Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 319 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Since The Night Matthew Ashbaugh Died
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.27.2013
The gross irony of getting pushed out for this thing she wanted so much it nearly broke her when she lost it the first time, only to recapitulate that same evolution on the one person whose fate might determine it. We know that -- despite David Lee's venom, guaranteed tantrums -- Lockhart/Gardner would have to take her back, because it falls apart without her. We can read the writing on the wall. But for Diane, she's got to take her pride and emotions and put them in her handbag and sit here waiting on an audience with the king so she can beg.
Generally when a person on this show vacillates, they let themselves be corrupted by the choice -- things get messy while they're waiting; things flip over -- and that's why their indecision leads to their destruction: Sit too long on the fence and you'll fall apart. And I was going to say Diane's better than that, but actually it's the perfect description for the Mandy Post bullshit.
Coincidences aplenty led her here, complicating and corrupting: Eli trying to get around her having to sell Will out, but getting it done seconds too late. Will letting his Diane disappointment harden his image of Alicia into the perfect partner, into everything but the sex. An office-decorating stipend she couldn't stop thinking about, as patterns bubbled to the surface; as she obsessed on the idea of leaving the house she built with their love and her pride intact, hands clean. Peter's attraction to Marilyn -- and his intuition of Alicia's ongoing ambivalence -- getting weaponized by today's events into a scorched-earth strategy to prove his love, to both of them.
Some of those she knows about, some of them she could figure out. But none of those stories, those lead-up narratives, those intentions, mean anything in the result: An old woman with her hat in hand, sitting in the lobby of the king, waiting to beg.
Eli: "Hi! We don't have a meeting?"
Diane: "I have some sticky news."
Eli: "Alicia getting fired? Girl, it is all we been talking about!"
Diane: "Not fired. Asked to leave early, as they told me at my own ouster."
Eli: "That sounds pretty chill, considering you slapped her fledgling business with a barely legal restraining order."
Diane: "I didn't do that! I didn't do any of it! I don't even work there! I mean, I am no longer involved with strategy at Lockhart/Gardner."
Eli: "So when you go into court this afternoon to defend the restraining order..."
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