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
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Geneva Pine sneakily pulls over Hunter Parrish (aka Silas Botwin Guinard, the best thing about most of Weeds) for a fake DUI that turns out to be a DNA test on an murder case from last year where a girl got doped with Special K and later murdered. Will takes over the case (the family was a client of Alicia's) and spends the whole episode with Kalinda trying to figure out who actually did the murder.
We never find out for sure -- although it seems unfortunately likely that Silas did it, in the end -- but it does bring Will into contact with Alicia's brother, who's a professor at the school where all this went down. Owen pitches him hard on the idea that Florrick/Agos -- and their sexy war -- is Alicia's way of keeping Will at arm's length, but Will seems determined to get over her. (And to continue giving his best performances on the series to date, if not his entire career.)
Meanwhile, that lawyer kid from the abortion case a while back shows up with a malpractice suit against Lockhart/Gardner that also brings Alicia into the firm several times: A botched adoption involving a bribe to the Chippewa Nation that obviously was David Lee's doing. That one awful fourth-year that always bitches about their bonuses ends up taking the fall for the bribe, but only on the way to selling Alicia out for the entire $6M settlement, as a way of getting a partner position back at L/G. So now she's on the hook for this malpractice thing, unfortunately, but at least we are rid of Bonus Guy.
Complicating this -- and when she finally runs into Will at the firm, it's a complicated silence indeed -- is the fact that a boy at Grace and Zach's school has been hacking her webcam to capitalize on Grace's newfound internet fame. Zach beats the guy up and Grace is very pleased with him, but the whole thing is so icky that they never tell Alicia the whole story, and she ends up still under the impression that her home is being bugged by David Lee in some kind of awful conspiracy.
Over at F/A, aka the living room, things are going poorly. Leveraging the malpractice stuff gets Alicia back her capital contribution, which may or may not even help, because they're bleeding cash. Eventually Cary brings in Nathan Lane's wonderful Clarke Hayden -- who has passed the Bar! -- to get their finances in order, and because they are in gay love with each other, and finally he joins the firm... But only after offering major assistance on every other thing going on in the episode. It looks like he'll at least get them into offices next week, and if that's accompanied by turning them into the lean, mean machine he's always wanted, and they say they want, it'll be a valuable addition indeed -- his eagerness to outsource the administrative stuff notwithstanding.
It's pretty standard for an episode -- if, given the insanity of this season, it's possible to even say what that really means -- but at the end we find the pieces in place for some bigger stuff down the line, and some fun twists and turns throughout both major court cases. Alicia comes in guns blazing at first, but quickly cools off and behaves herself, and it's fairly beautiful to watch everybody at L/G (besides David Lee, of course) follow suit. Watching these people remember their dignity is always satisfying, but never moreso than when it's Alicia, acclimatizing both quickly and well to her new F/A leadership role.
Next Week: America Ferrera! Natalie Flores shows back up to bring some sunshine to Eli's life -- and a bunch of ethics concerns into Marilyn's, of course -- while we're told that Robyn, and this is intriguing, "tries to be more like Kalinda." A goal to which any right-minded individual should aspire.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!JEFFREY GRANT
Is played by Hunter Parrish, which, depending on if you watched the show and more precisely how long you watched the show, is either a good thing or a bad one. But his casting here seems to be a dark joke that doesn't depend on either of those, so much as on his natural charisma (and the theater ties of many of the show's guest stars) that it's really only anecdotal when I say that I still miss Silas Botwin sometimes, and that made the twists (in this very basic, this surprisingly and a little painfully basic, episode) a lot more hair-raising than they might be if you weren't invested on that level.
Although either way, you'd be forgiven for finding the procedural plots and elements of this episode particularly tone-deaf and arbitrary. We come to the show because it isn't a standard procedural, so when things get a little interchangeable it's disappointing. Even if it's still the best season of the best show on prime time -- which it is -- and even if you discount the stupid zero-sum thinking that says every show has some duds every now and then like it's a fact of nature -- which it absolutely isn't -- it's a resigned whimper, not an angry bang, that finds most of this episode regrettably forgettable. Whatever.
Jeffrey gets pulled over on his way to Italian class at Chicago Polytechnic, even though he's going 35 and doing nothing more complex than practicing (some seriously remedial) conversational Italian. At first the cop tries to freak him out the usual ways, ordering him to stop calling his lawyer and get out the paperwork and whatever, but then when he spies some cold medicine in the jump seat he seizes on that instead.
Before you know it, Jeffrey's disregarded everything a person should do in this situation and he's getting hauled to the station because the breathalyzer he clearly doesn't need to take "isn't working" or some bullshit. Zach Florrick would be so disappointed! Flex your rights, son!
L/G PARTNER MTG
They call L/G for Alicia -- who represented his real estate mogul father on an assault charge a couple weeks ago, nice family -- and, as per protocol, the receptionist goes to alert the partners about the possibility of keeping this client. Will dicks the kid around about how Alicia is unavailable, and when his voice reaches hysteria levels he promises to come running.