The Good Wife Lets Alicia Drop Her Armour

Last month, when The Good Wife creators Michelle and Robert King wrote an open letter to the show's fans explaining why they made the decision to kill off Will Gardner rather than just write him out in a way that might allow him to return someday, I admit that I rolled my eyes at what seemed then to be excessive grandiosity. But the latest episode forced me to revise my view: this plot twist actually has moved Alicia into a new incarnation, spun her in a new direction, and kept her fresh. Except, for me, all of that means "Will's death has made Alicia interesting, maybe for the first time."

As often happens with TV series built around a character whose name (or nickname, in this case) is in the title, The Good Wife has sometimes suffered, in my view (and maybe mine alone), by its seeming need to keep Alicia as its moral center. That's not to say she's uncompromised: she's a criminal defense attorney AND the wife of an Illinois governor, which means she's done lots of shady shit in both positions. But being a good wife has meant that Alicia's default mode is cool, restrained composure -- which, given the kind of stuff she's had to face in her personal life, has sometimes made her seem like an emotionless robot. When she's surrounded by people who get to have hot entanglements with partners of both sexes, or steal elections, or get so mad they sweep every damn thing off a desk like they're in a telenovela, poor Alicia ends up being kind of the most boring character on the show. (Okay: third-most boring, behind her REAL boring kids.)

But Alicia's grief over Will's death has caused her to respond in ways we've rarely seen before. In fact, this one episode lets Julianna Margulies play more of an emotional range than I feel like I've seen from her in this role to date. She gets to move from comfortable camaraderie/drunkenness with Diane to bitter betrayal over an unfortunate misunderstanding. Her icy rage at Jeffery Grant's scumbag father segues smoothly into planting a (totally well-founded) seed of doubt the new AUSA in Finn's mind. When she draws a witness into a discussion of mortality and accidentally reopens her own wound, only to go outside to cry and run into Grace's old street-dancing friend Jennifer...

...I half-expected Alicia to take Jennifer up on her offer to join her for a few steps; Alicia's new emotional openness really made me think anything is possible.

But most shocking of all is seeing Alicia not just allow herself to feel bad, instead of tamping it down, like she usually does, and soldiering on like a GOOD WIFE, but to give in to those feelings completely -- to drop keys and clothes on the floor, crawl into bed, blow off commitments, eat up a day marathoning a show she doesn't even really care about. Alicia gives herself permission to turn off her life rather than try to handle the un-handle-able. And maybe she didn't succumb to sorrow in this way when she went through her last big tragedy -- Peter's very public cheating and subsequent prison sentence -- because she just couldn't; she needed to get a job in a hurry in order to support herself and two other people and pay for Peter's lawyer. Maybe it's because being a GOOD WIFE meant she automatically looked ahead to a future time when her poise would be perceived as her biggest asset. Or maybe it's because she never cared about Peter as much as she did about Will, which is certainly one way of reading this confrontation.

Alicia and Peter in a marriage of convenience isn't exactly new: it's how they spent most of Season 1, after all. But Alicia and Peter in a marriage of convenience while she is raging inside about losing the man she's always thought she was actually supposed to be with could be a pretty exciting new shade for both of them. I mean, like: it's a drag that Will had to die for Alicia to make meaningful changes in her life. But so far an Alicia that's furious at the world for fucking her over is scary and fascinating and I'm excited to see where she goes from here.