The Good Wife "The Deconstruction"

I like The Good Wife.  I've followed it since the first season, and have long had my own idea about how it would end.


I watched Alicia gradually fall into the world of the big law firm, and in so doing lose sight of her original goals and some of her moral convictions and certainties.  I was convinced that the end would involve Alicia, having drifted so far over her own moral line that she had forgotten where she started, suddenly finding herself at the centre of a scandal indicting her own moral turpitude, without even realizing how she ended up there, and her husband standing beside her and convincing her that she could turn things around and rehabilitate herself as well.


Since in some ways that happened last night, I suppose I should feel a sense of satisfaction, and I think the episode itself indicated it was deconstructing everything to push the reset button.


It didn't happen quite how I pictured though.  I thought Alicia and Peter would reconcile after his prison stint, and she would be the breadwinner for the family, at the same time realizing how difficult it is to maintain the moral high ground given the nature of her practice.


Instead, most of this season has abandoned the case of the week style that I so enjoyed, and focused exclusively on the character interactions and the politics, turning each week into political issue of the week.  Where once I accepted most of the law presented on The Good Wife as unusual but potentially valid, I've lost most of my ability to accept as real the types of legal decisions being made.  Leaving aside the re-count issue, that her lawyer would turn on her like that would be a gross violation of privilege.  The idea that Geneva Pine would see some benefit in getting a lawyer or law firm employee to turn state's evidence against a client completely ignores the concept of privilege, and the show didn't even bother to try to justify it.  The idea that a lawyer could be guilty or disbarred for presenting erroneous evidence when the lawyer had no knowledge, nor any reason to believe it was fabricated also seems highly suspect.


Kalinda ends the episode having been prepared to leave a child fatherless, renege on her word to Bishop, and set up an innocent man to be killed, just to get out from under a questionable legal charge against Diane, as well as abandoning Cary without a word of goodbye.


Diane has been almost entirely co-opted by this conservative group of her husband's, and while she feels she's making change from within, she's happily helping support a legal position which is inimical to her beliefs.  Arguably it's what lawyers should be able to do, but it's an area where Diane has consistently held her own moral line in this series, and now her professionalism is being impugned over the fabricated evidence at the same time she's abandoning the values that got her to the position of named partner of her own law firm.


Cary seems mostly okay.  Maybe he'll be broken up over Kalinda's departure, but he's the named partner in the law firm, which was his dream from the time he was a first year associate.  I would have liked him to have been so enamoured of his role at the State Attorney's office (particularly being deputy to Peter) that he decided to stay there, and that private practice wasn't really all it was cracked up to be, since being on the side of justice and doing the right thing meant more than billable hours and Brioni suits in private practice.  Unfortunately that character arc wasn't really pursued once Diane decided she needed Cary back at the firm.


I had hoped Peter would be rehabilitated in prison, and it would be like a teeter-totter (or scales of justice!) with his moral certainty rising as Alicia's fell.  But he largely abandoned his interest in religion and dove right back into politics, taking pleasure in using the moral suasion and undue influence that got him where he started in the series.


In the opening scene, we had the scene I had expected would be the conclusion from early on in the series.  Alicia acknowledging the vote rigging scandal, making a weak non-denial, exiting the State Attorney's office in disgrace while her husband stood beside her to offer moral support.


So, whether my predictions for character arcs were correct or not, it seems all of the major characters have gone through their respective arcs in full.  And at the end of the arcs, I'm left without a moral centre for the show, and without much hope of a redemptive arc for any character on the show, but a feeling that a complete story has been told.


So while I've really enjoyed the series up to this season, I've found myself liking the characters a lot less over the course of the season, and I'm not sure I need to see where any of the character arcs are going to go from this point forward.  It seems like a logical stopping point for me, and I think I'd like to leave it there and enjoy what I see as the full story the show was aiming to tell from the beginning.