Focusing on short-term goals often creates terrible long-term problems. There were some truly awful decisions being made amid crises in this week’s The Good Wife, which had a tense, dramatic, terrifically entertaining return from its winter hiatus.
Those decisions worked out well in the short-term for our characters in the appropriately-named “Hail Mary,” but set up a big cloud of looming consequences. The hands down winner of the Everyone Makes Terrible Choices Hour was Kalinda, who crossed into falsifying police evidence--and who inexplicably asked Chicago’s resident super-menacing drug kingpin for another favor. (Shouldn’t Kalinda have figured out by now that she should deputize these requests to someone who hasn’t threatened Lemond Bishop’s son???)
The police hacking ultimately worked out, for now, for Kalinda. But whether or not she eventually gets caught, Bishop doesn’t seem inclined to let her off the hook; he’s already literally calling in his favor by the episode’s end. That adds a sour aftertaste to Cary’s last-minute reprieve from jail, which seemed surreal; I half-expected that final court scene to be a dream sequence from an incarcerated Cary, Occurrence at Owl Creek-style.
It’s apparently not, but there were other near-fantasy moments as our characters celebrated Cary’s reprieve, including Alicia’s elated, seemingly out-of-nowhere embrace with her campaign manager. (Nope, not Finn; the guy who has great hair and better sarcasm, but about whom we know so little that I still can’t remember his character’s name.)
Alicia was having a reckless episode already, blowing off debate prep in favor of checking up on Cary’s sentencing; flirting with Finn in front of her husband; asking Peter to pull strings in the governor’s office for Cary’s sake; and finally, perhaps most devastatingly, publicly attacking Peter for his professional record in the course of their debate prep session.
I expect that to have the most long-term fallout for Alicia, who’s being more and more open about wanting to be her own woman this season, while still relying on her marriage to launch her political career. But that marriage has been pretty fractured personally, and Alicia’s heated words (and kisses) this episode seem to be attacking its professional usefulness, too. At the very least, this "good wife’s" short-term decisions may soon make her series in need of a long-term title change.
