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The Good Fight really goes for it this week and is sure to ruffle some feathers with anyone who isn’t already on board with its very liberal political views. While the bulk of the episode was focused on a particular Trump scandal, there was a little bit of political intrigue involving Colin, who felt he was a shoe-in as the Democartic candidate considering the only Republican running is an avowed Nazi. Hoping to impress the committee selecting the Democratic candidate, Colin asked Lucca to accompany him to show that, unlike the previous Democrat, he won’t be sexually harassing other women.
But Colin learned that they committee didn’t have an issue with his family life, it was his prosecution record. On paper, he always seems to cut deals for his white clients and he has a 95% conviction rate for the black ones, which would make voters assume Colin is a racist … even though the mother of his child to be is African-American. There’s no way for him to make those numbers go down in the short amount of time they have to make a decision … or is there?
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Luckily (and a little too conveniently) Lucca and Maia are still working on Craig Savador’s case, going so far as to hire Gabriel Kovac (Fisher Stevens) to be their mouthpiece in court. Since Lucca and Maia can’t continue to represent Savador because of the Whitehead case from the previous episode, all they need is someone who will basically read from a prepared script to ask for the arrest records from Whitehead’s case. Kovac nearly screws it all up by sticking to the script but goes rogue and convinces the judge to allow him to get access to the records. For Colin, turning around one conviction isn’t going to help, but there are actually 30 wrongly convicted felons who had been victims of Whitehead planting ‘drop guns’ on them. Even though Colin was working on the defense, he implored the court to overturn Savador’s conviction, giving everyone involved a win. Even Kovac, who said he was only doing it in exchange for a date with Maia. Even when she bluntly told him she dates women, it only made her more attractive to him. If she ever goes to dinner with him is another question.
The main focus of the episode, however, was a deportation case, one that came directly to Diane who seemed lost in the ‘news’ of the day in which Trump took five goats to a meeting in Europe (it was actually goals). Marissa was sensing something off about Diane and asked if she was still micro-dosing to which she replied, ‘Nope.’ Marissa countered with, ‘Are you dosing?’ Diane is obviously continuing to slide down a rabbit hole of despair with all that is happening under the Trump administration. So she asks Marissa to take some notes from the client first and then she’d see her.
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The client, however, turned out to be a Russian woman in line for deportation in a few days. She claims the deportation, which comes despite her student visa which is in good standing, is politically motivated and if she goes back to Russia, she will be the victim of a politically motivated assassination because … she’s one of the women in the infamous ‘pee pee tape.’ But is she? Or is she working for Veritas in some sort of sting operation?
I have to tell you, there was some good writing her with this intricate ‘is she or isn’t she’ plot. The woman, Dominika, claimed that Diane was recommended to her after she had given a talk at a university on immigration. But Diane said that never happened, it was Will Gardner who gave the talk. Dominika also suspiciously clutched her purse as if there may be a camera inside. It was all suspicious enough for Adrian to call Ruth Eastman (Margo Martindale) at the DNC to let her know what was going on. Eastman advised them to speak with the woman again but make their own recording to counter hers. But things got more interesting when she revealed the real reason she was being deported, but they still felt they were being played because they had evidence to counter her claims and, offended, Dominika left.
Diane had Marissa follower her to see where she went but Dominika didn’t go to Veritas, she went to what appeared to be her own apartment building. Marissa was unsure of what to do when a door opened and a woman assumed Marissa was snooping through their trash. And then Dominika came to the door and Marissa explained everything to try to get to the bottom of things. The other woman with her was one of the Miss Universe contestants and she corroborated Dominika’s story. In fact, everything she said checked out, including Diane giving a talk about immigration (which she remembered as all the pieces came together). And then Dominika’s contact Olga, who had suddenly gone missing, sent a flash drive to Diane labeled ‘P.P.’ — the Holy Grail of this case … if it was real.
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Alerting Ruth, she emphatically suggested the firm drop the case altogether because taking this on now would only make it look like the Democrats were stooping to Trump’s level and it would be forgotten by the time the elections rolled around. She felt the existence of this video would hurt their impeachment case more than it would help but Diane was more concerned about the deportation at this point that the contents of the drive (it was also pretty funny that whenever someone would watch the video, they’d be bathed in a golden light from the laptop screen). There was still a question of the video’s authenticity, so Diane took Dominika to speak with Madeline Starkey (Jane Lynch), who asked Dominika a very specific list of questions about her hair color, furniture in the hotel room, etc. and concluded that the video was a fake and Dominika was lying. Ruth Eastman also said the video was a fake because the bathrobe seen in the video (and Trump’s face is also never seen) was not the same as the Ritz in Moscow.
There was some shady business with Julius here after he ran into a friend (William Ragsdale) who seemed to know about the firm having this video and that it was a fake. He advised Julius to let them run with it because it would hurt the firm and his firm would have a job waiting for Julius. Back at the office, Julius told Adrian and Diane that someone told him the video was authentic and to go with it, so it seemed he was trying to do some damage because he wasn’t on board with the whole impeachment case Liz was going to be involved with.
But things still didn’t add up, particularly when Marissa discovered the bathrobe in the video was not a Ritz bathrobe … it was Trump’s personal bathrobe (and if he’s the germaphobe he claims to be, it’s only natural that he’d bring his own bathrobe). After Julius sees the video and they have confirmation about the bathrobe, he ‘runs into’ his friend again and feeds him some information that obviously gets back to Starkey who shows up at the firm with a deal for Dominika: if she signs an affidavit that states the video in question is a parody video filmed in Los Angeles for which she was paid $200, her deportation will be waived and she can stay in the country under political asylum laws. Diane says it’s up to her, and she signs. Madeline asks if the flash drive she now has in her possession is the only copy to which Diane replies it is.
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In the last shot, we’re back in Ruth Eastman’s office. She’s got a similar flash drive on one side marked ‘P.P.’ and on the other ‘copy’ which she places in an envelope and seals, stashing it in her safe with a note: ‘Open October 2020.’ Looks like someone is planning an October Surprise.
What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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