Review: The Good Fight, "The Beginning of the End" | Season 6, Episode 1
We've got streams and screens and virtual beings, but no escape from our lurking apocalypse
This week, on the post where Myles announced that I’d be covering The Good Fight, Lynn asked whether they needed to catch up with seasons 4 and 5 before watching and reading along with season 6, week by week. I breezily answered that I thought they could forge ahead.
Lynn, I’m sorry.
I hope you’re still with us after this moshpit of an opening episode, in which half a dozen consequential plotlines -- many from late last season -- surge forward, sweeping us along toward the barricades whether we feel ready or not. Let’s see if we can enumerate them:
Diane, removed from named partner status, relocates downstairs with the associates.
Marissa, newly certified by the Illinois state bar, freezes up when faced with doing real lawyer stuff.
Carmen represents a fugitive looking to make a deal with the feds.
Diane and Liz defend ChumHum against a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted in their metaverse.
STR Laurie, the British owners of the firm, bring in a new named partner.
Diane’s disturbing deja-vu experiences lead her to a doctor offering hallucinogenic therapy.
Protests block the streets around the firm.
And the guest stars! Longtime viewers know that sometimes the opening credits don’t drop for one or two whole acts, but for this season premiere they proudly lead off the hour, with a list of names designed to drop jaws: John Slattery, Wallace Shawn, Ben Shenkman, Richard Kind, and of course, the man himself, Andre motherfucking Braugher. Our heads are spinning before the first scene.
It would have been nice for this premiere to be moderately-paced, easing us back in, if only so I had some idea where to start with these reviews. But when has a Robert & Michelle King show been anything less than a maelstrom? In my book, no television creators are better at unsettling the viewer -- putting us in the unsteady, uncertain, precarious, and trackless positions of its characters. The signature emotion of these shows is what the hell is going on?
And I love it. The way the Kings and their collaborators generate this feeling never fails to leave me absolutely giddy with delight. If you had my living room bugged during The Good Wife, Braindead, Evil, or The Good Fight, you’d hear honest-to-God cackling. Over the next several weeks, as we watch this final season together, I hope to get a chance to explore why these shows give me an experience like nothing else on television.
Let’s start with the premise of TGF and how that gets operationalized in this episode. If we take those seven plotlines enumerated above, 1-5 would be at home on any drama about lawyers. I often challenge students to explain why so much television is about doctors, lawyers, and police. The answer is so simple that they often miss it: an endless supply of new stories can walk through the doors of those workplaces. And while the case of the week (with the guest star of the week) is happening, our ongoing characters can have their workplace dramas as well. Along with the once-popular Western or Roaming setting (new story rides into town, or our story rides into a new town), these are the perfect frameworks for open-ended episodic storytelling.
But it’s the flavor provided by the last two plotlines that puts TGF in a different category. Any lawyer/doctor/police show can rip their stories from the headlines, and many do. The Kings, though, want to marinate us in how it feels to try to do our jobs and live our lives during the early stages of apocalypse. We start this episode with Liz walking confidently down the middle of a weirdly empty Chicago street. Police have blocked it off for some kind of protest, nobody knows about what. (Right, left, who can tell anymore?) Throughout the episode, in the middle of these other plotlines, bangs and screams from the streets outside interrupt the action. Diane tells Dr. Bettencourt that she feels like she’s on a hamster wheel; not only does she seem to be reliving actual interactions from the past (muttering courtroom lines before they’re spoken), but social progress appears to have been reset. Everything once settled is back in the news. Trump’s running again, abortion and voting rights have been rolled back, we’re in another cold war.
So much happens, so fast, never stopping. But are we getting anywhere? Inside the office, names on the wall keep changing, new gods appear in the heavens, their priests swoop in to rearrange space and time, and the characters traipse up and down the stairs like they’re in an Escher print. Is it any more or less real that the denizens of the metaverse getting their jollies and wreaking their vengeances through avatars? In a dizzying montage set to the Kinks’ “Holiday,” characters don their ridiculous ChumHum headsets and escape the relentless news and flashing police lights, looking for information, dirt, or fantasy. The Kings convey that quintessential feeling of the last six years: stop the world, I want to get off.
