We pick up where we left off last week, with Eli’s bombshell about deleting the message from Will, and Alicia is pretty darn scary when she’s angry. It’s a nice touch having Jason pop by later that night when she was all over the place, opening the door just a crack so he wouldn’t see the smashed crockery.
Meanwhile, Zach’s back! The family are forced together – along with Ruth, Eli and the rest of the campaign staff – for the Iowa caucus, and Ruth gets more than she bargained for when she attempts a bit of on-the-road bonding with Alicia. Unsurprisingly, our protagonist is pondering what might have been. Ruth reckons what’s for you won’t go by you (and also, cheerily, “at the end of every fork, there’s a cliff”) but Alicia’s in full-on Dear Diary mode, complete with a dirge-tastic personal soundtrack. Ever the strategist, Ruth’s response is to relay (or cook up?) a story of her own to persuade Alicia that she was always destined to be here.
Meanwhile, and very topically, Howard and Jackie are thrashing out their pre-nup and David Lee’s in hot water over some money he hid in some kind of act of Panama Paper-y jiggery-pokery. Implausibly, Diane and Cary seem appalled. “You committed fraud?” they ask. “No, I committed selective depositing,” he replies. Very good.
Adding to the woes of Lockhart, Agos and Lee is the fact that new associate Monica complained of discriminatory hiring practices after the racism-athon that was her first round of interviews, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle even now she’s been hired (and in fact, her hiring only makes matters look more dodgy). Diane orders Cary under the bus, but he swerves out of its path and throws Howard under it instead. Good.
In among all this there’s a presidential campaign happening, of course. Happening, then screeching to a halt when Peter comes a distant fourth in Iowa and it comprehensively ruled out of a White House bid. Eli tells Ruth they put the wrong Florrick forward, but with so few episodes to go and Alicia close to wringing his neck, such talk is all a little late.
Notes
“It’s not about the crowds – you’ll never beat Hillary and Bernie on crowds.” I love how real it all feels – it must have been quite a challenge for the writers to future-proof their scripts.
Couldn’t Peter at least have managed a smile for his bizarre fancy-dress-rapper supporter? No wonder he came last.
Err… didn’t Zach totally break the rules by chatting up that Georgetown chick? “Let them come to you” was the instruction, if I’m not mistaken. He’s certainly his father’s son.
Shona Craven 