Monsters of Television

“I’m following the law, not agreeing with.”

It’s a challenge to review a show when you don’t want to pause it or look away. You don’t want to stop the show’s pace in any way or remove yourself from that pace to scribble or type a note about a scene. You force yourself to take it all in as much as possible and hope that your brain can recall the experience, what you were thinking when someone arched an eyebrow or how an actor just hit the beat in a line especially well. Sure, you could always rewind the episode if you’ve got it recorded, but it may play differently out of context of that pace (don’t even get me started if you watch it live).

This week’s The Good Wife had that quality. It moved at such a near seamless clip that I didn’t want to write any notes. And it’s a different experience than with Lost, which often demands, no matter how well made, taking a second to jot down ideas about what happened. While I’ve argued that Lost is at its best when it focuses on its characters, because of its thematic concerns and genre trappings, it depicts its characters in personal but epic ways. The Good Wife is about character in personal and intimate ways.

The stakes in the episode were remarkably high at a personal level, even for an audience member who has only seen around 5 episodes (like me). The episode seems to crest with Will and Alicia kissing, an event I’m sure the show has slowly been building to over the course of the season. The tension between them has been obvious in episode after episode (that I’ve seen anyway). It had to happen eventually. And that scene plays out nicely, from Will kissing Alicia to the break to Alicia kissing Will to Alicia breaking the kiss and leaving the office only to return and not find one another.

But that’s not the scene that really matters. The scene that matters is the morning after, when Will shows up at the apartment. Will’s arrival officially makes Alicia’s life a mess. I doubt that Will and Peter have ever been in the same room before this episode (I’m assuming there’s no reason for them to have been). And yet there they are. Drinking coffee that Alicia has made, sitting in furniture that she picked out and arranged. Her worlds have collided and she’s stuck between them.

Alicia has been balancing so many different roles — mother, lawyer, and, of course, the good wife — that fissures in her blank, mask-like face are beginning to form. Take her position in that scene. She sets down the tray and takes a seat in a chair away from both Will and Peter, drawing herself in a bit, trying to curl up in that small-ish chair. The next shot is from behind her, a wide shot of the room. We’re granted nearly her point-of-view, but the shots with Will or Peter as the focus also have a back half of Alicia’s head just out of focus, caught between them, but attached to neither.

That the show backs off from the kiss to recreate the status quo between Will and Alicia could feel like a cop out, but given the show’s maturity and personal stakes, the sequence works. Their conversation feels like an actual conversation, not a fictional one, one that you or someone you know may have had at some point. Even Will’s bargaining, that they’ll have dinner next week (Alicia doesn’t really reject this idea) feels like the efforts of man who wants so badly to be right that he’ll try anything.

And Will is a man who will try anything to be right. But like Alicia, he works to balance that desire to be right with larger needs. His desire for a class-action suit with this week’s case against an insurance company will help keep the floundering SL&G afloat, but he is driven to give his client’s baby a chance to live. So driven that he relinquishes an ace in the hole that would win them that class action, signing it away in a confidentiality agreement.

In the end, the episode returns to the status quo: Will and Alicia go back to the tension. Alicia doesn’t sleep with Peter again in the episode, leaving him to sleep alone in the guest room. And in that regard, the episode again parallels the overall structure of Lost. Things are resolved only to be replaced with new pressing questions, which ultimately feels like the status quo (questions are still questions, regardless of if they’re different ones). Both Will and Alicia struggle to maintain a balance within their lives and do the right thing. They, like the judge in the case, are bound by this entry’s epigraph: They follow a code that they must follow, even if they don’t want to.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• This is an episode where the more overt political machinations got in the way (hence the  “near seamless” qualification at the start). Eli’s talk with Pastor Isaiah went nowhere and felt shoe-horned in to give Alan Cumming something to do this week. Why not just replay last’s week awesome smack down of Becca? (I may link to that clip every week…)
• I swear, at some point, I’m going to do something about photography and this show. I really am. Eventually. No one beat me to it, please.
• Will gets all the best exchanges: “What’s her name?” “Bite me.” “Is that Dutch?” The only other truly funny moment was how quickly Peter took his shirt off when Alicia climbed into bed with him.