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THE KITTEN EQUATION

It might be hard to register at first but one of the coolest things about The Good Wife has its roots in Buffy: The theme that the soft or the fragile thing is always hiding teeth. As a feminist move, it has a lot of power, because we're put up over and over against things and people that look weak and then have to deal with what happens when you make the assumption. In TGW's Chicago, you're never more imperiled than when you go up against a kitten.

I'm not really talking about Alicia -- although if the end of S2 has anything to say about it, girlfriend is going to wreck shop this year -- but over and over you get the sense that intrinsic to the narrative world of the show is this idea of the overlooked and the presumed innocent being the most powerful people. Consider Martha Plimpton's wily Patti Nyholm, who uses her motherhood as a weapon; consider State's Attorney investigator Andrew Wiley, who carries infinite babies on his back and talks to demons through a stuffed animal, but did more damage in his third-act stint on the show than even gross old Blake Calamar.

Or look at wonderful, creepy Nancy Crozier, Mamie Gummer's insanely proper Hello Kitty of a prosecutor who uses her innocence pose just as hardcore as snake-turned-snake oil salesman Lou Canning (Michael J. Fox) uses his tardive dyskinesia to garner jury support. Or, my favorite example: Eli Gold (Alan Cummings) and his constant war against children. Eli can do anything, take anybody down, use any trick he wants, but the only thing he can't handle is kids, because you can't hurt kids. So again and again, first against Zach's awesomely gross girlfriend and later against the Florrick kids themselves, you see him brought up short by the one moral boundary not even he can justify. (And that's to say nothing of his crushed-out powerlessness against Ugly Betty, or the savior complex his daughter warns him about, both of which swing this theme around on its axis.)

Because that's the other side of the kitten equation: Anybody who is powerful is marked for a downfall. Whether it's Kalinda -- surely a superhuman in every way that matters -- or the highest and most corrupt State's Attorneys -- the unelected Glenn Childs, then the twice-elected Peter Florrick -- or Eli Gold himself, there's nobody on the show that isn't subject to extreme changes in fortune. The higher you go, the higher you fall.

Which is as good a place as any, to start, because what the last two seasons have done is bring about a moral framework in which Alicia's finally being forced to confront the actuality of power and influence in a way that affects her directly. In the first season, of course, Alicia was a first-year associate at Lockhart, Gardner, locked in a bakeoff with her coworker Cary Agos in such a way that the most she ever had to do, morally, was be astounded that not everybody else follows the rules as diligently as she does.

In Season Two, she was exposed to this behavior even in the people she admires most. I'm glad that we didn't go the route of woman-versus-woman implied in Diane Lockhart's earliest characterization, because that's something we've seen before. But to see Will engaged in political and legal ugliness, while simultaneously coming to a complex and layered understanding with Eli Gold and with Kalinda, means that in the end of the season, when Diane almost regretfully has to inform Alicia that her career is on the upswing -- as long as she's willing to use her connections -- she's got the perfect recipe for a whole new understanding of the world. The catalyst, of course, being the ultimate reveal: That even her greatest friend is not above personal betrayals.

But we've already seen Alicia freak out, several times in fact, upon learning that not everybody loves being Good as much as she does, and that they regularly benefit from doing the things she won't do. Simply putting her on that wall and tipping her over it wouldn't work nearly as well as presenting her with a number of open options -- Will, a political career of her own, a corner office -- and watching her negotiate these with her eyes open. That it's possible to swim with sharks without becoming one is obvious, but it involves a constant rigor that -- on her best day -- wouldn't trouble Alicia at all. It's just that the world keeps throwing shit at her and taking those good days away.

BAD TIMING

The showrunners -- a justifiably lauded pair of married writers named Robert and Michelle King -- have described the show's first iconic moment (backstage, immediately after standing by her man in a press conference, she slaps the shit out of him) as being, in a way, about slapping herself awake.

Alicia Cavanaugh was a rising star in the legal world fifteen years ago, before she left it all behind to marry the promising politico Peter Florrick. She didn't want to try to "have it all," so she moved out to the suburbs and raised her two gifted children; she put aside thoughts of a brilliant legal career and finally closing the deal with Will Gardner, and she was happy. The fervor with which teenagers Zach and Grace now engage with politics and current events tells you a lot about how they were raised; both Peter and Alicia were -- and still are, I would argue -- True Believers in the Jed Bartlett sense. No matter how dirty Peter's hands get, you can still see the man she loved, and married, and while this is part of the genius of the show it's also necessary: If he were wholly a monster, the show couldn't exist.

