The Good Wife: “The Decision Tree” (Episode 5.10)

Best episode ending. Ever.

The combination of Marilyn announcing she intends to name her baby boy “Peter” and Eli’s subsequent spit take provided a delightfully hilarious and surprising ending to the 100th episode of The Good Wife.

What is Marilyn up to? Let’s consider the possibilities:
1. As long feared by Eli, Marilyn and Peter did have an affair (or at least a one-night
stand), and the Governor is the father of her unborn child.
2. She’s just messing with Eli and trying to make him apoplectic. I mean this is a
woman obnoxious enough to wear a sound system for her baby to listen to in utero.
3. She has a father/brother/favorite uncle named Peter, and the naming of her child is
completely unrelated.

What’s great about The Good Wife is that each option is equally viable. Unfortunately we’ll have to wait until January to find out—the series will be in repeats until then.

The 100th episode was at times heart-wrenching, at times hilarious and full of meta jokes. (My personal favorite was the callback to the show’s pilot. “Your husband’s the fellow who slept with all those prostitutes,” Damian says to Alicia.)

Alicia discovers her now deceased client Matthew Ashbaugh (returning guest star John Noble) has left her 12 million dollars in his will. His widow, represented by Lockhart Gardner, I’m sorry, I mean LG, is contesting the will.

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But really the whole case was just to flashback to Will and Alicia’s romance. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been,” Alicia tells Will. Will does have a “whole lot of anger” towards Alicia. But we learn, as we have long suspected, that he is more hurt by Alicia than angry with her. He fears that Alicia has been using him all along.

Oh and they are totally still into each other. The scenes of Will cross-examining Alicia both in his mind and in the courtroom were immensely powerful. Alicia knew just what questions Will would ask and how to get the better of him. I stand by my prediction that Will and Alicia will have another steamy encounter before the season ends.

The only thing that continues to not work is the Kalinda story line. As happy as I am to see PJ from My Boys (guest star Jordana Spiro) as a detective, I don’t like Kalinda totally off on her own tangent. And her back-and-forth with Damian is far too reminiscent of the tension she had with Blake (Scott Porter) back in season two. Damian has far more of a twinkle in his eye than Blake ever did, so I don’t expect Kalinda to need her bat any time soon. But the whole thing feels redundant. And why haven’t Alicia and Kalinda had a scene together since Alicia left to form Florrick/Agos?

Other thoughts on “The Decision Tree”:

—David Lee really needed to be in this episode. I missed him and his M & M’s.
—So happy to see Lemond Bishop again.
—“Sometimes I think of you as mom. And sometimes I think of you as just an interesting person who lives in our house.” Well said, Zach. Well said.
—And any time you can have Jackie and Veronica face off against each other is a good time.