Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 12 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Will v. Grace
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.30.2012
Peter: "Good one. What do you want?"
Alicia: "Stop this investigation."
Peter: "No. That's the old Peter that would make things go away in a wrong fashion."
Alicia: "Your problem was not that you did things that were wrong, your problem was doing wrong things against your family."
Say what?
Peter: "Well, Will Gardner ain't my family."
He bounces, and Alicia's like, "I can't believe I just tried that shit. I feel like when I bought that Bitcoin, only I'm the Bitcoin."
Is it weird that my first response to this is just sadness? It hurts my feelings. It's good, growing up is defined by the ability to handle complexity and the tension of opposites and to look at yourself and see and love what you really are without compromise or denial. You want that for her. This should be a happy moment, really. But without St. Alicia, like, what the fuck happens then?
Because she just said two separate things. First, the tacit admission that comes directly from having this conversation at all, which is that she's willing to leverage him and lie to him and throw Season One in his face to stop this from happening. That's pretty bad. Mayor Sheeit caught it; Cary Agos caught it. "Real's gonna change," they said. "Just watch." And she never saw it coming.
But the second thing -- the more momentous, more vertiginous, more transformative thing -- that she just said is, "I just realized that I've always been complicit." That her innocence, in retrospect, was just as leveraged as anything else. That she turned around and looked at herself and saw a liar, a good wife, somebody accountable for Peter's legal indiscretions. That she cosigned his corruption, down through the years, and that she wants him to go back to that, and never knew any of it until he came after L/G.
It's a tremendously beautiful moment; it is a sickening moment too.
PARKS TESTIMONY
Parks: (Introduces himself.)
Cary: "Thank you, sir."
Parks: "Your Honor."
Cary: "Ha! Right, Your Honor. Can we say you're a reluctant witness today?"
Parks: "Um, it's a witch hunt. You're trying to criminalize the concept of friendship."
Cary, verbatim: "Did the attorney Will Gardner ever offer you a bribe, Your Honor?"
Parks, verbatim: "...Upon the advice of counsel I am here today to assert my right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination."