Eli's Evil Plan Risks Entirely Predictable Collateral Damage On The Good Wife

Honesty Is...Definitely A Policy

You've Given Me A Lot To Drink About

Who called the meeting? Ruth.

What's it about? Officially, it's a staff meeting. Between the two of them. Unofficially -- as Eli knows, and which he calls her on -- getting him drunk on Alabama Slammers while she pretends to drink but actually just collects data on her foe.

How'd it go? Eli comes in hot with an important piece of his biography: "My grandfather, Samuel Gold, was a Teamster organizer in Brooklyn. Everything I learned, I learned from him. I remember going to visit him in his office when I was little, all the people coming to kiss his ring, looking for advice or help. And he told me that the most powerful men are the ones that no one knows exist." Ruth:

Of course Ruth already knows about Eli's background: "Your grandfather was Ira Goldstein, owner of a schmatte business in Queens. He died a pauper after his brother-in-law cheated him out of a uniform consignment with the NYPD, and that quote? You changed it. It's from The Usual Suspects." Once she's dominated him on this front, she tells him the real reason he's there: the newest internal polls have come in, and Peter's had a four-point bump. It's now actually conceivable that Peter could win the nomination, which means they "need to be rowing in the same direction" and pivot to a new strategy -- one that isn't based on kissing the frontrunner's ass so much that Peter gets tapped for VP. Ruth adds, "This goes the way we all want, there'll be enough to carve up for both of us." She wants to move the official announcement of Peter's candidacy to Thursday; she wants much more of Alicia's time; and she wants to be able to trust Eli, and for him to trust her. It's a good meeting for Ruth in that she runs it like a boss; it's maybe not so great for Eli since her pivoting her strategy also means he'll have to tweak his own strategy with regard to destroying her.

Silicon Valley Girl

Jackie Oh This Isn't Going To End Well

Who called the meeting? Eli, by showing up at Alicia's unannounced.

What's it about? Peter's campaign, and Alicia's place in it.

How'd it go? Eli blurts, "Peter wants to be president!" and Alicia's like, "I need a drink." As she's mixing herself a cocktail in the kitchen, Eli elaborates, catching her up on the announcement on Thursday, the speech he's written for her, and that Ruth can't seem to decide whether she wants Alicia to be Jackie O. or Michelle Obama. Alicia muses, without much interest, that she keeps hearing this stuff not from Peter but from "his campaign manager," at which Eli sharply corrects her that he's not. Alicia then finishes preparing her drink, which she says is a margarita. Eli:

Alicia catches him for judging her and doesn't buy his denial that he is -- those eyebrows will not be ignored! -- so he wraps it up: "Be involved, go on Thursday, give a good speech, look First Ladylike." Oh -- and Alicia's old friend Frank Landau will introduce her, won't that be great??? Alicia:

Yeah, me too.

Jason Possibly Finds His Next Punching Bag

Jason's just finished telling Alicia and Lucca that HR at Running Milk (guys, seriously) definitely did verify the fact that Kristen had lied on her résumé, which would mean they have no case, EXCEPT Jason doesn't think there was ever a theft: "A firm like Running Milk [geh] is required to notify their customers of any breach. They didn't." "So they had no reason to polygraph," Alicia surmises. Jason agrees: "Fruit of the poisonous tree." That brings up an interesting question for Alicia.

All Is Forgiven! We Still Think You're A Liar, Though

Back in court, Lucca busts out Jason's findings on the theft, or lack thereof. Andrea tries to guilt everyone about her failure to have the case moved to Silicon Valley by blah-ing that the CEO of Running Milk (uuuuugh) has flown to Chicago "at great personal expense" for the trial, but it maybe wasn't necessary at all because it turns out Running Milk (eeeeeyuuuugh), without admitting any wrongdoing, wants to hire Kristen back at her original salary. Is it maybe because the CEO feels bad that she's now apparently so hard up for money that she'd wear whatever the fuck this is to court?

