Tuned In

The Good Wife Watch: Forget It, Alicia. It's China.

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CBS

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up:

I’m coming late to yesterday’s The Good Wife, but “Great Firewall” was such a strong episode—both in itself and for how it brought more than one major story arc to a head—that I at least feel obligated to put up a post for discussion. The double (triple? I lost count) cross of Bond and the bringing down of Childs (again, involving plots within plots) were so compelling that they almost eclipsed a very strong story-of-the-week, with guest star Ken Leung, involving Internet companies and co-operation with Chinese torture of dissidents.

In a way, though, I would argue that that standalone case actually serviced The Good Wife’s most important serial story of all: the increasing moral complication of Alicia and her relationship with the firm. Even more of a gut punch than the twists in the abovementioned stories was Alicia’s realization that the firm’s supposedly high-minded handling of its case was actually in the larger interest of another client—who would gladly sell out Chinese citizens to the government once the competition was out of the way.

Will makes the argument that, in this world, the best you can usually hope for is to do the right thing for the wrong reason: “Who’s doing something for the right reason? I’d love to met them, because after five minutes of questioning, I believe we’d find the wrong reason.” As much as we share Alicia’s horror, he has a point, and the real strength of The Good Wife—as I’ve written before, what makes it unlike any TV drama not on cable—is its willingness to live in this moral gray area.

Your thoughts? (And yes, I realize I’m leaving out a lot of plot in this extremely densely packed episode.) Where do we go from here?