If anything, Alicia now identifies her bendier moral stance with the part of herself that loved Will Gardner, which is why the show has always taken pains to balance her moral questioning against the vicissitudes of their relationship. It wouldn't work to have him make the choices -- the double-voicemail cliffhanger being an excellent feint in that direction -- because the show hinges on forcing Alicia to use her own voice. That's why the slap, it's why Kalinda's betrayal hurt more than Peter's, and it's the reason Alicia, ultimately, had to open that hotel-room door herself.

When Alicia looks at Patti Nyholm, or Louis Canning, she knows they're bullshit because she's spent her life resisting a pose of weakness. It's why wide-eyed Nancy Crozier throws her off every single time: Why on earth would you hide your strength, when the entire world is predicated on the idea of doing that for you? Similarly, her resistance to using her political and social contacts -- with or without Peter in the house -- for her own gain would be an admission of weakness, of using her position as an adjunct, a goodwife, Adam's rib, when that slap woke her up to the fact that she'd already compromised too much.

What Diane Lockhart has been slowly teaching her -- and us -- is that there's a third way. That by getting ahead of the bullshit, you don't ever have to play that card. Diane presents as a beautiful woman, independent and smart, with her own sense of ethical responsibility and a complete disinterest in playing any kind of inauthentic gender-performance games. We've seen Diane lose it a few times. The time she thought she was marked for death, that was pretty awful, but not half as terrible as her loss of innocence when we learned that her quasi-Al Gore hero was a serial rapist. Worst of all was the "lifeguard" storyline, in which she learned that not even a sisterhood of like-minded women on the judge circuit was free of corruption. In all cases, you see her risk disappointment by hoping that people aren't as gross as they seem: Just one more thing she has in common with Alicia.

By freeing up Diane to have adventures of her own, of course, we see her less involved in Alicia's development -- although she makes it count -- which, in the end, works out for all involved. The Bond storyline, although it left us with the bizarre involvement of Lemond Bishop in seemingly endless unrelated cases, gave us some pretty wonderful performances, and thankfully raised the visibility of bitchy family law dog David Lee. But it also gave Diane the opportunity to raise her game, fighting as she was a war on practically infinite fronts before she and Will resolved their issues and finally put paid to the firm's ongoing struggles after crazy old Stern left for the first time.

The situation of Jonas Stern, too, relates strongly to the generational and gender interrogations going on in the universe of the show. A mentor to Diane and Will, we never really see him at his best. First he leaves, weirdly, and then he comes back to steal clients, and the time we see him he's breaking down into dementia that only Alicia's allowed to know about. If Diane and Will are the "parents" of Lockhart, Gardner, Stern is an obsolete grandfather, still holding on stubbornly like something out of Steinbeck. (And let's not even start with his trio of even older Silent Partners, who come off like patriarchal mythological creatures, barely incarnate and useless as hell.)

As a map of our culture, you couldn't get a more poignant portrait of the way Boomers relate to their parents, and to each other, than the constant transitions and financial machinations in which Lockhart, Gardner constantly finds itself. Diane (and Will, for that matter) love Stern but want him gone, are beyond irritated whenever he manages to screw them without even trying, sit shiva when he leaves, and seem almost envious of Alicia's conflicted relationship with him.

In fact, it's such a universal viewpoint -- call it the Big Chill take -- that it might be worth thinking about just how different the world looks to somebody not immediately in the classic CBS demographic. As a huge fan, there's been something satisfying, not to say subversive, about watching my fellow youngsters come out of the closet about their love of the show. Watching Alicia learn what Google is, or Peter marvel over Zach's computer and surveillance skills, is something wonderful -- and again, you've got Eli Gold and his constant child problems to make even the occasional (often funny, never silly) intergenerational conflict something to enjoy.

There is a real concern, in the world of TGW, about the idea of legacy. Diane's legacy will be a generation of hardworking young women who never even had to have their hearts broken by the facts. Alicia's legacy was to raise two children with such strong convictions that they're now going rogue on her. Jackie's legacy, Peter, is so important to her that she regularly blinds herself to basic right-and-wrong. And Stern's legacy is the conflicted brilliance of his two stars, Lockhart and Gardner. Always in transition, always in flux, and yet somehow always following the chain through all three or four generations, the show's focus is timely and timeless at the same time.

THE BASICS

I mean, obviously I could do little capsules of every episode, but I don't see the point of doing that with a procedural. You're not watching it to find out that Hugo Chavez is in enamored of Courtney Love, or exactly how many wives Colin Sweeney is going to murder. And the show does a great job -- and I say this with a disinterest in most procedurals -- with those things, on an episode-by-episode basis. Even when you have no idea what they are talking about, the show guides you through the case effortlessly, and I can't think of one that wasn't fun to watch, or wasted. But the show's not really about the cases anyway. I don't think anybody would argue with that. And if you care to find them, most episode synopses tend to focus on the details of the cases, the window dressing, and this recap would be even longer if we included them. So let's see.