Regardless: under these new circumstances, Andrea thinks Kristen's case should be dismissed. Lucca asks the judge whether, if Kristen is rehired, she can't be forced to take a new polygraph, and he confirms that Lucca is correct: "Employers are barred from making polygraphs a condition of employment." Alicia asks for a ruling to that effect, but Andrea has a new bombshell to drop: "Actually, polygraphs may be applied to employees engaged in counterintelligence or national security functions, pursuant to a contract with the federal government." Alicia and Lucca both wheel around to glare at Kristen for not disclosing that this rule would apply in her case, but she's like

Alicia says Kristen has no connection to national security and repeats her request for a ruling, whereupon Andrea produces documentation of Running Milk's accounts with the federal government. Alicia asks why, if this was the issue, the whole "theft" story was concocted in the first place, at which Andrea's all, "Are we really wondering why the National Security Agency might have a need for secrecy?" ...Fair point. Lucca whines that the company just wants to hire Kristen in order to fire her again, and Judge Marx is like, word, but legally it can, so if she wants to work for the company again, she's going to have to take another test. Bad luck for the non-Silicon Valley lawyers. And for the fired employee who just found out she's a spy, apparently?

Where's The Hire?

Alert Type: Summer Intern Alert.

Issue: A woman named Monica Timmons has applied for a position in Lockhart Agos Lee's summer intern program.

Complicating Factors: Well, there are a bunch. Monica sits down with each partner on the hiring committee individually: Cary immediately puts his foot in it when he hears Monica is from Baltimore and assumes she must have grown up in a "tough neighbourhood." David Lee shits on her having graduated from Loyola. Howard wants to know if she's "Nigerian or what." Even Diane tells Monica they need "fighters" at the firm, and assumes Monica must be one: "You have to be tough to grow up there."

Resolution: Diane herself is a fighter, and she battles hard on Monica's behalf against Cary and David, who want to hire three white guys who graduated from Harvard and Stanford. But they overrule her. Diane tries to soften the blow by calling Monica back to the office so she can tell her in person that she's not getting a job offer, which Monica doesn't take well...

Spoiler: ...but that Monica apparently saw coming.

No, You Can't

Alert Type: Presidential Announcement Alert.

Issue: Ruth is planning all the optics for Peter's presidential announcement, and intends to copy Barack Obama's announcement of his candidacy in absolutely every way, down to buying Peter the same coat to wear.

Complicating Factors: First, Ruth loses the location Obama had used to an "interfaith breakdancing competition." When she compromises and agrees to move the event to the very stately-looking steps of a Catholic school gym, she ends up losing those too because they're not sound.

Resolution: Eventually, Peter and Alicia have to make the announcement inside the gym, but still do it dressed in outerwear identical to the Obamas' for the sake of the side-by-side photo comparison. And Eli does deliver Frank Landau, but Ruth snakes him (as Eli had planned) to introduce Peter instead of Alicia. However, what Ruth didn't know is that Eli cashed in his favour from Judge Schakowsky to leak a story about Landau having manipulated the voting machines during the last election -- something that will damage Peter when he's photographed at the announcement with Frank's arm around him. But, uh oh, Peter was also involved in that scam: he did it to make sure Alicia would win. So now Eli can't damage Peter without also damaging Alicia.

Spoiler: Can it be possible that Eli's schemes have gotten so twisty that even he can't control them?

No-etic Justice

After asking Jason directly and not getting an answer she liked, and then ChumHumming Jason and turning up both his mug shot and the report about the judge-punching incident, Alicia has called the punched judge directly. Posing as someone doing background checks on PIs, Alicia asks the judge to "shed some light" on the assault. He asks whether Alicia is thinking of hiring Jason, and when she says she is, he tells her he has some advice: "No no no no no and no." He describes Jason as a "ticking time bomb" and educates her about sociopaths: "One out of every twenty-five people is a sociopath. They don't have the gene that leads to compassion. They can fake being a normal person, but deep down? They aren't. They may not murder, they may not rape, but they will eat away your life from the inside. THAT is Jason Crouse. And my advice to you, ma'am, is run."

Okay, but like...does that mean they didn't bone last week, or...?

Spoiler Alert

Who called the meeting? Kristen, I guess?

What's it about? Trying to find another angle on her case that will stop her having to take another polygraph even though the judge in her case has ordered that she has to.

How'd it go? It goes well for Kristen's case in that it leads Alicia to a breakthrough of sorts. Kristen tells Alicia and Lucca that she and the other employees of Running Milk (I can't) were encouraged to work on side projects, and she wonders if one of hers was the reason she got fired. She'd been working on a relationship mapping app -- "It's a way to create diagrams of relationships between concepts, ideas, people, and other pieces of information." She found a way to "cross-platform it" with another app she created called Spoiler, which analyzed the pilots of new TV shows and then predicted future plot points, like who'd hook up, who'd be killed, etc. "So it's predictive," Alicia concludes. "Yes, why?" asks Kristen. "Did anyone say it might be used by the NSA?" asks Alicia. Kristen seems to think that's absurd: "It's not for surveillance!" Oh, Kristen, you adorable dope. Anything might be for surveillance! Which is why Alicia's next move is to go to Cary and ask him how to contact a certain former client of theirs. "It's complicated," Cary warns. "What isn't?" shrugs Alicia.