I really wish this show had been rendered obsolete almost as soon as it premiered. Instead, for the last six years there’s been a new gut-punch in each season’s opening credits, new images infuriating and dystopian, their documentary glimpses keeping us grounded in the shocks to which we can’t afford to become numb. And then stories unfold in that reality that we’re living through, a setting that warps the conventions of the lawyer show like a fun-house mirror.
If we have to all endure this, let us thank our Lord Jesus Christ that Andre Braugher is loudly and enthusiastically leading prayer in the conference room every time the camera floats by.
Stray observations
We live in the golden age of opening credits and theme music, but for my money there is no credit sequence more satisfying than TGF’s exploding wine bottles, choral flourishes, barbaric yawps, and of course Trumpian imagery. Raise a fist if you, like me, punch the air in time to the cymbal crashes.
The whole “Marissa gets the yips” plotline seems a bit mechanical on the surface; she can’t get Carmen to commiserate because, y’know, getting taken to meet a murderous kingpin of some sort with a bag over her head type case, so she ends up turning to her dad (which we all hope means Alan Cumming will return!). But it’s deeper than it looks. Marissa falls right back into acting as Diane’s assistant, contributing to the latter’s deja-vu. But she’s also always been a climber, and this storyline is her version of Diane’s hamster wheel. She thought she had gotten somewhere in Judge Wackner’s alternative court last season (Lynn, once again, I am so sorry), but turns out she didn’t level up on that sidequest at all. So she takes the secret passageway all the way back to The Good Wife in hopes of escaping the associate-bullpen dungeon.
I’ve always loved how both TGW and TGF have handled ChumHum, that big tech account that the firms are desperate to keep or steal as we reconfigure the names opposite the elevator. Perhaps it was a safe bet that the Facebook-slash-Google stand-in would continue to generate relevant storylines indefinitely, but being able to go back to that well both to provide ripped-from-yada-yada courtroom scenes and workplace tensions has been a huge boon to these series.
Liz graciously gives Diane a corner office in Hell, complete with birds hurling themselves into the window, African masks she can’t remember seeing before, a decidedly non-luxe couch, and heartbreakingly, Ri’Chard chucking the iconic flower-headed painting into the dustbin.
Carmen has no hesitation hitching her star to Ben-Baruch’s wagon, in TGW tradition. This guy might be a monster who casually offs anybody he suspects of disloyalty, but he’s also a ticket to the stratosphere for as long as you can ride that rocket. I hope to see a lot of Ben Shenkman this season, an actor I’ve loved ever since his surprisingly touching arc on Royal Pains.
This show has always done Upstairs, Downstairs as well as any lawyer show ever, and here it’s Ri’Chard demanding that the associates say what they hate about the firm when the golf ball rolls their way, much to Julius Cain’s consternation. The Kings love to put Julius’ back up, and Michael Boatman loves to play that business.
The STR Laurie folks calling Liz “Diane” while asking for her to give Ri’Chard a chance (“he’s a rainmaker”): Hooooooo boy.
The protest stays far below, the tear gas wafting on the other side of the building, the flashbangs loud but distant … until the grenade comes rolling into the elevator.
“We plan to kick ass!”
This is the second show to use an episode title from Lost in the past couple of months, and so I look forward to seeing which show does "Ab Aeterno" soon (and, of course, look forward to seeing the conversation on Donna's coverage of this final season).
For as many balls that are thrown up in the air with this episode, I think a consistent theme is embedded in the title: Everyone has drifted off mission. Ri'Chard arrives talking about how he and Liz have common goals, but can anyone say what those goals are? This is an ostensibly Black firm that's run by white corporate suits. Clients like ChumHum and Carmen's lowlifes have the lawyers on the wrong side of every issue. Diane's progressivism has yielded regression, if anything. Perhaps this is the starting point of a season-long redemption story, but boy are they low right now. (Great episode, though. I'm feeling like it's fully back in the groove after some missteps and false starts last season.)