I’m ironically spending so much of my day reporting on the new CBS schedule – which will move “The Good Wife” to Sundays at 9 – that I have very little time to actually write about the season finale of the show itself, but I have a few thoughts coming up just as soon as I press all the buttons on the elevator…
“The Good Wife” is capable of doing a lot of things very well, and “Closing Arguments” – co-written by both of the Kings and directed by Robert (Matt Seitz has a longer appreciation of how well-directed the episode was) – admirably tackled a whole bunch of them. We got shady legal ethics (albeit in pursuit of a just cause), clever backdoor maneuvers (showing Peter tearing up the shipping receipt was a nice little touch) maneuvering through different corridors of power, sexual tension (and, though we didn’t see it on-screen with either Kalinda or Alicia, sex), etc.
The Kings even, at least for one episode, made me enjoy the Alicia/Will thing. They’ve had so many false starts and contrived roadblocks that it was hard to remember if they’d ever had chemistry in the first place. But they did in that scene at the bar, and on the elevator, and in the hall, in part because the characters were allowed to acknowledge all the stupid things that have gotten in their way – to, even after WIll had payed $7800 for the presidential suite, worry that Peter or Tammy or Jackie or some other distraction would be on the other side of those elevator doors that kept opening and closing and opening and closing.
Just a terrific sequence, and the two of them finally consummating their relationship will only make things messier for Alicia in season three – and messy is where this show tends to work best.
What did everybody else think?