After last week’s thrilling standalone episode cleared the decks for the closing stretch of the season, there was one lingering piece of intrigue: the uneasy alliance that Liz and Ri’Chard had formed over the firm’s future. Ri’Chard didn’t seem to deny Liz’s suspicion about his personal motives for infiltrating a firm founded by her father, who had discouraged him early in his career. But they do happen to share a disdain for STR Laurie, the corporate succubus perched atop their office issuing orders they don’t always wish to follow and holding the financial pursestrings unreasonably tight. They agreed last week to take down STR Laurie together. Whatever happens between them after that would be up for grabs.
With all that set-up, then, it’s a little disappointing that STR Laurie may be going out on an own-goal. When Liz and Ri’Chard take a meeting with their bosses and inquire about payment delays to their equity partners, despite another robust quarter on the ledger, they’re asked to represent STR in court. The reason the money hasn’t been flowing at Reddick & Associates is that STR was in business with Russians and those accounts have been frozen up due to sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. STR claims the money represents past business, not present business, so they’re entitled to what they’re owed. But when the case gets into open court, those assurances turn out to be much more dubious than Liz and Ri’Chard realize.
The own-goal materializes when an STR executive takes the stand and basically admits to laundering Russia money through Israel via cryptocurrency. (How any of this is done is beyond me. But the entire back half of that sentence certainly sounds damning.) The executive plans to take the Fifth if and when government forensic accountants come knocking at his door, a course of action that doesn’t strike Liz or Ri’Chard as a solid legal strategy, but their loss in court stands to be their gain elsewhere. For all the anticipation the show built over these uneasy partners plotting against their corporate bosses, it turns out all they needed to do is bear witness to an implosion. The FBI raid that concludes the episode — assisted by Jay’s “low-tech†barring of the door — doesn’t necessarily mean the end of STR Laurie, but the episode title, “The End of STR Laurie,†certainly suggests the possibility.
The episode fares much better with its provocative B-plot, which brings the firm to the defense of an HBCU facing a lawsuit from former students who want their tuition refunded. The university’s president gave a speech that provoked an attack from right-wing media, particularly a Fox News–like channel that ran the story under headlines like “Woke Education Grooms Students on CRT.†(Including “woke,†“grooms,†and “CRT†in a single headline is some kind of wingnut Bingo.) As a result, fake grenades — the work of a white supremacist group that had previously been used to terrorize the firm — were used to threaten the campus, and 58 students felt unsafe enough to leave for other colleges The HBCU can’t afford to pay back that much tuition money, and it rejects the argument that the university president provoked the attack, which has an unsavory blame-the-victim quality to it.
The HBCU files its own lawsuit against its insurance company for refusing to pay liability, which opens the door for an appealingly zany courtroom scene where a Tucker Carlson type with a Tucker Carlson cackle who’s mistakenly referred to as “Tucker Carlson†comes up to testify. When asked about his inflammatory rhetoric on the stand, the host claims, “No reasonable person should take me seriously,†a reference to a successful argument lawyers for Fox made in a real-life slander case against Carlson. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee named Mary Kay Vyskocil, accepted the claim that Carlson doesn’t state actual facts on the show, but engages in “exaggeration†and “nonliteral commentary.†Here, however, the firm once again benefits from an own goal, as the witness starts talking about the daily briefing he gets from the network (“They decide what we coverâ€), leading the network, rather than the insurance company, to reach a quick settlement out of court.
The search for the specific white-supremacist group responsible for the fake grenades leads Jay back to the Black resistance movement led by Phylicia Rashad’s Renetta, who identifies them as the handiwork of an organization called Our Tomorrow. Scanning surveillance photos taken outside an Our Tomorrow meeting, Jay is shocked to recognize the face of a new paralegal named Susan Tremont, who’s been working closely with Carmen on a few cases. After a hilarious scene in which Marissa not-so-stealthily tries to summon Susan’s inner hate monger (“What do you think about Zionism?â€), Jay has Susan’s Uber followed to her next destination, which turns out to be an FBI office. That replaces one crisis with another: They may not have an undercover Neo-Nazi on hand, but the undercover FBI agent working alongside Carmen, who’s been crossing all sorts of ethical lines for unsavory clients, presents a new danger. The gang finds a way out of the situation by having Susan doing filing work on a Teamsters case that directly involves the FBI, exposing them to “unconstitutional search and seizure†charges. But Carmen is still playing with fire here, and the partners are not certain she can be trusted.
Meanwhile, the clock continues to tick down to 11/10, the date scrawled on the grenades — and the date when The Good Fight airs for the final time. The title for that last episode hasn’t been released yet, but “The End of Worry†seems like an unlikely candidate.
Hearsay
• That fallen body that closed last week’s episode so bracingly turns out to be a guy who fell trying to hang a “Fight the Hate†sign on the building, taking out two Proud Boys protesters below. The image of workers scraping the blood off Diane’s office windows gets the episode off to a dark start, but there’s something even darker about the view from Diane’s window later on, when the windows are clear and the head has been restored to the statue outside of them. Life goes on as if nothing has happened.
• Diane’s simmering attraction to Dr. Bettencourt finally leads to an impulsive kiss at his office door. She’s not sure right away if it’s reciprocated — Bettencourt assures her it was, but rejects her advances, referring her to another doctor instead — but Diane is back to wondering whether Kurt is the right man for her. Now doesn’t feel like the right time to be married to a conservative who’s giving talking points to the NRA.
• That’s Eric Stoltz as the judge who oversees the HBCU case against its insurer. Another fine notch on the character-actor bedpost.
• The Good Fight cannot get enough of teasing dim-witted Trump appointees on the bench. Here it’s Judge Soap (“Just think of me when you wash your hands!â€), who is hostile to the firm’s defense of STR Laurie until Julian strolls into the courtroom and attributes the frozen funds to Democratic red tape.
• The fact that STR Laurie appears to have invested in Israeli crypto through Ben-Baruch would seem to put Carmen in potential hot water, but she has proven savvy under duress before.