The Good Wife - I don't have friends. You were a friend.

Spoilers for The Good Wife up to the penultimate episode of the second season. 

Kalinda: Alicia, you’re a good lawyer, but you’re always waiting for people to give you things.
Alicia: I am not.
Kalinda: OK. Then everything will work out perfectly. 

The Good Wife – 1x15 Bang!

Blake: Alicia. It’s about Alicia. That’s what you care about.  

The Good Wife – 2x17 Ham Sandwich

One of my recent frustrations with this little blog has been that I can’t find a good way to talk about aspects of a show – not a show as a whole, not a specific episode, not even a certain theme, but just one detail that I find particularly interesting. I always tend to go for a general overview without a focus that would sometimes be necessary, and more often than that, I just desperately try to convey my enthusiasm (this is also unavoidably what my eventual Parks and Recreation project will turn into, should I ever finish it). 

The problem with this is that The Good Wife doesn’t really fit into this method. It’s a solid show with an exceptionally good cast, from the main characters to the growing number of recurring guest characters (particularly Alan Cumming as Eli Gold) up to the occasional big-name guest star. This would deserve more than one sentence because The Good Wife has repeatedly managed to find actors and actresses for roles that you would never expect them to play from their usual work, but who exceed every expectation with their portrayal – America Ferrara as a successful day trader threatened by deportation and revealing Eli Gold’s softer side, former Disney-star Miranda Cosgrove in a serious role, Sarah Silverman as the owner of an online sex site questioning Alicia’s ideas of love, fidelity and monogamy at a point in her life where these questions are more painful than ever before. In short, The Good Wife is really good at seeing potential in actors and actresses that other shows and films have missed before, and they bring out the best in each other. It’s one of the few shows really smart about politics, and with a keen sense of how the internet, social media and the 24-hour news circle influence politics and the lives of those that are involved in it, even if they are caught up in it by association – the families of the candidates. It’s also a procedural, with a fairly predictable one-case-per-episode structure – the cases are interesting when they reveal new things about the main characters, but can also easily become the least interesting aspect of an episode, especially when they are too obviously borrowed from current headlines. The worst one by far this season featured Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and his agenda of nationalizing businesses. There’s a tragic love story of missed opportunities in there too, one that is (predictably) going to play a big role in the season finale, but if it were only for the complicated relationship between Will Gardner (Josh Charles) and Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), The Good Wife still wouldn’t be one of the best drama shows currently on television, and one of the few that can pull off more than twenty episodes per season without any foot-dragging. 

The thing that makes The Good Wife work, the thing that is maybe the beating heart at the centre of the show, even if it is just for me and for a portion of the people who love The Good Wife, is the relationship between Alicia Florrick and Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi). And, hear me out, because obviously my selective perception has skewed my viewing of the show, etc., but the relationship is at the centre because many of the themes the show deals with are explored in this relationship. Alicia starts out as the wronged wife of a politician who is about to go to prison and, who, inexplicably, decides to stay in the marriage and has to focus on a career she has given up years earlier to raise her two children. She starts out as an idealist, not really prepared to ruthlessly compete for her spot in the firm against Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry), her much younger and much more competitive colleague, a bit too kind and quiet and unprepared for the world she is tossed into. Kalinda starts out as… well, a complete enigma. A woman who doesn’t share, with a remarkable talent to get whatever piece of information she needs to do her job as an in-house investigator well, but in turn someone who rarely ever gives away information about herself. They form a friendship that grows more serious as the show progresses, but even early on Kalinda seems more inclined to share things with Alicia that she wouldn’t with anybody else (at some point in the first season, she tells Cary that she isn’t unknowable – just for him – and asks Alicia what she would like to know about her, but Alicia doesn’t really take her up on it and completely accepts her boundaries without prying). Kalinda’s sexuality was one of the selling points of the show from the beginning (or at least one of the things often mentioned in articles about the show), but Kalinda isn’t just unwilling to define her sexuality (not even to Alicia, when asked directly) – she hesitates to share any aspect of her past, her private life and her family to anyone. She’s private and secretive, and yet, as the shows progresses, she becomes subtly involved in Alicia’s life. She encourages (and pushes) Alicia to be more competitive and to accept that isn’t going to get what she wants just by waiting for it to be given to her. Alicia changes and starts to embrace her new identity as a good lawyer, a successful lawyer, and a woman with an independent income and an apartment of her own (delegating some of her parenting duties to her husband’s mother, who is eager to step in and shape the children according to her own ideals). Once Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) is about to become a present part of her life again, she feels that this new identity she has found is potentially threatened. It’s not just that she hasn’t forgiven him for cheating on her, it’s that she isn’t completely sure if the “good wife” identity still fits the woman she has become now. Kalinda is the person Alicia turns to when she struggles with Peter’s release from prison.