No, but like, it's really complicated.

Surveil Of Tears

So obviously, Jeffrey -- remember him from Season 5? He was one of the nerds listening on on people's phone calls on behalf of the NSA whom Cary and Alicia represented when he whistle-blew? -- can't really come back to testify on Kristen's behalf. But he's still a mensch, so he's made a video for Alicia and Lucca to show Judge Marx. (Andrea makes a stink about it because she didn't have advance notice, but Alicia says she and Lucca didn't want to imperil Jeffrey, someone Andrea dismisses as "a disgraced poor man's Snowden," which: rude!) But the judge wants to see it, so here's how Jeffrey explains how Spoiler actually totally did end up getting used for surveillance: "Spoiler has been one of the NSA's most exciting civilian acquisitions, and although it was created for rather banal reasons, the same infrastructure lends itself well for processing other forms of data: like, understanding conversations between potential terrorists and predicting their future plots. You know, like if one terrorist is going to get into a love triangle with another terrorist's wife. Heh heh, just kidding. Sort of. The NSA has spent millions of dollars to secure the Spoiler app, and, in my experience, the agency and their partners will do a lot to protect that kind of investment." Once they've finished with the video, Alicia argues that Jeffrey's video proves Running Milk (ew) is continuing to mislead the court: the whole polygraph thing was a smokescreen so that the company could get rid of Kristen before all the millions from the NSA started pouring in and her stock options vested. Andrea argues that Alicia and Lucca are trying to make the court take the word of someone who's fled the jurisdiction and has a vendetta against the NSA. Judge Marx would like Jeffrey to appear in person to testify on the matter, but Alicia's like, erm, that will not occur, so the judge repeats that Kristen has to take a new polygraph. BACK TO SQUARE ONE, but at least now Alicia's got a shitload of phones!

She Tested Me With Science

Having run out of tactics to keep Kristen from having to take a new polygraph, Lucca and Alicia's new gambit is to prepare her as best they can for a good outcome, which means getting Jason in to give her some tips. This might be useful to you if you ever end up having to take a polygraph, so here they are! "Attempts to manipulate the data output are futile....Manipulate the person reading the data. Any deviation from your baseline stress level doesn't make the needle go crazy. It's the polygrapher's job to figure out what they mean, so while the machine may be objective, the polygraph's not. He's the key....I want you to throw him off his game. Start by asking him a bunch of questions....Confess before the test starts....Every mistake you've ever made, every lie you've ever told: convince him that you are unburdening yourself, and being truthful. It will make him want to give you the benefit of the doubt -- and remember, doubt is your friend. You don't have to come up as truthful. 'Inconclusive' works for you here."

Later, Alicia and Lucca escort Kristen to the neutral location where the new test is going to be conducted...

...and discover that there isn't going to be a tester for Kristen to charm after all. Or rather, there IS a tester, which CAN'T be charmed: Kristen's polygraph will be conducted by Multiple Input Lie Detection, or MILD, a computer avatar that measures "fifty different measurements," including "basal body temperature, retinal moment, and vocal stress." Soooooo, Kristen can still try that thing where she just disgorges a bunch of secrets before the test starts, but it's probably not going to help?

Call Of The MILD

Alicia's just finished making herself another cocktail (o_O) when the doorbell rings; she goes to get it and finds a courier envelope on the mat, containing an already-ringing phone: it's Jeffrey, calling to find out whether his video fixed everything. Alicia tells him about the MILD switcheroo, and of course Jeffrey already knows all about that: "Those Homeland Security pinheads always think systems like that are cutting-edge." Alicia asks whether he might possibly know a way to beat it?

And then uuuuuuuuugh, we see that Alicia and Jeffrey aren't the only ones on the call. Here's some bullshit I never wanted to see return to the show in large part because...I don't really get it/care? I mean, I get that the call centre dudes are doing some shady, barely-legal shit, but when they get down to specifics, I really tune out.

