Show is all action – until the ad break
NOT so breaking news, thanks to the announcement earlier this year by spoilsport Mike Hosking that Will Gardner, a main character from The Good Wife (TV3, 11.05pm) was shot dead on Tuesday night, fair cut down in his prime mid-trial at the Cook County Courthouse.
I was prepared for Will’s nervy client to grab the gun from the cop’s holster and kill himself, but he took out the judge and mowed down Will as well.
Private detective, Kalinda, got the lion’s share of the scenes with Will before his demise while Alicia, Will’s ex-lover had only one small exchange with him where the two appeared to bury the hatchet and re-establish a modicum of trust.
Kalinda who at the beginning of this episode had started to speak in a strange southern accent, was down the hall at the courthouse when she heard shots fired and pushed her way into the courtroom to see one of Will’s shoes lying pathetically in the middle of the floor. It didn’t bode well. Before the shooting, the episode had been puttering along in dull legalese when suddenly the murder scene snuck up on us and took Will out, removing the Gardner from Lockhart & Gardner forever.
The relative mediocrity of the action before the shooting was intentional to lull the viewer into a false sense of security, contrasting with the shock horror of the mayhem and the murders.
How fitting that Will died in harness doing the job he loved, but how ironic he had approached the bench to ask the judge for a brief stay of time. Now there will be no more time for Will who didn’t even get to spit out last words.
When he was still breathing, he was rushed to hospital, his status unknown as Kalinda and Dianne tried desperately to find where he’d been taken. He’d died in an emergency cubicle where they discovered him cold and dead. Deeply in shock the women broke down and sobbed when suddenly THEY CUT TO AN AD BREAK!
Talk about insensitive. After rude sponsor interruption, the next scene had Dianne and Kalinda looking at each other knowingly, making it their priority to phone Alicia. She was about to deliver a keynote speech at a conference and wasn’t answering her phone but Kalinda got through to Eli, conveyed the bad news and insisted she had to speak to Alicia. And this is where it became stoopid. Why would an experienced campaign manager like Eli let Kalinda deliver such a dire communication to Alicia just as she was about to mount the podium?
After all, Will was brown bread, and the awful news could wait a few more minutes.
We know how brilliantly Alicia behaves under pressure and were just about to see if she could stand and deliver when the credits started to roll.
It was reminiscent of the episode where she was about to go on stage and back her husband Peter, the governor, as she paused wondering if she was doing the right thing, and the credits rolled on the series final.
That famous final scene seems like many moons ago as we see how far Alicia’s come from those days. But has she?
She has returned to her once-philandering husband who may have knowingly committed voter fraud and her ‘‘good’’ name could be dragged through his mud once again. How can the show go on now with Diane alone at the helm of Lockhart Gardner and Florrick & Argos across town in start-up mode but with Will dead, not so much to push against any more.
Perhaps now that Carey has told Alicia that he’s seeing Kalinda who slept with her husband, she might be tempted, if asked, to join Dianne? Who knows? Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to watch and cry.