The Good Wife Gets Its Scandal On

Before I watched the latest episode of The Good Wife, I knew some kind of crazy plot event was on the horizon. CBS had made the rare decision to make screeners for the previous two episodes available, teasing that they were part of a lead-up to a big but unspecified twist, though that episode would not be released in advance. The promos for the episode were uncharacteristically hysterical for a show where the most dramatic stuff tends to revolve around when someone signed a particular piece of paper. And when I went on Twitter last night, the people I follow on the east coast were displaying varying degrees of shock and horror about what they were seeing. Given all the hype, it was probably inevitable that my reaction when I finally saw it would be, more or less, "Eh, I've seen crazier."

And frankly, I blame Scandal.

What happens, as you must know by now, is that we're back in court with Will and his client, Jeffery [sic] Grant, who's been charged with murdering one of his college classmates. Things are actually going pretty well -- Kalinda's just uncovered some evidence that will cast doubt on the prosecution's DNA evidence -- but Jeffery has been getting beaten up a lot in detention (maybe because he spells his name wrong), and he's starting to crack up. When Will offers to get him special protection, he immediately refuses, because that will just mean he's in Solitary all the time and that if that happens, he'll kill himself. He can't stop himself calling another witness -- and the best alternate suspect -- a liar during the guy's testimony. Then Jeffery shows up with another mark on his face, Will finally overrules Jeffery's earlier resistance to protective custody...and while Will's up at the bench for a sidebar that Jeffery apparently judges to be dangerously collegial, he seizes the opportunity presented by a bailiff's unsecured sidearm and shoots up the court (though he runs out of ammo before he can finish by shooting himself), wounding both attorneys.

And then: suspense! Diane is down the hall arguing her own case when she hears the shots! Kalinda pushes past security personnel to find Will covered in blood, opposing counsel Finn putting pressure on Will's bleeding neck! Then Kalinda and Diane are at the hospital, trying to find out Will's condition! Kalinda can't reach Alicia on the phone! Finally, Kalinda spots Will's unshod foot in a curtain area and finds him covered with a sheet! OMG, WILL IS DEAD!!! Kalinda figures out she should call Eli, and the last thing we see is him handing Alicia his phone so that she can take the call that will CHANGE HER WHOLE LIFE FOREVER!

Except, I've been so ruined by the constantly escalating plot twists of Scandal that I wasn't paying attention to the time and thought for sure that Will's death couldn't be the whole story. I mean, on Scandal, not only do major characters get killed all the time, but they get killed by other major characters. Two weeks ago, Olivia even hung a lantern on the show's tendency in this regard by dissolving into crazy giggles at the realization that all three of the presidential candidates who were about to take the stage for the first debate of the election were literally murderers. And then the very next episode started with the current Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series Emmy winner lying dead in the street, killed by the head of a super-secret black-ops agency who also happens to be the fake boyfriend of one of his husband's closest colleagues.

The internet reaction to that death seemed to be, "Well...yeah, sure." Whereas Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King seem to be doing everything short of ordering grief counselors sent to fans of the show. They've published an explanatory letter about Will's death, in which they claim that the decision to write Will out of the show this way when Josh Charles let them know he wanted to leave is because "the irredeemability of death" is too little dealt with on TV. As my esteemed former colleague Linda Holmes wrote on NPR's Monkey See blog, that is plainly inaccurate. I mean, yes, Scandal doesn't take death very seriously -- see above -- but lots of less-soapy shows do; The Good Wife is generally in the "less-soapy" category, and dispatching Will in this sensationalistic way obviously represents a major departure.

As for me...I think the Kings' damage control is a little bit excessive. Josh Charles is still alive! It's a pretend person who died! And if Charles forced them to figure something out, they could have done worse. If they'd come up with, as the letter suggests, a job offer across the country (they make a cute reference to Seattle, where one of Julianna Margulies's past TV boyfriends ended up), then the spectre of Will would have continued to hang, BORINGLY, over all of Alicia's future romantic relationships, as a certain segment of the fan base dreamed that Will might still come back someday. It would hardly have been believable for Will to have died of natural causes, given his age and general hardiness and the fact that I can't recall the show's ever having dealt with anyone's personal health problems before, such that if suddenly Will was going to a lot of doctor's appointments to address the chest pains or headaches he was starting to experience, we'd have seen what was coming. And if he'd died in a car accident or something, there would be a lot less dramatic potential for the characters he's left behind; this way, the Jeffery Grant case continues and evolves and all of Lockhart Gardner AND Florrick Agos have a villain to focus their anger on. (And, as I recall, the last time a show wrote out a character by killing him in a random car accident, that didn't really satisfy fans either.)

For those who, like Linda, are swearing off the show for the rest of the season in light of this plot twist: I get it. This is not the kind of thing people watch The Good Wife for. But maybe it will help you come to terms with it if I tell you how I, as a watcher of Scandal, was pretty sure the episode was going to end: Kalinda finds Jeffery on that gurney in the ER, kills him with her bare hands, and totally gets away with it. SEE? It could have been worse.

(And if that does still happen...um, sorry.)