It’s not unusual that I won’t totally grasp the details of the case of a week on The Good Wife. Sometimes, things get rushed through; sometimes, the case is less important than the larger plots it’s pushing. I suppose that was true with this episode’s case, but I have to confess, I barely had any idea what was going on for most of the time. There was a couple, a dorky professor and a sexy blonde lady, enjoying some sort of improbable love, but they’d also maybe brought cocaine back with them to America for a drug trafficker? Or did the stewardess (Ashley Williams, Ted’s lady from How I Met Your Mother) do it? Who knows! There’s two juries, though! And a very frustrated Victor Garber!
The point of the case of the week was really two-fold. One was to explore another weird facet of the law, something this show loves doing. In this case, it was a two-jury trial, where two cases are tried simultaneously for two separate juries. I have never heard of such a thing, and I am sure that it is rare, because boy, oh boy, does this shit look complicated. One jury can’t hear some of the things another jury can, nobody wants to sit in the folding chairs, and there’s some business with stinky Thai food I wish we’d explored further. Garber, making his first appearance as a judge of the week, empanels the two juries in the name of efficiency and quickly regrets that decision.
Because the real reason we’re watching this chaos unfold is that it’s another way to get Alicia and Will together. Usually, they’re on opposite ends of the courtroom, but The Good Wife knows how implausible that’s going to be week to week. Plus, we’ve been starved of Geneva and Matan, prosecutors extraordinaire, who show up for this case. With the two juries, Alicia and Will have to fight on the same side, but only sort of, since each is representing one of the defendants. Predictably, infighting, weird legal tactics, and an eventual frosty alliance ensue.
Right? I think that’s what happened at the end, but like I said, I didn’t really follow. The whole thing already had me completely baffled before it looked like Robyn had cracked the case—the cute couple didn’t do it, it was the mean stewardess we saw earlier! Classic bait and switch! So Alicia tries to nail the case to her head, and (I think) gets Will on her side to do the same, but it only kinda works, and Alicia’s client ends up with a plea bargain while Will’s walks free. The conclusion felt rushed, to say the least, and while it was probably realistic that Alicia couldn’t turn around the charges onto the stewardess with one cross-examination, that piece of evidence felt unexplored. This struck me as an episode where a lot fell on the cutting room floor.