What a long, strange trip it has been as ‘Good Fight’ ends run
Christine Baranski might have one of the best laughs on television, and she puts it to considerable use in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight.” Spinning off from the long-running CBS series “The Good Wife” in 2017, it quickly established itself as a wonderfully spiky and humorously enraged treatise on This Moment We’re Living Through. What a long, strange trip it has been.
This time, that trip is partially drug-induced. That’s why Baranski’s Diane Lockhart is laughing so much. It’s a side effect of an experimental mood enhancement treatment — she wants off this treadmill of anxiety we’re all stuck on. It is “less powerful than ketamine” and administered in the swanky offices of a physician played by John Slattery. After each session, Diane emerges blissful and glassy-eyed, obsessed with the vividness of colors around her.
This is in stark contrast to the reality around her — but is it even reality? When we first see Diane striding to work in Chicago, she meets up with her longtime colleague Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) and it’s as if the Loop has been emptied entirely of people cars, sounds. It’s eerie, but neither woman acknowledges this. Is this another one of the show’s playful tricks? Is this a dream? After going upstairs, they eventually peer out their windows and suddenly, down below, there are crowds of protesters and police, noisily clogging the streets of downtown.
Chaos and violence is in the air. But inside those sleek law offices, everything
is business as usual.
Maybe that dichotomy, which continues episode after episode, is meant as a canny statement all its own — about the surreal feeling of a world falling apart around us while we force ourselves to carry on and go to work as if nothing is amiss. But I’m not sure the sentiment actually lands. “The Good Fight” has been here before — and done it better. I always liked the show’s wit and anger and cheerily bizarre narrative gambits, but this season it has an annoying tinge to it — instead of smart and sly, it feels aimless.
When we last saw Diane, she had decided to step down as a named partner amid legitimate questions about why a white woman was wielding so much decision-making power at what was supposed a Black firm. The money men upstairs, to whom Liz must now answer alone, foist upon her a new named partner in the form of Ri’Chard Lane, played by Andre Braugher.
One-time assistantturned-investigator-turned -law student Marissa Gold (Sarah Steele) is already a lawyer who passed the bar months after she started law school. The show’s creators Michelle and
Robert King bring back her dad, Eli Gold — the political mastermind from “The Good Wife” played by
Alan Cumming — who is in some legal hot water his own these days. And associate Carmen Moyo (Charmaine Bingwa) continues to be more than willing to represent high-end clients who are likely guilty of the grisly crimes of which they are accused.
“The Good Fight” feels especially heavy-handed in its final run. I have little sympathy for Diane, much as I admire Baranski’s performance. On the flip side, this is absolutely McDonald’s best season. Liz is savvy about how to deal with this new partner — she plays Ri’Chard at his own game — and she has to confront her past as a prosecutor and whether she knowingly used the testimony of a corrupt cop to gain a conviction.
The acting on the show: top-notch. Same with the wardrobe. It’s always had a ridiculous if sharp-eyed view of the legal system — and the world at large.
But this time out, instead of saying something, “The Good Fight” is simply going through the motions.