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Let’s Talk About ‘The Beginning of the End’:
- Welcome new cast members John Slattery and Andre Braugher!
- The city is eerily quiet when Liz and Diane arrive at their building … which sits across the street from a Trump building?!
- Liz unconcerned about warnings that Diane is coming for her, but is she wrong?
- Diane moves into a new corner office downstairs with the associates, but is she truly happy to be there, and why does she feel she’s done all of this before?
- The firm has lured ChumHum back into the fold, but a new case involving a VR game produced by the company may be more problematic than thought.
- A man named Ri’Chard enters the office with his entourage and announces he is the new named partner.
- Carmen gets dragged into a very dangerous case courtesy of Charles Lester.
- Marissa begs to handle a motion for continuance and totally screws it up.
- Diane takes a trip into the world of VR and is directed to a real company called Mind Trip where she is told they can help her cure herself.
- Carmen pushes Marissa away, fed up with having to coddle her, so Marissa calls her daddy Eli Gold for some help.
- The protests outside take a terrifying turn inside that puts several lines in danger.
Ah, it’s great to have The Good Fight back for one more season, but why does it have to end?! With this sixth season premiere, it means we’ve only got nine more episodes to revel in the deliciousness of this world created by Robert & Michelle King and Phil Alden Robinson. Yes, Christine Baranski has been playing Diane Lockhart for almost 13 years now, but it’s going to be difficult to finally let her go. Hopefully she will return with another role as juicy as this one. But let’s not dwell on the ending just yet as the new season is just getting started, laying the groundwork for much more drama and wry humor to come.
As is typical with The Good Fight, real world issues are incorporated into the show and this week is no exception as the city of Chicago is being held hostage by what appears to be a truckers’ strike, causing massive gridlock in the heart of the city, leaving major areas basic ghost towns. Diane has returned from her vacation to an eerily quiet city when she meets up with Liz outside of their building, not really sure what’s happening on the other side where the protest is taking place, but there is a smell of tear gas in the air and flash bombs being launched. But, duty calls and whatever this protest is about surely will not affect them, right?
Also as is typical with The Good Fight, this season is pretty much another re-set from the previous season. Diane is no longer a named partner and has willingly taken an office on the lower level among the associates (Liz generously had it expanded for her). But while unpacking with Marissa and birds committing suicide against her windows, Diane begins to feel a sense of deja vu. Somehow she feels that she has done all of this before but she can’t quite put all of the pieces together. Upstairs, Liz is being warned that Diane is coming for her but Liz pooh-poohs that idea. She’s perfectly happy downstairs. Right? However, some cryptic conversations between Liz and Diane, and Diane being put on notice by the suits upstairs at STR Laurie that they want to being in another named partner has Liz on alert. Also that picture of them on a hunting trip with Diane’s husband doesn’t make her feel confident in her belief that Diane isn’t trying to wrangle her way back upstairs, which also causes her to behave a bit stand-offish with Diane. But she can’t worry about that now as the two have a case involving their prodigal client ChumHum, which has returned to the fold.
The case should be a slam dunk for them as it involves a sexual assault … that didn’t really happen, at least not in the sense of a real world assault. The incident in question happened in a VR game produced by ChumHum — which seems to only be about sexual assault, so that is problematic in and of itself — but the argument is that it was a game and the woman who experienced the virtual assault, with the assistance of a haptic suit that allows the user to feel what the character in the game is experiencing, could have put an end to it at any time because it wasn’t real. There is a lot of questioning going on about victim shaming as Liz tries to argue that the woman purposely chose a scantily clad avatar with huge breasts, in effect she was ‘asking for it’. But, Liz argues (and the judge agrees) that the woman is not a victim to be shamed because she was not actually assaulted. But Jay notices something going on with Diane as she is quoting verbatim everything Liz and the judge are saying. Has she done this before? They receive an offer to settle the case for $2 million but Liz knows ChumHum will not go for that amount, so they just have to continue pressing the idea that no real assault occurred. Everything seems to be going their way until the judge is given the opportunity to experience the VR game himself. Shouldn’t be a problem until he is also given the haptic suit to which Liz and Diane object. The judge overrules them and enters the game. It seems harmless enough until his avatar is also assaulted by a group of men (apparently others playing the game online). Feeling the physical effects of the suit, the judge is horrified and violated and now seems to have no choice but to rule in the victim’s favor. But Jay has taken a little trip into that world as well and witnessed the victim approaching another avatar willingly. He makes a recording of the scene but the internet connection is cut. He has enough to almost prove their case that the victim willingly put herself in that situation, and the judge is about to rule in their favor … until he allows the victim to speak. She gives a powerful accounting of what it was like in that moment that moves the court. There’s no way Liz can fight back about that, but they did manage to get the settlement down to less than a million, not that ChumHum likes to part with money.
