The recently puffy Jonathan Groff shows up, looking slightly less puffy, to bring a case that manages to resurrect not only our old hated client ChumHum -- honestly, did you think you'd ever hear from them again? -- but also that old LA-based lady-poacher Rita Wilson, and reigning Broadway hottie J. Benjamin Hickey.
As a sort of sprawlingly awful take on the Syrian Uprising, it's somewhat topical, but the surprising ways that it fucks with everybody are classic This Show. Kalinda's got an Insurgent friend that checks in with her over Skype and goes missing by the end of the episode. Judge King Of Mississippi Denis O'Hare returns as a particularly embarrassing -- and allergy-ridden -- Occupy sympathizer. Jonathan Groff continues to be the Flavor of the Month five years after the rest of us knew who he was. And so on.
In the end, Groff gets his pretty white sister out of Syrian jail, and Viola Walsh gets a Golden Globe or whatever white people bullshit that really has nothing to do with Syrian politics and everything to do with denigrating protesters for their privileges over their intentions, because it's lazy and stupid and Crash. A particularly boneheaded Boomer take on Millennial politics that manages to go all the way into Gen X hateful before all's said and done, without ever really getting the point at all. It's pretty gross.
Meanwhile on the real show that we're used to watching, the following shit is happening: Eli talks his ex-wife, Parker Posey, out of using Amy Sedaris as her Eli, thus becoming her Eli. So now they will have more sexy '90s chemistry and hook up in a hot minute, and probably their asshole daughter will come all the way back from kibbutz in order to have a pointless problem about that. The first inklings of Alicia trying to take Caitlin in hand come off with fairly useless results, as expected. Kalinda's all broken up about her Syrian informant, who's probably dead...
And Will, after thinking he was in the clear, learns from Rory Gilmore's grandfather that he's now likely to be disbarred pending investigation, so he grabs his baseball bat and literally goes home, imparting two pieces of drama as he goes. Number one, it's finally time for Diane to be Alicia's mentor, after two and a half seasons of joking around about that, and number two, here is a huge casefile about Kalinda that we've never talked about before.
As a way of getting the main romance of the show back on track, it's pretty gratifying to have somebody just hand Alicia a case and say it's now her job to deal with Kalinda. Boom. And ditto, just having Will roll over and accept a six-month leave, considering how very much time we've spent this season on his fake grand jury, and whatever Star Chamber shit is going on between Wendy and Peter that I still don't fully grasp. I get that these are easy ways of moving the plot along. But I could not give less of a shit.
It's about time Will paid for his apparently sketchiness-filled history; what's sexier than Will manfully and honorably paying for whatever. And it's more than fucking enough slow-burn to get Kalinda and Alicia back together. Frankly, I wouldn't care if Kalinda caught some kind of Michael J. Fox syndrome and needed an innards transplant and Alicia was the only donor. If Alicia accidentally slept with Lela's old husband and it was bygones. I wouldn't blink if they got stuck and spent an entire episode in an elevator with just their feelings, some ice cream and a limited supply of feminine hygiene solutions. I wouldn't mind if those two ladies ended up crash-landed on a desert island and had to work together to create motherfucking shelter and find food and water. Whatever gets their asses talking again. We have been through enough.