Dear Owen, Stay Out Of Alicia's Love Life. Sincerely, EVERYONE.

This week's episode of The Good Wife continues the show's Season 5 trend of being unpredictably twisty, scheming fun, as Alicia loses an old Lockhart Gardner client to...Lockhart Gardner, but gains a business manager willing to work for free until Florrick Agos is on its feet, with practically the whole thing set over a portentous strings score that amps up the suspense and urgency: nothing wrong with any of that. And then Owen shows up for the first time this season: usually that is also a welcome development. But THEN he decides to get involved in Alicia's personal business, and: no.

What happens is: Alicia's old client, Jeff Grant, calls for her at Lockhart Gardner when he gets arrested on a sketchy DUI charge; Will jumps on it instead, and is at the cop shop with Jeff when he finds out the real reason Jeff's been picked up is that he's suspected of having murdered a girl at his college the previous year, and they detained him to swab his mouth for a DNA sample. As Will digs into the case, he learns that the dead girl was rumoured to have been having an affair with one of her profs, and when he goes to the school to talk to that dude, he runs into Owen, who's teaching math there now. In the course of getting Owen to tell him all the professor gossip about this other bro and his dead student, Will finally runs out of ways to deflect and admits that Alicia's not at the firm anymore. A shocked Owen then heads straight to Alicia's and basically accuses her of having blown up her career because she was scared to fall in love with Will -- and even though she denies it, he feels free to turn around and go tell WILL that! Hey! Owen! Here's an idea: shut the fuck up!

First of all, I'm pretty sure my esteemed colleague Sarah D. Bunting put a nail in the Willicia coffin months and months and months ago. As Sarah wrote then, "The Good Wife is way more interesting when it's focused on the law and Alicia's relationships at work, versus at home," and God, it's so true: it's exactly what's made the current season so thrilling. Could Alicia do better than Peter? Sure. (Is Will "better than" Peter? Debatable.) But if Alicia were in the middle of relationship drama, there's no way she could deal with the apparently endless parade of decisions, stresses, and switchbacks that the formation of Florrick Agos has led to. Sure, she still has A Woman's Needs — which is why it's nice to have a pocket Peter to stop by, service her sexually while the rest of the firm is two rooms away, and get back to his own life, leaving her clear-headed (if slightly tousled) for whatever the next battle turns out to be.

On top (heh) of all that: Alicia's season-ending decision to start a new firm with Cary did not seem, to me, to have been based on her yearning for Will, like, at all. Alicia is too generous and loves her brother too much to get pissed off at him for reducing a canny, well-founded professional decision to a girly loss of nerve...though I imagine that will change if and when she finds out he went over her head to Will to share his theory, and anyway, I was pissed off enough for both of us, because (a) this is business, Owen, and (b) mind your own! To this point, I had really liked the way producers had drawn the relationship between Owen and Alicia — he's one of the few characters on the show who can ever get a genuine smile out of her, for one thing — but for Owen to reduce this move to lovelorn self-sabotage suggests a basic misapprehension of what Alicia's about.

What's made this season so exciting — even before the split had actually occurred — has been the threat that Florrick Agos could fall apart at any moment. Everyone who defected has good reasons for having decided to forge a new path: independence, control, ownership. "Too weak-minded to keep working with secret ex" is not among them, and if the show's producers suddenly decide that this is what motivated Alicia to make her move, it will negate everything that's been so good about this season, so let's just hope that Owen arrived at this notion because he's been reading too many Victorian novels and not because it's actually based in fact.