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While they were in court, a man named Ri’Chard enters with his entourage and begins looking for an office, trying to find the largest one. Julius is baffled by what’s going on and when Ri’Chard decides the conference room is his new office space, he tries desperately to get Liz on the phone. Things go from bad to worse as Ri’Chard brings the associates upstairs and plays a little game with them. When the golf ball comes to them they have five seconds to say what they dislike about the firm or they are fired. One complaint is it’s too cold in the office. Okay, he’ll fix that. Another is that there are not enough associates, and that raising some red flags for Ri’Chard. Julius tells him they are hiring and have two new associates budgeted. Ri’Chard asks the associate if two is enough and he says no, so Ri’Chard drags Julius to a swearing in ceremony at the courthouse where they do some headhunting and hire several more associates. When Liz and Diane return they meet the new partner and Liz is shocked because she had no idea this was happening … and she also felt like a heel for treating Diane so badly. She later apologized and Diane said she assumed that’s why Liz was acting so indifferent toward her, but they will pick up the pieces and move on. Diane assures Liz she will always have her back.
Carmen, who has just been with the firm for about eight months, has been dragged into another messy case thanks to Charles Lester. She is summoned to an apartment where a realtor is showing her around, directing her down a hallway while she goes in another direction. Carmen is met by two men and then finds herself with a bag over her head while trying to deal with a call from Marissa, who is behaving very needy, wanting some advice on a case she’s talked Diane into letting her handle. Carmen assures her that it’s just a continuance and she can handle it but she really can’t talk at the moment. As Carmen arrives at their destination, she is greeted by Lester who tells her that since she did such a great job with Oscar Rivi’s case, he’s got another client for her in a similar situation. The client in question is named Ben-Baruch and he is accused of murder. Lester introduces Carmen to the client and he assures her that he is innocent. Carmen takes the case, but when she gets back to the office, she is greeted by the police who want to know Ben-Baruch’s whereabouts. Carmen assures them she has no idea where he is, but why would she tell them if she did? He hasn’t done anything and they have no evidence to prove he did. Ah, but they do. A conversation captured by an informant wearing a wire. If she gets him to turn himself in, they are willing to lower the charges. Carmen goes back to Lester with this information but questions why, if they have the evidence against Ben-Baruch why would they reduce the charges? Because they don’t actually have the evidence. Carmen asks Lester who knew about the murder, and he says Ben-Baruch, himself and now Carmen. Plus his two henchmen. Aha! One of them is a snitch, and it had to be the one who works the most closely with his boss. Carmen had already led the police to Ben-Baruch, but with this new information they visit him in jail and reveal that his closest associate has ratted him out. Ben-Baruch doesn’t want to believe her but it’s the only thing that makes sense. Later at the office, Carmen is visited again by the police, now with the news that the informant was murdered, left on his doorstep with his chest cut open for his wife and children to find. The cop says Carmen got the man killed but she tells him it was he who got the man killed by making him a confidential informant. She asks him why he’s even bothered to pay her a visit with this news if he feels she’s such a bad person, and if she’s so bad what makes him think she would have any feelings about the man who was killed? The cop warns her that in nine months when her client is finished with her, he’ll be pulling her body out of Lake Michigan and he will feel absolutely nothing. She dismisses him from her office and picks up the phone where Lester and Baruch may have been listening in. Lester says Mr. Baruch wants to bring her all of his business and she says that would be wonderful … but is she making another deal with the devil?
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The gist of the episode though, and perhaps the season ahead, is Diane’s feeling of deja vu or rather deja vecu, which means to have previously experienced an event even if it isn’t true. Unpacking her office seemed eerily familiar, the court case she could quote everything that was being said, the feeling of being on a hamster wheel from which there is no escape. Thanks to ChumHum, everyone at the firm was given the gift of a VR headset. Diane decides to give it a try and ends up in a virtual version of her vacation getaway. There she encounters another group of women who talk about how they were able to get off that hamster wheel and heal themselves. One shows Diane a business card for a place in Chicago called Mind Trip, so she decides to check the place out since it’s an actual business. There she meets Dr. Lyle Bettencourt, who tells her the ‘game’ she was in was actually a marketing ploy that he was against, but it got her here so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. After she tells him how she is experiencing this constant loop of the same things happening again and again, from issues like voter rights to women’s rights, she needs an escape. He describes the process they use involving a drug that basically takes the patient on a trip for 90 minutes, all medically supervised, and at the end they talk about the experience for 30 minutes. Diane admits that she had been micro-dosing to deal with her issues but he says without the medical assistance and the therapy session afterwards, the micro-dosing is only a temporary escape that does nothing to alleviate the concerns dogging her every day thinking. She feels that maybe this is all a bit too much mumbo-jumbo and thanks the doctor for his time. Later at the office and she and Liz make their amends and try to deal with their world in the firm and the world going mad outside the window, it’s the end of another day. As she, Liz, Carmen, Marissa and Jay take the elevator to the lobby, it stops suddenly on another floor. The doors open but no one is there. Carmen tries to get the doors to close but nothing happens. As they wait, a hand appears and tosses a grenade into the elevator, the doors closing before they can kick it out. But it doesn’t go off. Jay picks it up and sees it is a dummy with ‘The next one is real 11/10’ written on it. The experience was terrifying enough for Diane to reconsider another visit to Mind Trip.
What did you think of the season premiere? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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