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Hamish Linklater's DOJ official, David LaGuardia, approaches Eli with what seems like an investigation into questionable contributions to ex-wife Parker Posey's campaign, if you can remember back that far. But once a very incredibly awesome Diane Lockhart gets involved, it turns out that once again the only thing anybody ever cares about is Peter Florrick.
The mysterious FBI photo of Kalinda and Eli, that Nick stole, is still not in play, but after Diane and Eli tell LaGuardia to go to hell, the fall season ends with the Department of Justice raiding Gold & Assoc. To be honest, I'm not even sure that was meant to be a storyline so much as setting up the 2013 half of the season; if there was more to it, I didn't catch it as it was happening. Still, tough times for Eli means tough times for Peter. Or actually for everybody, since he bitches so much.
Alicia spends her few minutes away from the very complicated case of the week trying to figure out who has been googling "types of condoms" on her ChumHum and throwing around an insane amount of made-up tech-speak, as is her wont. Zach is still dating Invisible Nisa, but they don't need the Talk; Grace is shoved into sudden curiosity about sex after Alicia makes the rare blunder of referring to abstinence as being a "good girl," which is so beneath her that I hope Grace fucked Hot Connor like that day. Gross me out, Alicia.
But really gross me out because eventually Zach's research turns up the fact that the person googling the condoms was in fact -- as you probably guessed -- good old Jackie Florrick. Their shared mother/son horror about this discovery is so adorable that it almost makes up for the Grace thing. Almost.
Alicia's conundra do not end there, though. The legal stuff this week is less complicated than it sounds, but basically there are two guys on trial for this chick's murder. One of them is in Chicago, where the girl died, and the other one is in her home county, where the killer dropped her body. In order to help Will defend the Chicago boyfriend against Captain Hellinger, Alicia runs info back to help prosecute the other boyfriend. (He is being defended by Becky Ann Baker, regulation hottie, whose appearance excited me even more than Linklater and about which I had no foreknowledge, and who deserves a TV show just where she goes around having sex with young guys and like solving crimes with psychic powers.)
Anyway, it's a whole thing where cats are lying down with dogs and prosecutors are working for defense attorneys and everybody's trying to screw everybody else's case. Hellinger continues to be fabulous, calling bullshit on Will left and right with such precision that I think he's developing a little crush. Once Kalinda figures out that we're defending the guilty guy, Alicia takes us all the way back to kindergarten once again about what a defense attorney actually does, but in such a way that it's actually valid this time: They are helping condemn the innocent and letting a murderer go free, regardless of who the client is. It ends probably as cleanly as it possibly could, though: After both cases are pronounced guilty, though, Will and the Captain agree over drinks that they'll help with the innocent one's appeal.
And in Kalinda News, Nick Savarese finally does the one thing. You know what I'm talking about: After getting fed up with his bullshit, Alicia fixes him with a steely eye and personally fires him again as a client, so he gets up in her face and threatens her. First Cary's face, and now Alicia? No way. Get him out of here. Certainly that's all Kalinda needed to hear, so after confirming that he's transporting drugs and smashing up his towyard, she provides him with money and an escape... Which he then refuses to take. Prompting her to, I think, kill him. You don't mess with Alicia, dude.
I mean, it's unclear. And my hope is that it remains unclear, and we never hear about it again, because it's actually a brilliant solution: The reason the Nick story got cut short was that people hated it, and the reason people hated it was that it made Kalinda look dumb and weak and boring, and also because it removed some of the Kalinda Mystery. So, how about you resolve it with a capper of total mystery? Preferably one that puts the Kalinda/Alicia bromance back at the center of things, the way it should be? I mean, it's really elegant. I'll always wonder what might have been, but if they had to shutter this early, I love the way they did it.
Year: Campaign stuff, presumably. We haven't heard from Maddie or Kresteva in a long time, and now that Eli's had his precious office supplies commandeered there's no telling how nuts he and Diane will go on the DOJ. I'm guessing if this Trustee stuff doesn't get wrapped up soon, Diane will just become a terrorist anyway, so this might be two birds with one stone. Mostly it'll just be nice to have Kalinda back in-house instead of running around having sex with ice cream and knives and whatever, considering the two people that make her wonderful to watch now share an office. Right? Can we just get back there already?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Kalinda's ex-husband showed up and didn't really do anything too bad until Cary figured out he was using his towtrucks to move drugs -- which makes so much sense it's amazing nobody thought of that before -- and he got beat. Now they are sort of threatening each other with death, and who knows what will happen. Peter's campaign continues apace, but it's hard to say what is really happening since this tail end of the Fall Season has been so schizoid about which parts of ongoing storylines come up in any given week.
A DINER
Eli's listening to BWV 808 on his earbuds, reading pollsterisms and eating lunch, cutely playing along with his fingers like nervous pianists tend to do when distracted.
Hamish Linklater: "I'm adorable! Take out your earbuds so we can chat about things! I nervously play air accordion sometimes. Although I am just a beginner."
Eli: "I don't care about you or your accordion proficiency. Leave me to my charts and graphs."
Hamish Linklater: "Hey, are you Eli Gold? I'm voting for Peter Florrick for sure!"
Eli: "Ugh, always with the fans. It's like campaign managers and fixers are the new rock stars."
Hamish Linklater: "Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Listen, when you were doing crisis management, you had Wooster-Graff Industries as a client, yeah?"
Eli: "I have to go now. Goodbye, Hamish Linklater."
Hamish Linklater: "David LaGuardia is my name, and Justice is my game. Department Of. We're gonna be fast friends, I can..."
