Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 76 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Zach & Gracie Make A Porno
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 7 | Aired on 11.10.2013
Another theater world transplant and recent guest star, the young lawyer Schmidt who got so mad at Alicia over that abortion case a couple weeks back, is the lawyer in this one too. We're here to depose regarding who knew what about the Gopnik adoption, so we know who the real problem was.
Alicia: "Hey. How are the um, Isenstadts?"
Schmidt: "Not thrilled? Desperately sad? Living in a daily nightmare?"
Alicia: "I really do actually care. I am so sorry for them."
Schmidt: "Me too. Thanks for saying that."
David Lee: "Shut up about that stupid baby and let's do this."
Diane: "Sorry I'm late, but I had a real case to deal with."
Schmidt: "Sorry I'm impervious to your disdain, but let's do what we can to make this case quote 'real' for you. I will get very fucking real if I can. Alicia, you're up. How long were you on this adoption?"
Alicia: "About four months."
Schmidt: "And were you the supervising attorney?"
Alicia: "I did the day-to-day management, I looked at some of the documents the younger associates drew up..."
Everybody's confused for a minute because she's acting like Alicia Florrick and not this devil creature they've all been picturing her as (Schmidt included, if you remember his last shot with her) and she instantly names the associates and the documents for him, and generally is just helpful and poised, like every day Alicia. You can feel Diane relax, on one level, even as she watches them both like a hawk.
Alicia: "Really I was just shuffling paper. Mr. Lee was the partner supervising it overall."
Schmidt: "You were aware the genetic father was part Chippewa?"
Alicia: "I became aware of that."
Schmidt: "And did you also become aware of how that heritage gave the tribe an absolute right to block this adoption?"
Alicia: "I became aware of that, made the Gopniks aware of that, and they insisted on proceeding anyway."
He presses, and Diane tries to get him to move on, but he's playing a different coded game where he's trying to get Alicia to understand he's about to need her to flip on them in a big way, so he emphasizes several times -- until she gets it, actually -- how they have mistreated and fired and been dicks to her.
Here there's also this dumb thing that acts like a joke but isn't actually a joke, which is that Diane supplies the German word for Alicia's ouster, Gesundschrumpfen, as if it's the translation of "Getting pushed out of a law firm ahead of her desertion," the joke being that Germans have a compound noun for everything, which is something Baby Boomers still find funny. Since literally the translation is "healthy shrinkage" you might think she's being clever or pointed regardless, but it's actually just the German term for "downsizing," so it's a non-joke inside a joke inside another non-joke, which is one of those nuances about this episode that, taken together, coalesces into relative (but not general) dissatisfaction. The good parts are very good, so let's not dwell.
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