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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.19, “Tying The Knot” is a twisty meditation on perception

The Good Wife is obsessed, especially lately, with memory, with subjective experience and the way it colors our entire perceptions of the world around us. We never get out of our heads, after all. Everything we ever experience is colored by this limitation. Our senses and our recollections are all we have to tie us to the past, and to help us pull ourselves forward. The world outside ourselves is something we can only do our best to conceive of. Anything but our own flawed memory is pure conjecture.

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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.17, “A Material World” lets Alicia get messy

“A Material World” opens with a scene that is basically right out of any true The Good Wife fan’s dreams: Alicia Florrick and Diane Lockhart getting plastered together on martinis. The two commemorate their friend Will, confess to their insecurities, share a few secrets, and shake hands, coming away with a vague notion that they will begin work on merging Lockhart Gardner and Florrick Agos.

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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.15, “Dramatics, Your Honor” changes everything

Sometimes something happens and the world falls apart. Gravity drops out and you are left floating, untethered to your surroundings, separate in a way. Nothing makes sense anymore. The world doesn’t work in the way it’s supposed to and it may never function in that way again. Reality feels unreal, sounds reach you as if they are traveling through water. Nothing can touch you, because if it did, everything would fall to pieces.

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The Good Wife, Ep 5.13 “Parallel Construction, Bitches” brings dormant plots back

The mid-season break The Good Wife took over the last few months was almost certainly not built into the show’s plan for the season (if it was, it was not handled particularly elegantly). Where plenty of other network shows have taken to doing “mid-season finales” and structuring their longer, more unwieldy episode counts like two mini-seasons that form a more coherent whole, this is a show that works best as a behemoth, a large series of interconnecting plotlines that slowly fade in and out of relevance and become increasingly or decreasingly important across the season.

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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.12 “We The Juries”: Judicial gimmickry with a Kalinda problem

A few times a season, The Good Wife likes to do a “judicial gimmick” episode, throwing the attorneys into a fish out of water situation and watching as they flail, trying to adapt to something they simply do not prepare for in an average trial. “We, The Juries” is one such episode, throwing Will, Diane, Alicia, and Cary into a complicated single trial with two defendants and a bifurcated jury—one for each client. This complicates things not only for both prongs of the defense, but for the prosecution and the judge (played by the always welcome Victor Garber as an imminently decent, efficiency-minded jurist increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of the system he decided on to try the case).

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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.11, “Goliath and David” is a wacky blow-off episode

The Good Wife returns from its short winter break this week with an episode that is erratic at best. “Goliath and David” has a mediocre case-of-the-week, an annoying plotline involving Marilyn’s baby, sub-par Lockhart Gardner drama, and hints that the Kalinda/Damian story is going to get as bad as we’d worried. Basically, it is an episode that shows that even at its best, The Good Wife makes the occasional misstep.

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