The first season ended with two phone calls and the universe -- in the person of Eli Gold -- making sure that Alicia made her decisions for herself. No goopy awesome speech from Will could ever be allowed to take her away from her husband, because this is Alicia's story. It provides excellent yearn-bait and excitement and all those things, narratively, but as a hard-and-fast moral to the story, Alicia can't be allowed to let other people make her decisions for her. When she tries -- and she loves to do it, on the rare occasions when she lets herself -- the universe fucks it up.

Because as much as the show is about testing Alicia's convictions -- she was protected, in a way, for those fifteen years, from the cynicism that has worn down everybody else on Earth -- it is adamantly not about breaking her will. There are some shapes she absolutely will not assume; there are compromises Alicia will not make. Where the story gets its power, then, is in watching her find ways to negotiate without losing herself; without going backwards. Her belief in herself is a continual triumph. Even in cases where her rage comes through -- awkward and horrible and completely relatable, but still stutter-shocking when it bursts out -- she's always been able to say it's about her family.

She's not a Bad Girl, an Angry Girl, she's not hard like Diane or closed-up like Kalinda, and in fact it's one of the things she loves best about herself (as her madcap brother Owen loves to point out) even though she has it in her to bring the whole bookcase down on everybody (as Owen also loves to point out). Her vulnerability and her compassion are, through the operation of her brilliant mind, strengths. Which is how they get you.

That's why the Lela thing is the first and only time we see either of them cry.

For different reasons, they were holding onto each other so tightly they couldn't even admit it to themselves, and when it fell apart, so did they. Which is a fascinating way to end things, with the abrupt dissolution of both the marriage and any semblance of a relationship between the two women. When Alicia returns on Sunday, having cut herself free from the last ties to her marriage and still pissed as hell at Kalinda, she'll have nothing else to depend on. What is a Good Wife without her Bad Husband? How do you keep your hands clean when you've lost your best weapon?

OH! KALINDA.

If you have ever had or overheard a conversation about the show lasting more than a few seconds, probably you made it to Kalinda. One of the most unique, sophisticated, beautifully drawn characters probably ever on television. Queer, silent, driven, empty, full, beautiful, ugly, and overqualified for any position whatsoever -- from Pope to assassin -- Kalinda's faults lie so deep and are so infinitely terrifying that you end up with this weirdly paradoxical need to protect her.

Because Kalinda's deal is a big part of the plot, I guess it's worth going over. Kalinda is an in-house investigator for Lockhart, Gardner who is a genius and kind of a sociopath. So far, the only thing she seems to actually care about, literally, like in an existential-void kind of absolute way, is Alicia. (Maybe Cary Agos, a little, but who knows about that.) When Will brought in a second investigator, Blake Calamar, what seemed at first like professional rivalry quickly escalated into all-out war. Bodies were flying, baseball bats were constantly in play, this doctor went into a coma, there was kinky and there was scary, Blake had ties to west coast gang activity, Kalinda was sleeping with FBI agents, it was insane. A total mess.

But then, in a truly stunning turnaround/misdirection, it turned out that Kalinda's identity (Lela, a Canadian with a husband who might be dead or something), her grand jury indictment, her ongoing physical confrontations with Blake, the sudden involvement of the SA and his third investigator Wiley, all of it came down to nothing like a stolen identity or a housewife on the run: Blake finally figured out that Lela slept with Peter years ago, for helping her create the Kalinda identity. That was it: Slept with a guy, fell into a profoundly loving relationship with his good wife, years later. Hated herself too much to come clean.

Even as the trap was closing, Kalinda was opening escape hatches. She used her own grand jury trial to frame Blake for having an affair with Bishop's wife, taking him off the board. She gave Will her notice and left to work for her married girlfriend's security company. She even tried to take Alicia aside before the news hit, but circumstances conspired. And in the end, she landed right back at Lockhart, Gardner: Her first job would have placed her right back in Peter Florrick's State's Attorney's office, as though the last several years -- and identities -- had never happened. (Her helpless giggle at this latest irony, although extremely dark and on an already dark day, was about the only thing that kept the sanity going, in that moment.)

