(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I finished watching The Good Wife last night.

By the end of the show, the Eli Gold and Marissa Gold dynamic was my favorite part of the show, and I am delighted to learn that Marissa is a regular on The Good Fight. More chances to root for the show to give me Marissa dancing. (Eli dances in a supply closet in a Season 2 episode, it is spectacular)

I didn't love the ending. They maneuvered so hard against giving Alicia a happy ending. Breaks between her and both Diane and Cary! Was that really necessary? It certainly didn't seem entirely logical. I kept expecting Alicia to make some gesture toward reconciliation with Cary. And of course the finale suggests the break with Diane is conclusive, although she's had conclusive breaks with Diane before.

The structure of the finale seems to suggest an effort to imply Alicia's path forward is to follow Peter's path. Eli is urging donors to give to Alicia, her reputation has largely been rehabilitated, the Frank Landau storyline largely petered out, she is severed from Peter... That's what Diane's slap is supposed to be about, her fury that Alicia has chosen performing loyalty to Peter (not to her husband, but to the political future for Saint Alicia he represents) over loyalty and friendship to Diane. But it's much more incoherent than that in practice. Even if Alicia is divorcing Peter, she has strong ties to him through her children and their shared history, and anyway, the argument that they have an obligation as lawyers to offer the best defense possible seems clear here. And Diane knows all this, and so do us viewers, so the slap's motivation is blurry and messy. After all, Kurt betrayed Diane, not Alicia!

But ugh, do I really believe that Alicia's future is in running for office? I'm not convinced. She always seems happiest when she's lawyering, and unhappiest when involved in politics, and also, she's become by the time of the finale much more vulnerable to scandal than she was the last time she ran. Does Alicia really want the possibility of her extramarital affair with Jason exposed? And so this narrative that leads to the slap doesn't make emotional sense. The arc is blurry.

That said, well into Season 7, The Good Wife was a surprisingly smart and good show, even if the landing didn't stick.

I also want to say how delightful I found the whole NSA storyline... the NSA contractors as fanboys debating the show's plot points is just about the cleverest late-series meta take I've ever seen, simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and at its center, deeply true. I know in my heart that that's what NSA contractors are really like, wielding incredible power and corrupted by it, but still essentially human in their failings. If I want to vid anything in the show, it's probably the NSA storyline.

Comments

[hannah]

If the show had ended the moment Alicia really left Peter, with the final shot being her letting go of his hand, I'd have been so much happier with that.

[seekingferret]

Yes, I agree.

[hannah]

The vid I always imagine for this show is an Alicia character study to "Cactus Tree" - because for all the relationships she's had, and all the work she does, her core conflict is how to be free. "So busy being free" sums up the character for me.

[seekingferret]

That makes a lot of sense. The cinematography of the show is full of angles that emphasize the way people are always watching Alicia, and she is aware of being watched, and I feel like a lot of the show is about her learning how to stop caring if she's being watched and in that way carve out some freedom by not letting others, imaginary or real, police her behavior. A thing I really loved in Season 7 was how they shot Alicia being increasingly affectionate in public with Jason, using the same kinds of camera angles they used on Alicia Season 1... I was convinced that at any moment the show would reveal that they'd been photographed together by a paparazzo, and then it never happened. It was actually a really effective failure of a Chekhov's gun to go off, in that it showed how things changed between Season 1 and 7.

[calledtovienna]

I never got into The Good Wife, but I did get into the Good Fight (and only petered out around the middle of Season 3, and I still have it on my laptop). I don't know if I would call it good, but I am excited to see what you think about it.

[seekingferret]

I'm curious how The Good Fight reads to someone who didn't watch The Good Wife, I'm only two episodes in but it's chock full of tiny references to The Good Wife that seem likely to skate over the head of someone just jumping in.

[calledtovienna]

Yeah, I thought that the first season relied on that a lot. It felt weak to me, and in particular, I was annoyed by its focus on white characters (who, with one exception, are recurring characters from the Good Wife -- but coming in clean, it was hard for me to emotionally be excited about, for example, Marissa Gold). I thought that the future seasons got gradually better at walking that line.

[seekingferret]

Hmm... I think I actually found that Season 2 of The Good Fight leaned even harder on returning guest characters from The Good Wife than S1, but with almost no signposting of them for new viewers, just some giant winks. There's an episode in Season 2, the one with the split between Liz's Case and Lucca's Case, where every single guest character is a guest character from some place in the Good Wife, and at the end of the episode they all edge into an elevator together and ride away as a silent meta joke about how much re-use of Good Wife worldbuilding the Good Fight is doing.

That said, I think Season 2 did a much better job of not being overly focused on the white characters... finishing up the Rindell storyline cleared up so much storytelling room for more interesting things, and they took advantage. Now I'm two or three episodes into Season 3, which feels too implausibly batshit for TV but batshit in more or less the same way American politics is today. :/