Kalinda plays her part in Alicia’s transformation, but Alicia also changes Kalinda. In Mock, a late season one episode, Alicia takes up a case because she feels guilty and responsible for a neighbour’s misfortune, and Kalinda is initially hesitant to help out because she doesn’t see any benefit in it – but then she helps Alicia anyway, her “good deed for the year”, simply because she cares about Alicia and slowly, also about the things Alicia cares about. She doesn’t confide in Alicia, and she doesn’t share details about her past (only hints like, “I didn’t like my past, so I changed it”), but she still becomes Alicia’s closest friend (and, as we eventually realize, Alicia is her only true friend, the one person she bothers with without secretly trying to benefit, or get information – there are plenty of people in her life with whom she has a shallow relationship with a specific purpose). 

The second season was, in regards to Kalinda, like a slowly moving detective story that had the viewers trying to arrange the pieces of a puzzle (so who is Leela?), while hoping that none of her adversaries would get their first, since it was obvious from how her usually very composed facade crumbled whenever she feared to have been found out that her past must contain some horrible secret. 

When the secret was finally revealed, it turned out to be both less shocking and more tragic than anyone expected, and of course it cut to the core of her identity: Leela was dissatisfied with her old life, so she slept with her boss, who happened to be Peter Florrick at the time, and became, with his help, Kalinda Sharma. She hadn’t done anything illegal, but at the same time, the revelation was also more horrible than a few skeletons in the closet would have been, because it threatened her relationship with Alicia. 

The brilliant and wonderful thing about The Good Wife is that an epic showdown the show has worked towards for a whole season now isn’t a character’s close encounter with a serial killer, or a life threatening accident, or a spectacular at-gunpoint thingy with explosions: it’s a secret that is finally revealed and leads to apologies, accusations, break-downs, composed characters completely losing their composition, quiet characters finally stopping to be quiet, and hearts being torn out because relationships implode. I’m sure that the final episode will be very good as well, but for me, the heart-breaking breath-taking moment in the second season finale will always be Kalinda’s trembling hands when she realizes that Alicia has found out her secret and isn’t going to forgive her, and the way she almost couldn’t walk to the elevator when she desperately tried not to break down in front of the entire office. 

Kalinda: Do you want me to get somebody else to brief you?
Alicia: You mean someone who hasn’t slept with my husband?
Kalinda: Yes, you’re in pain, Alicia. I hurt you. Now, do you wanna know the fact?
Alicia: Of what?
Kalinda: I slept with him once. Now, I do that, it means nothing to me, but I do that. Look, Alicia, I didn’t know you. I’d never even seen a picture of you. To me you were a the housewife. Then I met you, and I liked you, I liked working with you, I liked talking with you, I felt bad. I don’t like feeling bad.
Alicia: Every step of the way you just looked at me, and you knew?
Kalinda: Yes.
Alicia: And I’m an idiot. I never once thought that you were my friend out of some guilt. Out of some guilty welfare for poor little me.
Kalinda: That’s not why. I don’t have friends, Alicia. You were a friend.
Alicia: And you lied to me. You said, that’s not true, about being with him.
Kalinda: Yes. I’m sorry.
Alicia: Okay, thanks. Now that we’ve cleared that up…
Kalinda: I’m not explaining to…
Alicia: How was my husband? Was he good?
Kalinda: I’m… I found another job and I’m leaving next week.
Alicia: Good.

 I love how the writers decided to frame the issue: it’s not that Kalinda slept with Peter per se, because Peter has cheated on Alicia countless times. It’s not the old and tired and sexist narrative where the “other” woman is the home wrecker and the husband is miraculously almost blameless for his actions. It’s the fact that the friendship with Kalinda has become this incredibly important thing for Alicia, a friendship built on trust, despite the fact that Kalinda wasn’t willing to share her secrets and her past with her, and now she sees that trust betrayed. Alicia takes longer to figure out how to deal with Kalinda after she finds out about it – her removal of Peter from her life is almost clinical, she seems prepared for it, but her confrontation with Kalinda is messy, emotional and brutal (“Kalinda, there are so many people who can see us right now, but I s…swear I will scream at the top of my lungs if you don’t get out of my office now.”) It’s that Alicia thought she’d emerged a new and stronger person from the mess of the past year with the help of Kalinda only to find out that all this time, she was also this other person in Kalinda’s eyes, this housewife she had wronged. She sees their entire friendship based on a lie, and this is what she can’t forgive. From Kalinda’s point of view, she’s just lost the one person she confided in, even if it was just a little bit (in a conversation later in that episode, she tells Will that she has just learned she never needs to confide in anyone – the one time she tried, it went horribly, tragically wrong). 

The emotional impact of the episode and these scenes is the result of incredible writing and acting, of a show that has compelling and complex characters and doesn’t need any artificial drama to remain interesting – because what could be more tragic and epic than a friendship, falling apart completely (and then, hopefully, being rebuilt piece-by-piece in a season-long ark).