'The Good Wife' Winners and Losers: I'm Your Scumbag

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It's impossible to pick a favorite Good Wife guest star, but Michael J. Fox ranks in the top three. (Spoilers ahead!) Things are starting to adjust to the new normal on the show — Will is gone, but he's been replaced at work; Florrick Agos is making decisions based on whether or not Alicia decides to shower and get out of bed; and all the non-Will subplots have started to make a comeback. Cue Louis Canning, played by Fox (recently free of his poorly-rated show).

Meanwhile, we finally saw the end of the NSA subplot, aka the show's attempt to comment on Edward Snowden. The joke that Snowden made life harder for independent contractors got old fast. 

Winner: Louis Canning

Loser: Diane & Kalinda

Last night's episode was just one battle in a longer war between the two name partners, but Canning came out ahead. His and Diane's dinner conversation pretty much summed up the episode:

Diane: You're not the enemy, you're the Devil.

Louis: That's why you need me. How can you be an angel if you don't let me be the devil?

Diane: That makes no sense.

But then Canning manages to get the firm out of acquisitions Will got them into, and, at the very least, forces Diane to pretend to tolerate him for a few minutes. He's a scumbag, "but I'm your scumbag," he says. For a day, he actually was. 

Loser: The NSA

Winner: Everyone

The NSA wire tap has been one of the weaker subplots on The Good Wife, and I'm glad to see it go. Everyone benefitted to a degree from the end of that storyline — no one's being tapped anymore, Peter got to do something nice for Alicia, and we don't have to pretend to care about a bunch of guys who spend half the day sharing screaming goat videos. 

Winner: Alicia and Finn Polmar

Loser: the State's Attorney's office 

Jimmy Castro and the state's attorney's office almost ruined Finn and Alicia's blossoming friendship by trying to pin Jeffrey Grant's mental state at the time he shot up the courtroom on his stint in general detention, where Finn placed him. But if last week was the week Alicia went from "pretending to be okay" to "being not okay," then this week was the week she got her groove back. When Castro tries to explain away his emailed references to "GD" (general detention) as "going down,"  Alicia asks (with a straight face!) if he meant "go down" in this text:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.