A review of last night’s “The Good Wife” coming up just as soon as we split the check…
“Long Way Home” was Dylan Baker’s fourth appearance as Colin Sweeney. He’s clearly enjoying himself in the role, and I’ve always liked Baker (for a long time, my Twitter avatar was this picture of him eating a cat on “The Pitts”), but I think we may be at the less-is-more point with the character. “The Good Wife” in general leans too heavily on “shocking” twists to court cases in the final act, and since Sweeney’s always playing seven angles at once, his stories are even more twist-dependent. It’s like the point “The Practice” reached where every time Bobby Donnell got a seemingly-innocent client acquitted, it turned out they were actually guilty and manipulating the hell out of their attorney. Do it once or twice, and it’s shocking; do it every time, and it’s beyond predictable. On the other hand, I won’t object to an hour of watching Morena Baccarin, since “Homeland” likely won’t be back until September.
For me, the more engaging parts of the episode involved Alicia’s real estate quandary and Cary being confronted with the racial double-standard at work. The sequence where Alicia revisited her old house was very well-done(*), and also tied in nicely to the Caitlin subplot. Alicia suggests that Caitlin will want to go back to work one day and will regret the time away, and while she’s flourished at Lockhart Gardner, I do wonder if it would have ever occurred to her to return to the law (at least, before both kids were off to college) if it hadn’t been for Peter’s arrest.
(*) At first, I wondered why the new owners wouldn’t have painted over the height markers Alicia made as the kids grew up, but then I remembered there are a couple of obscure corners in my house where we never got around to covering up things referring to previous owners.
And the Cary/Peter subplot did a nice job of illustrating a problem that is very real at many workplaces: not overt, ugly racism, but a boss who subconsciously feels more comfortable with others of a similar background (and skin color), filling the leadership positions with those people without even recognizing what he’s doing. Peter’s not evil, but we know he has flaws, and this is one he’s not even fully aware of. “The Good Wife” is often at its best in dealing with subtler ethical/moral issues like this, and that was a strong story that made its point without pushing too hard.
What did everybody else think?