Private Sector Ears Are Listening To You

As the staff meeting breaks up, Stephen and Tyler put off returning to their workstations to rickroll each other with goat videos ("goatroll"?) to tell their boss the latest they've just overheard: they've been tracking Jeffrey, and he just called Alicia -- "No thread, just talk of a case." "Her husband's running for president," Foyle reminds them. Stephen notes that they've been tracking everyone else Jeffrey called. Foyle lets them track her for forty-eight hours: "Find a connection between Mrs. Florrick and another brown-level target and I get you a greenlight." Tyler whines at "brown-level," and Foyle drawls that they need to learn to take yes for an answer. SEE AGAIN I DON'T REALLY GET IT BUT IT SEEMS BAD???

You Can't Almost Spell "Diversity" Without "Adversity"

Though Monica didn't seem that psyched to be called in by Diane and let down "easy" about the job -- particularly since Monica looked up the hall and saw the three white Chads who DID get hired rejoicing -- Diane is happy to open her email the next day and get an email from Monica with the subject line "Thank you." Hey, Diane must be thinking, she does want a female mentor after all! Except...nope, the email actually contains a link to a ChumHum video Monica's cut together from her interviews with the partners, which she was secretly shooting on video the whole time.

Howard: You don't see many black lawyers in here.

David: I think I should warn you that we have a certain Lockhart Agos Lee "type" here, and you're not really it.

Cary: We've had some African-Americans here before -- not in all positions, but we are open to all types and all backgrounds!

Diane: No, no, you're exactly the kind of diversity we want at Lockhart Agos Lee. We've seen dozens of eminently qualified candidates and...well, you just came up short.

Diane watches the video with mounting horror, and seeing her own unconscious racial bias laid bare canNOT be a great feeling for someone who considers herself as liberal as Diane does! But dang, nice work, Monica.

Lucca calls Alicia with good news on PunchGate: she spoke to a witness to the altercation who reported that the judge walked out of a bar afterward without a scratch on him. Alicia seems pleased that the impartial third party offered a version of events that differs so vastly from the judge's, even though (a) obviously the judge's report was going to favour himself, and (b) do we assume Jason didn't prep the witness Lucca spoke to? He is pretty shady, that's what this whole thing is about!

Diane brings Monica back, and tightly compliments her on her "ingenuity" and "chutzpah." Kind of patronizing, but okay. Diane goes on to add, "I'm not saying our world today is enlightened -- far from it. But starting out as a woman in a big law firm thirty years ago? Let's just say I empathize. Everyone has to eat dirt on the way up. The only difference is what kind." Mmmmm, less good. "Are you seriously comparing histories?" marvels Monica, disgusted. "Yes, I am," says Diane, evidently not seeing the problem. "If you chose to lay on your back for a male partner or two, just to get ahead, that was your choice" says Monica." Okay, well, now everyone in this conversation is burning bridges? "I don't choose to have women hold their purses tighter when they see me coming down the street," she adds. "I don't choose for cops to drag me out of my car and frisk me just for failing to signal." I mean, true? But Monica has already kind of undercut her position by impugning Diane's sexual ethics on zero evidence. "I don't want your understanding. I don't need your advice. What I need is a job." I was totally Team Monica, but I'll be pretty pissed IF SHE GETS ONE AFTER CALLING DIANE A PROSTITUTE.

Eli watches the announcement coverage from his office, which, I guess he's not there in his capacity as Alicia's Chief Of Staff because he doesn't want to be present at the scene of the crime whenever this Frank Landau dirt comes out? Ruth turns out to be right about the photo op: the TV report does show the side-by-side of the Obamas and the Florricks without noting how stupid it is that the latter couple are dressed like that while INDOORS...

...even though Alicia and Peter are so hot that she gets caught on camera literally mopping his brow for him.

And then Peter takes his place at the podium, and sees that Ruth (I assume) has fitted it with multiple fans to keep him from passing out as he finally makes his big announcement: "Today I'm announcing my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the president of the United States of America! How's that for plain speaking?" Peter then reminds us that he's not a heel all the time by calling Alicia up to join him there so she can also enjoy the cool! Aw.

Andrea calls Alicia about the case when Alicia, as she tells Andrea, is still at the campaign event! She's got a dozen supporters staring at her, and she's going to tell them about Spoiler! Now both Kristen and Jeffrey are willing to talk! "What do you think will happen to Running Milk [ENOUGH] stock when the world finds out they're in bed with the NSA?" Andrea immediately pivots: "Amend the suit....Have Kristen sue for gender discrimination and we'll settle." "They'd rather be seen as sexist than in bed with the next Edward Snowden?" marvels Alicia.

And that name is brown as can be! And brown is also the colour of what Alicia's just dropped herself into! (I'm saying she's in deep shit.)