THE BAD HUSBANDS

So what about Peter? For every conversation you've had or overheard about Kalinda, I'm guessing there's a conversation that ignored him. It's easy to view him as a nonentity, an obstruction to various story or shipper goals, a scary opponent or corrupt and irrelevant, but his role in the coming season couldn't be more interesting or frightening. Whether or not Alicia follows up on her newfound fame -- and whether or not the Congressional scandal that has brought her travails back into the limelight is still an issue in the coming season -- Peter's political ambitions will only grow, and continue to tangle her up.

She's a woman who deals in signs and symbols, it's what makes defense law simultaneously so easy and so difficult for her. Peter has become, by the end of Season Two, a symbol of rot and stasis and feeling like the Vice President of her own life. In that context, then, Will isn't a man either, so much as a symbol of her pissing match with God.

But Will also symbolizes a power, which she has always denied herself, of bending the rules or looking the other way: The privilege of an officer of the court to sometimes act above the strictest interpretation of the law. The dirty-handed so-so, the compromise that the real world keeps telling her is the best she can hope for. By claiming him, finally, she enters into a certain kind of agreement with the universe at large: I am a grownup, I'm one of you now. There are ways you can't hurt me anymore.

The image we have of Will now, and who's to say how closely Alicia's following this thread, before the Presidential Suite or now, after, is somebody thrilling in the same way that Kalinda was thrilling. Alicia loved nothing more than to blush at something Kalinda was willing to do, and then benefit from it. In fact, Kalinda's dark arts were just about the only thing she was willing to accept, because it won them cases and because being accomplices together with her felt good.

And Kalinda's the only one with that privilege. Again and again, we see suspect people -- Rita Wilson's Viola Walsh, Louis Canning about a hundred times -- offer Alicia a job, and she refuses. She couches it, internally, in terms of loyalty to L/G, but really it's because she's better than they are. Any hint of being brought down to their "level" -- her dealings with the murderous pervert Colin Sweeney, the way Nancy Crozier drives her absolute bonkers -- and she bolts. In her worst, most superior moments, she gives the impression of seeing no difference between her fellow attorneys and Dr. Booth's awful video of the mice desperately biting and fucking themselves into a chunky stew. So what do you do when you see yourself -- even for a mere split-second -- as just another mouse?

If anything, this is what we're looking at for the coming year: Alicia vs. Alicia. The loss of her own self-image as being better than the games she plays. You can even see this tendency in the last hours of the season, as Alicia plays a back-and-forth game with David Lee about her divorce. He keeps telling her to stay married until Peter's in office, so that she can benefit from his new position: That divorce is also a matter of timing, just like love. And as long as he doesn't say this, she can give him all the leash in the world, but Lee's way too smart for that -- he intuits, as a family law practitioner and a genius in his own right, that she's using him to play herself -- so he says, at every possible moment, "You will be making a financial decision, because that's part of what divorce is." And she hates that... Until she doesn't.

The best thing a procedural, even a hospital show, can do is to bring the Monster of the Week into alignment with the real drama in a way that isn't on-the-nose but also isn't bizarre non-parallel. It's very subjective, with these shows, where that line is drawn. I like it here, as I like it with Grey's, more than any other show I can think of, because it's not the correspondence that matters, but the questions it raises. It's not about Alicia identifying with Sarah Silverman's creepy swinger couples, or the victims of Colin Sweeney, or even Lamont Bishop's raging and painful divorce -- it's about the changes that the cases make in her. Her refusal to be a cliché, an angry divorcee, a wounded animal, a dried-up victim, or whatever the case is, she'll have none of it.

By using the antagonistic relationship of prosecution and defense to draw out every strand of meaning -- by using her immense compassion to understand every player in every case -- Alicia uses her job to teach herself about herself. Not what she "should" do -- which is both her fallback and her favorite form of self-injury -- but what Alicia would do. And then she does. And that knowledge -- more and more rare in the showrunner culture we're entering as an industry -- actually stays with her, into the weeks and months. Which creates in her life, and in the show that chronicles it, a feedback system that is as exciting to watch happen as it is inspiring to watch evolve.

LIFE IN PUBLIC

The first season begins and ends (as does the second) with a press conference about Peter's career, and Alicia's place -- quiet, forgiving -- in it. We keep wheeling around to this "good wife" image, never too often but always at points of greatest stress: This is a story, on one level, about the things that publicity and surveillance do to ourselves and our families. Peter's always getting spied on; L/G goes through periods of intense self-wiretapping and spycraft; Alicia wins major points with just about every character at some point just by keeping her shit together in the face of amazing reasons not to.