808 starts playing again. All that is left of Eli is a spinning diner-counter stool and a variety of papers wafting to the floor. But is David LaGuardia downhearted? No! He is plucky and adorable! As always! Even with his hair chopped off, which I always thought would be like Samson if that happened, and take away his powers. Luckily, it just makes him seem more like an actual man and less like your friend's older brother, who can drive, and poorly play accordion, and who makes you aware of a certain thing you will one day come to realize is called sexuality.
(I defy you to come up with a better description of the Hamish Linklater Thing.)
GOLD & ASSOC
Eli: "Batten down the hatches and get me Greg Leshoure from Wooster-Graff Industries! I have a gavotte in my head going faster and faster. I realize I am constantly flipping out like a poodle about everything all the time, but this is no drill."
Cary: "Um, also Killer Hobo works for a landscaping company. The trace amounts of drummer silt clay loam aren't actually that unique."
Alicia: "Wait so not only did I give his prosecutor inaccurate evidence, but I can't tell anybody?"
Cary: "Yep. Because then it becomes public record, and the Captain can use it against American Pyscho. Our client, who killed a girl in the woods."
Alicia: "Wait, explain it to me like a hundred more times."
GOLD & ASSOC
David LaGuardia, how nice to see you! Oh wait, it isn't. Oh wait, you're raiding the entire office and knocking cell phones out of people's hands. That's not so good.
HOME: THE CASE OF THE TYPES OF CONDOMS, PART III
Zach: "Mom? You know that whole thing about the condoms? So I 'ran' a 'cache search,' and I figured out when that person googled that thing. It was during Thanksgiving dinner."
Alicia: "That does not solve the Case Of The Types Of Condoms."
Zach: "Except immediately before that, Grandma Jackie logged into her Hotmail account."
(Or if that's not funny enough, he could say like, her Prodigy or her AOL. Because she is old, you see. That bitch is so old!)
Alicia: "Your grandmother has discovered Types Of Condoms?"
Zach: "I need a hug."
Alicia: "I need a drink."
VERDICTS
American Psycho: Guilty.
Killer Hobo: Also Guilty!
All Of Us, In A Sense: Guilty.
FERN BAR
Laura: "I guess we buy each other drinks, then?"
Will: "Sucks to be Killer Hobo."
Laura: "You know what, though..."
Will: "We can throw all of our combined evidence at his appeal, since we've discharged our own duties?"
Sometimes everybody gets out alive.
Sometimes.
L/G AFTER HRS
Kalinda Sharma sits in a room, in a chair, facing the door. In the dark. On the other side of that door is a tiger. This isn't the first time this has happened.
Nick: "time you want my attention, give me a jingle."
Kalinda: "Won't be a time, son. You're outta here. I just called the cops about your drug business. They're probably already at the tow-yard. Here's an envelope with money, and a key to a locker at the bus station, where you'll find half of my twenty grand you're always talking about."
Nick: "Have we not had this conversation literally a million times?"
Kalinda: "No, you broke it. You fucked it, you burnt it, you ruined it. That thin slim thing we still had, with the ice creams and the cast-iron cookware and the knives and throat-punching and all that, you broke it."
And the funny thing is, you'll never know how, or why. You heard that thing my voice did on the phone, you heard it every time. You heard it, and I never even heard it until you pointed it out. And you were right to be jealous. I will spend the rest of my life making up for what I did to her, for making her feel stupid, for making her feel like she wasn't worth loving. You were right to be afraid, lady. Because I'm somebody else's tiger now.
You spent so much time poking around trying to hurt whoever was on the other end of that voice, and when you finally did it, you had no idea. So this may come as a shock, but it's over. Really, truly over.
Please fight me on this.
Nick: "M / F / K? What's your Plan B?"
...Thank you.
TEQUILA SHOTS
Alicia looks around, feeling nervous. Not scared-nervous, excited nervous. Two shots, two limes. Kalinda nowhere to be seen. She shoots hers.
We don't know what happened in that room. I hope we never do. But it could have gone the other way. Always remember that it could have gone the other way. And Alicia will never, ever know.
Alicia: "Kalinda, I'm just wondering where you are. Give me a call?"
She comes, as she always does, out of nowhere. "Where Is My Mind?" starts to play, a sweet cover. Damning and celebrating, all at once. Love is like this: The person is a door, and you can open that door a million times and see a million things looking back at you. Everybody wants a pet tiger, but nobody wants to get hurt.
He never even knew why. He never even got to know what that sound meant, in her voice, or why it happened sometimes. That it was as full of pain, and regret, as it could ever contain anything else. She never let him know what that might sound like, her pain. Too sure she'd be devoured if she did, for showing weakness. Nick Savarese stood at a door, in enemy territory. In the dark. On the other side of that door was something. Maybe a lady, maybe something else. Maybe something that would feed him until he wasn't hungry anymore. It wasn't the first time.
Alicia: "Where were you?"
Kalinda, smiling: "Out."
Alicia: "You seem... Relieved."
Kalinda: "Very much so."
Alicia: "He's gone. And you're safe."
Kalinda: "You're safe."
Real love isn't about sex, or parents, or children. It's not about men or women or gay or straight or marriage or how well you know the person, even. It's not about the things you want from them. The test, if you're ever wondering how much you love someone, is whether you could, for example, die for them without ever getting credit for it. Ask yourself: How far you would go, what you would risk, without them ever finding out.
Alicia: "And he's not coming back?"
Kalinda: "He's not coming back."
For just a moment, she collapses into the Kalinda Sharma version of grief: She looks over to the side, and calmly exhales.
Ask yourself.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Gossip Girl, The Good Wife and Homeland 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, his novel The Urges, and a novelette, "The Commonplace Book," appeared this fall on Tor.com.