The Good Wife: Season seven, episode four: Taxed

Peter Gallagher as Ethan Carver and  Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart. I’m sad this is the last series because I think we’ve run out of time for Diane to reveal that she has a secret daughter, played by Taylor Swift.

I’m watching season seven at UK pace via More4. No spoilers in the comments please!

Another week, another winning combination of juicy legal battles and our favourite characters doing what they do best. We’ve got Alicia being outraged at the injustices of Bond Court, Diane parking her ethics to please a client, Louis Canning playing up his disability to derail a cross-examination and Eli pulling various Florrick strings behind the scenes.

Is this the first time we’ve had an assisted suicide case? If so, I’m surprised the writers resisted the temptation for so long. Diane is conflicted when she’s asked to go from devil’s advocate to actual advocate and argue against the right to die, while Canning is the stopped clock that’s (morally in the) right twice a day.

I feel like this case really deserved a whole episode to itself. There was a lot to take in – the medical evidence, the faithless boyfriend, the Scabbit scavenging, the Trojan horse reveal – and the twists and turns all felt a bit rushed. It was also a little odd that Oliver Platt’s Reese Dipple didn’t make an appearance. Sure, he’s a busy man, but the Ken-doll-come-to-life who was sent to do his right-wing bidding wasn’t very persuasive. Now, if he’d been wearing a lumberjack shirt and toting a pistol…

Meanwhile, in Bond Court, Alicia’s colleagues are dehumanising their clients and also really not being very good lawyers, it seems. “This is not To Kill a Mockingbird,” the grumpy (and quite possibly corrupt) judge warns our heroine, who promptly starts gathering names for a class action against a department store that appears to be racially profiling its customers.

In the end nothing comes of it – a cynical person might note that when people are accused of racism in The Good Wife, nothing generally does – but I couldn’t help think of Sarah Reed, who died in custody in England last month, when that panicked woman was carted off to the cells for refusing to plead guilty to a shoplifting charge.

Notes

Investigator Jason Crouse is back on the scene, and naturally it turns out he has A Past. Not since Robert Downey Jnr joined the cast of Ally McBeal has anyone smouldered quite so forcefully. I almost can’t handle it.

Glad to see Ruth proving her worth after last week’s major boo-boo.

Also glad to see Alicia and Lucca are still pub pals/possible partners.

For God’s sake Eli, move that desk back! Or get a smaller one. There must be an Ikea in the vicinity.