Zach's -- and often Grace's -- storylines tend to center around the blurring boundaries and public and private, not just for the famous or the powerful but for everyone. I can't think of a time that Zach wasn't messing with, receiving, hosting, duplicating, finding, taking, destroying or otherwise being harassed by images. The sexual images of his father (that he recapitulated with Becca, which is when I knew it was time to start taking this show seriously, and later with other, fake ones); his entire war against the illegal FBI guys outside the apartment during Peter's house arrest.

Eli, of course, is all about spin and public perception, which is why he's always in the thick of these stories. From Peter's hooker Amber's rebooting as an Obama Girl-type campaign strategy to the sudden upswing in embarrassing Tea Party "support," Eli must control the image. It's how he comes to respect Alicia, finally, when she demonstrates for him that her public and private selves are exactly the same thing; one could even argue that his feelings for Natalie come in part from her unwillingness to lie about even dangerous parts of her own life. (One wonders what he would make of Kalinda, given time: They're kindreds, but also opposites, given that he is a secret keeper and she is a living secret who reveals everybody else's secrets.)

And when he's not fighting against Becca or the internet, he's hassling Alicia constantly about family images: Whether she's willing to step up to the podium again, give an interview, bring the kids (or don't bring the kids, during the campaign's brief flirtation with courting the racist vote), bareknuckle fight cancer survivor Wendy Scott-Carr, whatever it is. As an embodiment of the scrutiny which both scours her heart and sets her free, Eli is the perfect symbol for her ambivalence toward the press and the public and the very act of looking itself.

If nobody had ever looked at her family, if the Amber tapes had never been released, Alicia could have gone on with her life the way it was. But now, through her shifting relationship with Eli, we see the ways she's willing to play the game and the ways she is not (yet), and we also see how weird she feels and has always felt -- and I would say the tension around this idea is key to the character, because it intersects with her self-perception and values as much as anything else -- about the fact that part of her life has always been a performance. That sometimes she was acting so well she didn't even know she was acting, that sometimes in her public performance she only gets the numbers by being -- or at least appearing -- completely vulnerable and honest.

ST. ALICIA

To be honest, I'm less interested in the Will thing than I am in this idea, because I've always noted a subtle aggression in the way Alicia treats her enemies. She's unfailingly polite to even the worst of them, and at worst -- Canning, Wiley -- just gets evasive. Even when it's in her face, she finds another way: Preferring to let Cary -- for example -- power their competitive relationship while showing him nothing but kindness.

(In fact, they're pretty strongly linked; as she was the top biller back in the days before Peter, he nearly wins the bakeoff on billable hours alone, for example. And that parallel wasn't ever just about showing up her familial responsibilities: This isn't Baby Boom. Through both seasons I'd say she likes him the way Diane likes her, which is to say: Carefully.)

But now the table's flipped: It's Kalinda who is the immovable object, that just loves Alicia in spite of her rancor, and I'm very excited to see how that transposition plays out this season. Because it's not just Kalinda she's allowing herself to be angry with: She's made a possible enemy of her husband, she's declared open war on Jackie, she got downright curt with Childs and Wendy toward the end of the campaign. Shit blew up there, toward the end. It all seemed unconnected and scary, but in terms of a shift from passive to active it all looks like one big slap awake instead.

With her convictions at her back she's never been less than forthright, but she's definitely chosen her moments. It's what makes her strong: Her discretion, like her compassion, are the weapons she wields best. But if she's got nobody to hide behind, if she's coming in as a third-year associate and lead chair, if she's going to work with Eli on her own career and David Lee on her divorce, she is eventually going to have to speak. One more in a series of extraordinary moments.

It's hard to be the suffering wife when you're divorced, and she's going to have to give them more. Her Good Wife powers will continue to work, obviously, and it's an open secret that her convictions and Goodness are what creates these opportunities for her and will continue to do so. The conflagration at the end of the season means she's going to have to mediate not only her public and private images more than ever before, but actually tinker with the way she views herself. It's time; it's not like the universe is going to leave her alone. And frankly it's not like she -- or we -- would have it any other way.

See you Sunday, when -- now that I've said all of this mess -- we can have regular old recap fun together. Deal? Because check out this chill, totally normal, not at all disconcerting shit right here, discovered literally as I am typing this:

While the staff at Lockhart/Gardner adjusts to new realities and relationships, Alicia must put aside distractions in her personal life to defend a Muslim student accused of murdering a Jewish classmate.

No big deal, just a Muslim kid killing Jews, nothing we can't handle. I mean, I'm guessing that's not exactly how it went down, but you just never know.

JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps True Blood, Gossip Girl, and Pretty Little Liars for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook. IRL work appears in BenBella's SmartPop series of anthologies, most recently A Friday Night Lights Companion and Fringe Science.