Before I go on, let me announce something important about last night's Good Wife: Nick, jealous of Cary's rapport with Kalinda, snarked at Cary for wearing nice suits and then called him "gay." It was a typically incendiary Nick move, but the remark provoked the cutest damn Cary face I have ever seen, so if we treat this as a mathematical equation, we arrive at: Cary + Gay = Cute. Pencils down. I call this a victory. Nick, kill yourself.
Too bad this episode was pretty awful. While the majority of it focused on likable daughter Grace and her weird, flirty relationship with a well-groomed peer whose ex-girlfriend (also named Grace, because of SYMBOLISM) just killed herself, The Good Wife slagged around in lame old storylines we don't care too much about. The firm is going under, but a new case involving a murderess and a hit man may save it altogether(?)! Kalinda and Nick are the new Bonnie and Clyde, except not them, and the worst. Peter's campaign is dogged by the same old gossipy gobbledygook, and Eli is still a raging popsticle stick about it. Otherwise, here are five things I found myself actively caring about:
1. Judd Hirsch is drunk, and I'm drunk on it.
The Good Wife's mission to serve up every beloved onetime Oscar nominee of the 1980s-90s is noble. We had F. Murray Abraham last week, Judd Hirsch (of the unbeatable Ordinary People) this week, and next week we have Stockard "STOCKARD" Channing joining the ranks. What! What. Holler for all these notables.
Hirsch played alcohol-loving Judge Creary, a blowhard whom Alicia and Will accuse of bias and try to get removed from a case. You see, Judge Creary ran into Will at a bar and drunkenly confessed that he believed Will shouldn't even be allowed to practice. Whoops! Alicia and Will decide to claim that Creary is unfit to rule on their murderess/hit man case since he hates Will's guts, and suddenly our Taxi vet barrister finds himself shivering in the back of his own court while Alicia turns up evidence that he's a notorious drunkard. Yikes.
The important thing is that Judd Hirsch is here. He did a great job, he was 100% less sympathetic than his psychologist role in Ordinary People, and he conjured the kind of surprise seriousness that one may associate with his old costar Andy Kaufman. God, "mad" Andy Kaufman was scary. I hope Hirsch was inspired by his tantrum-y escapades.
2. Grace is ruining all of Peter Florrick's family values!
Young Grace, who hasn't been very visible this season, pals up at school with a boy whose girlfriend killed herself. He's a nonchalant delinquent, smoking in the courtyard and being sexy whenever he wants. Grace finds this attractive for some reason and quizzes him about things like believing in God and missing his dead girlfriend WHO DIED SECONDS AGO. Their dynamic was bizarre, and worst of all, the press is snapping pictures of Grace hanging out with the Marlboro boy. Uh-oh. Is this a kink in Peter's flawless campaign? As long as this new bad boy doesn't smear egg on Grace's boob like Nick did to Kalinda, I'm completely fine with this couple.
3. Nothing can be worse than the "teenage" dialogue of this episode.
I hate terrible teenage dialogue. I hate it. I hate it. It is so rare that we get screenwriters who care to make teenagers sound real, and therefore I just shuddered while sitting through a scene where Grace's friends debated why the other Grace killed herself. "Who told you she got an abortion?" one asked another. "I don't know," the reply began. "Somebody retweeted it."
Shut the hell up. Literally no one ever has or ever will respond to a query about the alleged abortion of a freshly dead peer with "Somebody retweeted it." Kids are not just idiotic bubbles of buzzwords! Do you know anyone who speaks that way? Because they don't. If you think they do, you're just old. See? All makes sense now.
4. Yes, I reacted to Cary's beatdown like a worried lover.
OK, we all know the Nick nonsense is spiraling to a conclusion, but it's happening in the zaniest way possible. Following a contentious conversation with Cary that I'll recount momentarily, Nick sent out a lackey to beat up Cary in a bastard of a rainstorm. Yes, that's right: Nick hired someone to beat up his own lawyer. After all, he's unpredictable! And fascinating! And whatever, this is tiring. But God, Cary's painful screams resonated in my abdomen like decades of mourning. Ugh. When he moaned, I threw myself on my desk and wailed like the lady in the opening credits of PBS'Mystery!. Tough. But the grim, hazy smackdown could do nothing to tarnish the memory of the scene that preceded it. Ahem: Here comes husband material in the form of a winsome grin and a swoon-provoking GIF.
5. CUTE CARY FACE MAKES THE EPISODE FIIIIINE.
Cary and Kalinda enjoyed a moment of smiley eye contact by a copy machine, and that is sincerely what drove Nick to the brink. Sincerely. It's what also led to the pictured conversation, one where Nick leans in like a knife-wielding baddie in the "Beat It" video and quizzes Cary about his Calvin Klein jacket. "You don't wear suits like that when you're out and about. You don't wear suits like that on weekends, do you?" he inquires, looking like Gordon Ramsay's sewer rat brother. After Cary politely says no, Nick contnues, "Good, because people might think you're gay or something. You're not gay, are you?"
I understand that he's trying to emasculate Cary, but is the way to achieve "alpha male" realness by noticing that a suit fits? He's a lawyer, honey. Lawyers wear suits and sometimes pullover sweaters, like a few weeks ago. I don't know why I've vowed to make sense out of Nick, but I just found this whole scene shrug-worthy.
As opposed to HUG-worthy, which Cary is.
Did you also dislike this episode? Is Grace slightly intriguing? And most importantly: Come on, who else here wants Cary's suit?
