We start with... No, hold up. We start with this.
We start the episode itself with Eli's spit-take from last year's final episode, Marilyn Garbanza admitting that her child's father is named Peter. Eli hustles her from place to place at the F/A holiday party trying to get the real story, but in the end it's so bizarre and funny that all he really does is piss her off. After Kalinda tracks down Marilyn's high school boyfriend, it's finally revealed that the father of the child is none other than Peter Bogdanovich, as in The Last Picture Show. Because it's Marilyn, who gets more charming and strange each week, this is hilarious and not just bizarre and dumb, like it sounds. (And yes, he is wearing a cravat when we meet him. Not that you had to ask.)
Less funny is the coinciding (and hour-ending) revelation of a newspaper's proof of the ballot-box hijinx from last year's finale, which threatens to bring down not just the Governor but practically everyone on the show. I kind of forgot that whole thing happened, so I was almost as shocked as Eli, who walks out of the episode like he's headed into a zombie attack. (I can't even see Will going that far, although he was the only person who knew about it, right?)
Good old Kalinda, when she's not creepin' around the edges of Marilyn's confusing life -- specifically to protect Alicia, which Eli somehow knew was the only way to get her involved -- she's nailing that hot cop lady, whose friendship with the minorly threatening Damian Doyle is still fairly troubling for Kalinda. Nothing hugely new happens there, but it's nice to see different sides of Kalinda and this "desperate to actually connect with people, against her every instinct" is a particularly compelling one. There's also something about this lady that commands my sympathy, but who knows how long that'll last.
Diane is still pissed about Damian's hiring, of course, but only leads a charge against Will once he decides to open a branch in LA to go with the NY branch he's also opening. Because the case of the week has Will going out of his mind anyway, that stuff was pretty harrowing, but luckily it ends on an up note: She pours him a scotch, tells him she wants them back on the same page, and then agrees that he's owed the chance to try and lead LG to these greater heights, considering she had only just come back to the fold when Alicia abruptly left: She was the one that walked away, leaving him to carry the firm, and now he'll be damned if she won't let him use his Alicia rage powers to do just that.
Cary, on the other side, has some great scenes with the case of the week, which pits Alicia against F. Murray Abraham's LA attorney Burl Preston over a fairly uncomplicated case about music rights. (A phenomenal) Matthew Lillard's hipster guitar YouTube cover of a rap song was in turn covered by essentially Glee, leading us into a thicket of "transformative works" and satire in copyright law that means we get to hear three irritating versions of an irritating song for about 85% of the entire episode.
Preston shows up at LG looking for Alicia, and by the time he's done Will has hitched himself to the wagon, hoping to "get" Alicia by facing her in court, but after a wondrous pep talk from Mr. Agos, Alicia flips the script on him, getting twice as dirty as her former lover in the process: By the time she shows up in court wearing the same dress as the first time he quote "banged" her, just to get in his head, it seems pretty clear she's cruising for a breakdown of her own, just under the degree and sheer quantity of his bullshit.
While a certain amount of sexy love-hate is enjoyable, this left-turn into outright hatefulness is only as satisfying as it ends up being because it arises from such a basic-level irritation at Will's drama queen antics. "You need to get over it," she says, as an afterthought, and then spends the rest of the episode trying to force him to do just that. The fact that F/A (presumably) wins the case only proves her point. Robyn Burdine does some magic, Matthew Lillard hands out liberal amounts of hugs, and Alicia's sitting pretty... For exactly as long as it takes her to find out about this ballot-box thing, which makes week's Springsteen-inflected episode (the last one until March) look like a pretty intense powder keg.
What do you think? It was an interesting case, and Alicia getting nasty about things was kind of exciting, but it seemed like a lot of pieces getting moved around otherwise. I hate, always, the scheduling of this show -- When does it even come on? Nobody knows -- but this month-long break is going to be tough, especially if things go as horribly week as it seems they might. Do you think Will is the anonymous leak? Do you think Eli will go insane or change in some way as a result of the DNC's grody vote tampering? Do you feel cheated by the pregnancy fake-out going to such a weird place? Do you wish Kalinda had better taste in ladies or do we still like this one? Do you still believe Marilyn Garbanza is pregnant with Wendy Scott-Carr's demon baby? Because I still kind of do.