Kalinda she’s a massage therapist! Kalinda says, “Oh, really?” Ugh! Yes! This feels so right! If anything is indeed happening between her and Cary, obviously it isn’t exclusive, although nobody should be surprised at that. But then she gets the call, and she can’t ignore Alicia, although she does say, “Now?” and glances longingly over at the massage therapist, who is currently advancing her hands towards hers, but Alicia says yes, now, and Kalinda can’t say no to her, so she sighs. Sorry, massage therapist. Thank you for that beautiful thirty seconds, anyway.

Kalinda goes to Cary at the Shamrock Shake Thing to see if he has any information on this possible suspect police officer from his days at the state attorney’s office; he’s not supposed to swap info like that but eventually complies when he learns Alicia might be threatened. As Kalinda gets up to leave, he squeezes her hand for a moment. She pauses for exactly that one moment, then continues on her way. Alicia’s more important than you right now, Cary. And let’s be honest, she always will be.

As Kalinda hurries away in the dark, she calls Alicia to ask if she remembers anything else about another murder Ashbaugh had been agitated about. Something about this case rattles more flashback memories out of Alicia’s brain, and these are much more distracting for her, because these ones involve sexy times, and lots of them. And all of them with Will.

This is particularly awkward, as Amanda Peet has just adorably asked Alicia for advice as a friend. She feels sometimes like Will is flirting with her but she’s not sure and she knows it’s so high school but what does Alicia think? And it’s not all in Peet’s head; we’ve seen the flirting, too. Like the perfect martyr Alicia is, she tells Peet to ask him out. A decision which she is now obviously thinking deeply about in the midst of these memories.

Alicia in these flashbacks is so interesting, too, aside from her obvious sexual satisfaction with Mr. Gardner. Even in the earlier flashbacks where all we saw were attorney-client interactions between her and Ashbaugh, she seemed happier, lighter, younger, quicker to laugh. And while she obviously literally was younger, she wasn’t that much younger. Not that much time has passed, yet the Alicia of today is so much harder, so much sadder, hiding so much more.

The still-alive feelings from the flashbacks obviously aren’t only in Alicia’s head, being that when Will is finally clued in to what’s going on, he rushes immediately to the police station, ignoring Alicia’s protests. When he arrives, Alicia giggles at his valiantness. She then glances out from the room they’re in and sees Amanda Peet staring in at them, nervously. And at that moment, decisions Alicia has been running from seem to cement. She continues to laugh with her eyes as she asks Will, “We were good, weren’t we?” But it’s a sad laughter, a resigned smile. She says they’re holding each other back. Will says, “Alicia, I’m fine,” as if how he was feeling was the sole topic of this conversation. She disagrees; things aren’t fine. She’s being selfish, she says, acting like things that are in the past aren’t. This is when the tears start to form. She’s with Peter, she says. Now, this has to end. Will says what we all feel when someone breaks a relationship off, even when the relationship isn’t defined, and cuts off the feelings that are still there: “Can you just decide that?” She says, “I can. I have to.” He replies, quietly, “Then OK.” And if Julianna Margulies doesn’t get all the awards for this episode, I don’t even know.

Our girl Kalinda, meanwhile, is out there being her badass self at the police car lot where they’re looking over the killer’s car. The police detective is waving her off, telling her she’s not going to get any info. Kalinda hounds them until they at least reveal the make and model. Which, of course, was their first mistake. The thing about that car? She says, tipping them that she’s on to their game: it doesn’t have GPS.

They set up Alicia to believe she was in danger in order to get more information out of her. Classy act, guys! She tells them to go fuck themselves. Someone make a montage of Alicia telling powerful men off in this episode, because she has been on fire.

Speaking of powerful men getting what’s coming to them, Peter also punches out Kresteva in the bathroom for talking shit about his son. He reasons, the story of him punching Kresteva in the face will sound just as ridiculous as Zach being busted for pot. Hah! Hah! Peter, you are funny, sometimes.

And to bring all the family drama to a smashing finish, Momma Channing has also revealed to the kids whilst at the Irish pub that 1) Alicia was already pregnant with Zach when she and Peter got married, and 2) Grace was an accident. Whoops! Good call, Grandma. They all meet up at the Shamrock Shindig and Alicia admits that, yes, she was pregnant with Zach and she was embarrassed, so she changed the wedding date later so no one would know. But no, Grace was not a mistake. Tearily, she says, “I loved Zach before he was born. I loved you before you were born. I love you even more now.” Grace asks, “And Dad?” Alicia pauses before she says, “I love him.” And this moment of her hugging her daughter on this fancy staircase, tearily looking out into the crowd, is one of the most poignant of the episode. Because Alicia has now done everything that she was supposed to do, that she wanted herself to do. She is the good wife, the good lawyer, the good friend, the good mother. But for some reason, as she watches the cardinal shake the hand of the husband she just said she loved, I still don’t know if I believe her.

Ashbaugh’s killer, by the way, ended up being the owner of the barky dog, after all. The police don’t believe Kalinda when she figures it out, with all the other sketchy stuff he was involved in, but she deadpans, “Have you MET a dog lover?” In Alicia’s final flashback, as she dances with Peter in the present, she also realizes that dead Matthew Ashbaugh might have actually spent all that time in silly litigation with her because he was in love with her. Who could blame him? Poor, kooky man. Oh, and the Catholic cardinal ends up not hugging Kresteva OR Peter, so there’s that. Like most things with the campaign, Eli’s elated; no one else cares.

Without a doubt, this was one of the finest episodes of the Good Wife ever. I loved the suspense and the mystery, the flashbacks, the raw emotion of so many relationships, the loyalties, and Kalinda, even besides her flirting with a lady in a bar, swooping in to be the badass one who figures it all out. While Kalinda has definitely helped in some capacity for most of the cases this season, she had a sense of power and righteousness in the few scenes she was in this episode that I had missed.

What did you think? And what do you think Diane will decide?

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