The danger of going far out onto a limb is that sometimes it snaps.
The Good Fight has never been a conventional courtroom drama, even in the tradition of shows that shoot for ripped-from-the-headlines relevance. It’s more like a forum for larger issues in politics and culture, which the courtroom (and office space) happens to accommodate well. The cases are rarely in the vicinity of mundane legal business, often getting so zany that last season devised an entire fake court, presided over by a judge whose very name evoked “wacky,†to take them. The vast majority of weeks, this works strongly in the show’s favor, but on occasion, it becomes so untethered from reality that it winds up floating into the ether.
“The End of Ginni†is one of those occasions. None of the three major subplots connects despite their tinkering around hot-button issues of abortion and fetal rights, violent white supremacist movements, and the influence a far-right spouse might have over a Supreme Court justice. That’s all in a week’s work for The Good Fight, but the payoffs are an odd shrug across the board, lacking the usual clarity and purpose that gives the show its edge. There may be some follow-up in future episodes that will reveal a deeper plan for any of the three, but it would not be a huge loss to see them quietly tucked in the bin. Not every idea is a winner.
The episode opens with Liz on a morning show called Breakfast in Chicago where she’s celebrating the appointment of the first Black female Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The host asks Liz if she was also around when Clarence Thomas became a Supreme Court justice, a question that Liz savvily deflects by quoting Thomas’s fellow right-wing jurist Antonin Scalia. (“I am an originalist, but I’m not a nut.â€) Liz continues by attacking Thomas’s wife Ginni, whose history of far-right activism has recently inched into election denial, opening up the potential for influence on democracy cases that are coming before the court. Aside from one disturbing exchange after the interview — a white cameraman points at Liz with a menacing finger pistol — nothing about the appearance seems that unconventional. Nothing, that is, until “Ginni Thomas†calls Liz on her cell phone.
Liz is savvy enough to question whether this really is Ginni Thomas, so she asks Jay to look into the name of the deprogrammer who got Ginni out of the Lifespring cult in the ’80s. When Jay comes back and confirms the same name “Ginni†offered Liz, her skepticism starts to fade and the two start to have conversations about a reality-TV show like regular human beings. This Ginni is looking for an apology from Liz that’s not exactly forthcoming, but Liz does find herself chatting casually with her anyway. That is until Del Cooper turns up, Candid Camera–style, to reveal that it’s all been a big prank (“You’ve been fili-busted!â€). The point seems to be that people with stark political differences can still relate to each other. Just not over anything more consequential than Below Deck.
In actual office business, we’re treated to the return of Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni, who has been underestimated since her first appearance on The Good Wife’s first season. Elsbeth’s shtick is to seem like a distractible flibbertigibbet right up until she cheerfully twists the legal dagger. Ri’Chard doesn’t know who she is, which makes him the easiest possible mark. At issue is a confusing arrangement between a married couple called a “push-nup,†which offers an expectant mother compensation from her husband for carrying the child to term and sacrificing present and future money-making opportunities. Ri’Chard’s client is the husband, who’s willing to go along with the idea, but Ri’Chard picks up on an opportunity to revisit the terms of the couple’s prenuptial agreement. After disarming him with a misshapen homemade glass paperweight, Elsbeth happily snaps the trap shut on the wife’s behalf because the entire point of the post-nup is to reinitiate the terms of the prenup.
The madness deepens when Paul Scheer appears as a third lawyer representing the fetus — or, perhaps more accurately, a third lawyer representing the grandparents who want the family money to be secured with the child-to-be and not the couple currently negotiating. If that weren’t confusing enough, the fetal-rights issue comes before a conservative judge with a pro-life agenda, who’s all too happy to reveal her point of view to the activists cheering her on in court. Despite Elsbeth, Diane, and Ri’Chard all being on the same side of the aisle against the fetus’s lawyer, they cannot stop a judgment that puts the unborn in a conservatorship. It’s a head-scratching development in a subplot that starts in an unprecedented place and keeps going, to the point where Elsbeth’s paperweights might be useful to pin all the nonsense down.
And finally, the aftershocks of last week’s unsuccessful attempt on Eli Gold’s life — resulting in the inadvertently successful attempt on Frank Landau’s life — bring office security to the fore. Between the disruption outside the firm, the fake grenades tossed into the elevators, and now an actual violent incident, the forces of darkness seem to be encroaching on our characters. Now one of those forces has been identified as Totenkopf USA, a militia group named after one of Hitler’s elite units, and the once-unflappable Marissa is starting to feel pretty flappable.
There will surely be more to the story than this — a decal that appears on the elevator ceiling references the Nazi term “blood and soil†— but Marissa and Jay’s attempts to protect her fizzle into more silliness. The two glowering men who are following Marissa on the street turn out to be federal agents, and Jay’s subsequent arrest for trying to stop them leads another group, called the Collective, to come to his defense. Now the Collective wants to recruit Jay for the type of underground justice that, again, may pay off more meaningfully down the line. But for now, it’s another frayed narrative strand in an episode regrettably full of them.
Hearsay
• Scalia did indeed take a shot at Clarence Thomas during a series of interviews in 2008 he granted to promote a book called Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. The line “I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut†refers to Thomas’s willingness to abandon precedent — which, of course, is exactly what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
• “Are you going up or down?†“That depends on the day.†As shaky as this episode was, it’s always a pleasure to have Carrie Preston back on the show.
• Marissa’s research into “the next Civil War†suggests to us — and to her — that we’re either at the precipice or already there. That’s a theme this season that the show is unlikely to drop.
• Ginni Thomas’s departure from the Lifespring cult is detailed in this massive Washington Post exposé from 1987. Thomas was a congressional aide when she was enrolled in a Lifespring course, and her efforts to leave the organization were met with a campaign of intimidation and harassment.