Here Comes the Thud

Thanks to the hubby I've been watching a bodacious amount of The Good Wife lately. I missed most or all of Season 1 but got drawn in early in Season 2. I really enjoyed the second and third seasons, despite the tendency of the show to hang far too much emotional and dramatic weight on the ridiculous, universal sin of infidelity. "Fer chrissake shut up and litigate," I found myself saying.

But then... last night... Season 4 Episode 8, "Here Comes the Judge". Or maybe "Here Comes the Judd".

By far the worst episode I've seen so far. In terms of plotting and dialog, it's hard to fathom a more likely explanation than that the writers all decided to try bath salts on the same day.

First we have a judge who is advertised as "playing it by the book"—this is coming from Kalinda, an investigator whose time in court is limited, so this judge must have a seriously loud reputation for being straitlaced—but who nonetheless engages in a drunken tirade in a public bar, hollering before witnesses that Will Gardner is going to lose the case he, Judge Straitlace, is currently adjudicating. Also that Mr. Gardner is a liar and a thief who doesn't deserve to practice law ever again. Ok, we learn later that Judge Straitlace just got divorced and fell off the wagon, so now it's a free-for-all.

We have Mr. Gardner and co-counsel planning and calling for an independent judicial review of that judge's obvious bias—without once considering that it might aid their case to call the main witness to the judge's tirade, a woman, incidentally, with whom Mr. Gardner was once involved. (Are there any women in the legal profession in Chicago with whom Mr. Gardner was not once involved?) We have Mr. Gardner finally—after a courtroom reversal makes everybody go "duh!"—approaching that witness... and having sex with her before mentioning he and Justice both need her help.

We have the universally idiotic walking contrivance of "tow-truck magnate Nick Savarese" a.k.a. "Mr, Kalinda" a.k.a. "Hey let's remake Clockwork Orange!", obsessing on Cary Agos, absolutely dead certain Mr. Agos is sleeping with his wife.

And we have insipid side-plots involving each of the Florrick teens:

(1) Zach successfully lies about his identity to take a volunteer IT job at his dad's campaign headquarters—and nobody recognizes him as the candidate's son. The newly hired IT boss pleads with Eli Gold because she really, really needs this one specific high-school kid IT volunteer to, I dunno, hack the Pentagon or some shit—but he won't stay. Of course, once Mr. Gold finds out it is Zach, now Zach really, really wants to stay, but he's afraid to even ask his mom about helping out at Dad's HQ. Because for some reason both parents treat the campaign trail with the same child-protective horror as an opium den, alligator pit, or witness box at an organized crime trial.

(2) For no reason and with no convincing in-show rationale, Grace obsesses on a boy at school whose girlfriend, also called Grace, just killed herself. "It's sad but I'm good," she tells her mom on the phone—a typical utterance, as if this wildly privileged, coddled, and engaged private school teen has never learned any polysyllabic adjectives. Even if we concede the moronic premise that this human child of normal(ish) intelligence is worrying, "Hey, my name is Grace too! That could have been me!", the sequitur is ridiculous: in the space of a few days she stalks the boy, accosts him, befriends him, BFFs him, SWFs him, invites him to her house, asks him about the sex he used to have with Dead Grace in the bushes and whether that's what he intends with her (Live Grace). And possibly takes up smoking cigarettes.

And through all this insulting rubbish there is not a bit of acting required of the luminous Ms. Julianna Margulies to relieve the painful stupidity of the episode.