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This week’s The Good Fight was a very powerful episode centered around words and the perception we can have of those words. A great choice of topic for a show that relies so heavily on excellently worded scripts. There was one teeny, tiny false note at the end that kind of irked me a bit, but over all it was a standout episode.
Marissa found herself eager to try a case in Wackner’s court against a comedian who has had a history of bad behavior when it comes to the females in his profession, from his own crude actions to telling other clubs to not book the ones who called him out for his behavior. But there was a second case she was assigned by Wackner, because she couldn’t really do one without the other, that involved a college professor who lost her job after being told a word she was using in class was offensive. We’ll spell out the word here as Wackner had the graphics people at the copy shop up front do for the court presentation: N*ggardly. Which was even too touchy for anyone to say out loud so it was reduced to N-word-ly.
Marissa was super-passionate about prosecuting the comedian because he was an avowed sleazebag, and she knew from speaking to another female comic that he caused her to lose jobs. When she was asked to ‘tell some jokes’ to the court, she fell flat. Hard. The defense even pulled up a review of her act that panned it, which they then alleged was the reason her next gig was cancelled. But … Marissa had Joey on video saying to very derogatory things about females and that was enough to swing the case to Marissa’s side. But it took a dramatic turn when Marissa learned that David Cord, who was representing Joey Battle, and Del Cooper, the producer of ‘Wackner’s Court’, had a financial interest in getting Joey off because he had a gig coming up to play on Del’s streaming service. This had Marissa call out Wacker, suggesting he was in on the whole thing and his decision in the case was preconceived and Joey would get off scot-free. The mere suggestion of bias made Wackner completely lose his cool and he threw Marissa out of his court. To Del, it was great TV, but when Wackner reviewed the tape he realized what a terrible thing he’d done and called Marissa to apologize. He asked her to come back to court and he’d make a proper ruling. No one, however, was prepared for that — he sentenced Joey to three weeks in prison! Wackner doesn’t have that authority, and Cooper and Cord tried to get it reduced to two weeks, but Cord sort of brought this on himself because he also owns a prison for which he offered Wackner some unused cells to jail the guilty. Wacker knew Joey’s gig was in two weeks so he stuck to the three weeks to prove he was not profiting from the decision. Even Marissa was stunned, but the female comic was given the privilege of escorting Joey to his cell. That was chilling.
But Marissa was called out by Del for being more passionate about that case than she was the N-word-ly case, suggesting that because the word or the perception of the word — which means stingy or miserly — didn’t affect her. Even talking to Carmen and Jay about the word, the two of them could not come to a consensus. Carmen was not offended because she knew the meaning of the word. Jay said it didn’t matter, just the perception and the sound of the word was offensive. Marissa really didn’t try to hard to get a ruling for her client, and Wackner decided the teacher had done nothing wrong so she was free to go. But … she wanted some kind of punishment because that was the only way she’d get her job back, so he ordered her to clean the bathrooms for a week. She was overjoyed, but I don’t think Marissa felt that she got a win for either case.
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Meanwhile, Liz and Diane are still furiously butting heads about Diane’s position with the firm. Diane insists that Liz is trying to push her out, and she brings in the big money clients, but Liz isn’t happy with how those clients went to the top and made this issue between them a company-wide matter. And on top of that, they’re co-chairing a case against a police officer who tasered a teen girl at her birthday party, which resulted in her death because of a heart condition. Both Liz and Diane kept jumping up to make objections to the defense’s line of questioning, which was pushing Liz’s and the judge’s buttons. Diane was also scrutinizing the jury to see which ones she believed they were losing. And even though it wasn’t the officer himself who was being charged — they were actually going after the Chicago PD as a whole — they had to show the officer had a violent past, so they brought his ex-wife in to take the stand. The defense was not happy about that, and the surprise witness led to the judge calling a recess.
If things couldn’t get any worse, the cop was murdered later that evening, and a conservative news host put the blame on Riddick & Lockhart, specifically Diane, playing a clip of her in an interview saying the police are not being held accountable. But, he was playing it as if it were a new quote which contributed directly to the officer’s death, but it was actually a sound bite from weeks before. But the perception he painted put them in a really bad place. And then they still went ahead and put the cop’s now widow on the stand the next day which went even worse. They had to ask the judge to pull the jury and question them as to how the news of the officer’s death has affected their decision for the case, and if the presence now in the courtroom of police officers is intimidating. Many of them were swayed and fearful, and they only needed to find one more juror to get a mistrial. Unfortunately, the incident and the right wing reporting has now put a target on Diane’s back and put the firm in true danger after someone managed to get into the offices — security has ‘no idea’ how anyone got in after hours — and spray painted ‘Cop Killers’ across the elevators wall.
That conservative news host may have inadvertently helped with his follow-up report suggesting … Liz and Diane are lesbian lovers. The absurdity of the claim actually broke some ice between the two women who decided they could play that to their advantage. Now this is the part I found completely out of whack — the judge had been cited a few times in the episodes as being a fervent hater of Fox News. So when he pulled Liz and Diane into his chambers for a chat, I thought it was going to be about the absurdity of the report about them. But no, the judge fully believed that they were lovers and that was all they needed, suggesting that one of the jurors, who had already mentioned she got a lot of her information from people at her church, was giving them the side-eye because of their relationship. And the judge seemed to buy it! There was no resolution to the case, that we saw, but in the end Liz and Diane were called to a meeting with HR where they were asked to sign ‘love contracts’, which is standard when anyone in the company enters into a romantic relationship. Without a word, they both signed … gleefully. How this will affect their professional relationship moving forward remains to be seen.
Aside from that one bit with the judge, this was an intense episode skillfully directed by Carrie Preston, who is more known to viewers of the show in front of the camera as ditzy lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni. Great job putting the episode together, and dragging some furious emotions out of Christine Baranski, Audra McDonald and Mandy Patinkin.
What did you think of this episode? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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