In its final episode, The Good Fight found itself stuck inside the precise problem it has always loved and never truly been able to solve. The show’s penultimate episode was a flight of surrealist bizarro-world fantasy: Billionaire tech dude Neil Gross offers to buy the entire Democratic Party in order to overhaul the whole thing, proposes pushing for the Rock as president, installing Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) as head of the DNC, and solving the nation’s rampant misinformation issues with a snap of his fingers (by also purchasing Fox News). All of it felt cathartic and surprising and sudden and strange, and it also left The Good Fight’s finale episode with a question. Should it end in our world? Or should Diane Lockhart be allowed to finally escape into the show’s vision of a fantastical dream, hopping into a red convertible with lightning bolts on the side and flying off over the horizon?
The tension between realism and fantasy, between grounded stories and escapism, has defined and dogged this show from the start. As a spinoff of The Good Wife, the show carried with it all the usual franchise baggage: which characters would continue, whose stories would be left behind, how expansive its universe would be, how it would feel different from its origin show. In another universe, at another point in TV history and American history, The Good Fight could have been a more rote extension of where it came from. The show’s lead, Diane Lockhart, a late-career feminist lawyer perpetually flirting with retirement, could have been comfortable in a case-of-the-week model pushing for fair liberal outcomes in a system she knows is biased but ultimately respects.
Throughout, Diane and her various coworkers (The Good Fight cycled through several cast members over its six seasons) toyed with their own needs for escapism. One of the show’s most persistent questions was whether Diane should stay plugged in or allow herself to depart from reality, whether through her work or by microdosing LSD or other experimental mind-altering practices. But some version of that tension appeared everywhere in the series: stay and fight for the world as we know it? Decide the world is broken beyond repair and glean whatever pleasure you can still get? Accept that American government is fundamentally unjust and smash it to bits in order to rebuild something better? Or, in the language of one of Diane’s real-world contemporaries: lean in or lean out?
The show’s final season was one of its strongest in part because it was so effective at playing with that question. From the start, racial politics and Diane’s discomfort about being the only white partner at a majority Black firm felt like a story the show was always trying to tell and yet often approached with either uncertainty or awkwardness. By the final season, though, Diane’s relationship with Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald), the increasing radicalism of the firm’s investigator, Jay DiPersia (Nyambi Nyambi), and the additions of Carmen Moyo (Charmaine Bingwa) and Ri’Chard Lane (Andre Braugher) all combined to put the show on surer footing. Diane, main character, had to accept the problem of her centrality, and one version of accepting it was to step back — to allow Liz to be in charge and to soothe her own anxiety with a drug that is not exactly ketamine, but you get the idea.
But The Good Fight’s chief achievement was always that its bent toward surrealism had the capacity to feel more like the experience of being alive than any more obviously realist story ever could. This season’s strongest move (a high bar to clear in a season where Phylicia Rashad starts secretly shipping white supremacists to Antarctica) is that while the law firm goes about its daily business inside its downtown Chicago skyscraper, there is a riot on the streets below. The riot never leaves. For the entire season, while the law firm keeps chugging along with standard-issue legal dramas, there is a violent, amorphous, never-ending battle happening directly outside. No one knows who started it; no one knows exactly what its terms are. It is constant, it is terrifying, and yet they’re all inured to the fact that it’s out there. What choice do they have? Life goes on! Except maybe it won’t go on for long, because of the violent riot!
The show’s penultimate episode was surrealism in the same vein, though more disorientingly compressed than usual. The tech-billionaire-ex-machina plot offers a way out for all of Diane’s problems — and America’s! But then the finale performs a dramatic hairpin turn. The tech billionaire vanishes, the Rock does not become president, the outcome of the midterms is never spoken of, and the violence explodes and is then quashed (by being shipped to Antarctica). And meanwhile, Diane and Liz circle back to the early Good Fight status quo. There is a straightforward debate about whether to represent a previous client who’s now got damaging information about Ron DeSantis, and once again Diane ponders whether it is time to retire. After its heady, imaginative departures from the typical legal-show playbook, The Good Fight ends with Diane and company firmly back in a recognizable American 2022. Just in case there was any doubt, the closing image is footage of Trump at a rally, announcing his 2024 presidential run.
It’s a good place for the show to end. The series began with Trump’s inauguration, and it ends with his probable reelection run. It strikes a note of alarm, and it registers a touch of the absurdity of the present. But as Diane decides to continue her law practice despite her sense of burnout, the finale offers an answer to the series’ constant dalliance with fantasy. It’s fine to flirt with ignoring the world, “The End of Everything†suggests, but in the end, the only path is to keep working. There’s no escape from it. Diane cannot keep drugging herself, and Marissa can’t work in the previous season’s alternative court system created by random citizens, and Liz is not going to fix the Supreme Court by having late-night phone calls with Ginni Thomas about the Below Deck franchise. Even though the show has been at its best when it questions the nature of what a “good fight†looks like in 21st-century America, it’s never stopped insisting that people should keep fighting it. Not for long, at least.
It’s pleasantly symmetrical: As bullets pepper the law firm, the show’s memorable opening-credits imagery suddenly appears in the text itself, exploding office accessories shattering everywhere. But it is not a cathartic ending. There’s no relief to it. The riot disappears in a dramatic, terrifying, and ultimately magical way, and we’re left with no more big metaphors for the oddness of what it feels like to be alive right now. Is it appropriate to end with Diane reinvesting herself in legal work because it’s the best thing she knows how to do? Probably. But it has none of the giddy, preposterous satisfaction that made The Good Fight feel remarkable.
Instead, the finale’s standout scene comes much earlier. The riots are escalating, there’s been a threat made against the firm, and the building management has shut down the elevators. “We have a lot of nervous people up here,†Liz tells a security officer. “Are people getting nervous up here?†Jay asks, when the phone call ends. “No!†Liz says. “That’s what’s so weird. We’ve all gotten so used to it.†It’s right that Diane Lockhart ends by rededicating herself to the cause. But The Good Fight’s best role was never to remind people why they should keep fighting. It was about reminding us that the world has gone off the deep end and we’ve all gotten so used to it.