'The Good Wife' Wants To Be an Ex-Wife

Fed up with her husband's philandering, Alicia finally blows a fuse. But will this, too, pass?

CBS

The fat is finally in the fire. After months of often sublime forbearance, Alicia blows a fuse. Having learned that Peter's apparently compulsive womanizing swept Kalinda on to his dance card—many years before Kalinda became one of Lockhart & Gardner's legal investigators—Alicia manages, in what appears to be about 15 minutes, to find and rent a small downtown apartment, pack Peter's belongings into cardboard cartons, have those cartons picked up and delivered to the new apartment, then arrange to meet Peter there so that she can hand him the keys and tell him their marriage is over.

Not surprisingly, Peter is taken aback, and once again penitent, but their conversation quickly spirals into anger and the two part with the requisite door-slamming. Shall this, too, pass? We have three (or is it two?) weeks to find out, say the program's producers.

Domestic sturm and drang aside, Alicia demonstrates that a surgeon who has removed her client from a list of liver transplant prospects is prejudiced against tattooed heavy drinkers and has earmarked an available liver for an aging but generous contributor to the hospital where the surgeon works. In defending her client's right to be next in line for a liver transplant, Alicia has to deflect a number of dubious ploys on the part of Martha Plimpton, the opposing attorney.

Alicia must also endure a scolding from Peter's mother, a tearful confrontation with her heartbroken children, and the forever looming figure of Cary who, now unemployed, considers resuming his career at Lockhart & Gardner—unless Peter, in a grim final scene, decides to keep him on the State's Attorney staff, essentially because of his adversarial relationship with Alicia.