The Good Jeffrey

This guy. Margo Martindale decides he's a problem, so she convinces Vanessa Williams to hire him for some work in San Francisco, and he accepts it because a) the money is great, and b) it's very clear he's being swept out of Alicia's orbit and she doesn't ask him to stay or beat the offer. (Well, the FEELINGS-Y parts of that, I am inferring.) So... for a few months, at least, we are done with him. I SHAKE MY FIST AT THEE, GOOD WIFE.

The Good Morgan

The thing that really works about him is the way he holds eye contact. He ALWAYS makes the other actor blink first, in a way. I think it's how he radiates all that heat.

The Good Twinkles

SEX TWINKLES. Why are you letting a man go who looks at your face as if it's the great miracle of his life?

The Good Lust

And he practically has Alicia swooning. Not that she lets herself do it. She's all, "Will you call me? UM I MEAN ABOUT WORK. WHEN YOU GET BACK." He says he will. CALL HER JEFFREY. CALL HER SO HARD.

The Good Pattern

That is not one of Alicia's finer suits. It's fairly standard fare for Lucca, because she gets to be lively.

The Good Bodice

I'm not real into the semi-sheer shirts/sleeves on her, though. This style of dress looks like someone stuck a crappy cheap long-sleeved tee underneath a cocktail frock. The pattern could be SO much better served if it actually were a dress.

The Good Suit

I like this crisp black number on Alicia, though. She gets to wear it while uttering the words, "I don't give a single damn." She's speaking to Eli about whether Jackie and Howard should have a pre-nup -- which I just typed as pre-nip, and i guess that might come in handy too -- but Alicia is pissed because she thinks ELI is the one who sent away Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I would be mad at him, too, Alicia. Although it is REALLY not his fault that you failed to tap that.

The Good Duo

Alicia looks traumatized. And she IS wearing a zip-up coat while Lucca's blouse makes it seem like she has a matching scarf and suspenders (it's actually just the blouse's fabric, but yikes).

The Good Trickery

All the associates finally up and leave LAL, right as a huge deadline looks. They did none of the work, knowing they were jumping ship to Louis Canning's firm, which reps the opposition. Cary basically tricks them into coming back to LAL and doing the work, then turns around and fires them, so they are conflicted out of working on the case for Canning. Cary actually did have sympathy for their reasons for leaving -- he calls out Diane et al for only giving the associates lame work -- but it's also intriguing to me that he hoodwinks them for doing almost the same thing he and his fellows did to Lockhart Gardner. At least he looks good doing it?

The Good Hire

This DOES mean that this lady gets hired, and gets to make some lovely demands. Hey, remember when Cary kind of hit on Lucca and they went dancing? I do. DOES ANYONE WORKING ON THE SHOW RECALL IT?

The Good Diane

Sadly, it's only a one-suit episode for Big D, although she wears her lone contender very well.

The Good Dumping

Vanessa Williams has to head back to San Francisco, so she dumps Eli. Well, it's more of a "This was super fun but I have to go home so good thing we kept it casual" kind of thing. Eli doesn't care for this, and ends up knocking on her door and telling her that she is the only thing that has ever taken his mind off work. He wants her to stay. Or, go, but come back a lot, and keep the fire burning. She affectionally rejects this idea, because where Eli is finally willing to look away from the campaign at something happier, she isn't there yet with her company. Goodbye, guest stars. While these two kissing had all the heat of an ice cube, Alan Cumming was tremendous at pulling a JDM on her face -- which is to say, gazing upon it as if it were treasure.

The Big Eli

So then, the big scene. Eli comes to Alicia and makes sure she knows he did not send away Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He then gulps and tells her to call him, please, and be happy, because it's stupid for these campaigns to keep getting in the way of her having a good life. We're meant to think that losing Vanessa -- being on the flip side of that conversation -- has taught him that life is too short, and so he haltingly begs Alicia to chase the rainbow that is JDM's ass. She brushes this off, though, refusing to admit any chemistry.

AND SO: Eli confesses something I forgot even HAPPENED, which is: the time he had Alicia's phone when she was about to go on-stage and stand next to Peter at the announcement of his SA campaign. There was a new message from Will, and Eli listened to it, and it was Will telling Alicia that he loved her and would chuck it all to be with her. Eli deleted it. I TOTALLY did not remember this and GOOD FOR THE WRITERS for doing so. For once. He tells Alicia that THIS is the reason he doesn't want her to be unhappy. That he can't live with that guilt anymore. You can imagine Alicia's reaction...

The Good Fury

She gives him NOTHING but this face, then quietly reaches over and takes his margarita, in a way that clearly says, "Get the F out of my house." And I'm concerned about what the disintegration of the Alicia/Eli relationship means for Alicia having ANY kind of connection with ANYONE who isn't Grace. Or Lucca. But it's nice to see a dramatic bomb going off at a time when I didn't think this show had any left.

The Good Wife recap, season 7, episode 10

I'm not someone who thinks fans should own producers -- which is to say, I don't think TV shows should do exactly what viewers want all the time, because it's not our show. It's theirs. Let the producers produce. But there is following your own vision, and then dangling carrot after carrot after carrot to your starving viewers before yanking it back AGAIN and being like, "Eh, we aren't a restaurant, we're not in the business of feeding." That's what I think the Kings are doing. Now, Jeffrey Dean Morgan may well turn up again, but this was the last episode on his IMDb page. And after Josh Charles left, the producers have both insisted that we shouldn't care about Alicia's sex life, and then turned around and tried to get us titillated by the heat and the pregnant glances and the awkward acknowledgements of attraction and the roadblock of Alicia's sham marriage. Only to THEN sweep those things aside again and insist they're immaterial, and worse, interchangeable. You can't have it all ways, Kings. Pajiba published an interesting piece about whether everyone in this cast hates Julianna Margulies. Some of that, I think, isn't totally sound logic. Josh Charles left a 22-episode-per-year show at a time when he had a new baby, and instead took on short-mouthful commitments (Amy Schumer sketches, the 13-episode Masters of Sex), along with saying he was seeking more film opportunities. That all flies for me. Steven Pasquale is a Broadway/stage actor, so I can't imagine he intended to do a long-term commitment on the show, and indeed, in 2015, he would've gone from Good Wife to rehearsals for Carousel opposite Laura Osnes in Chicago. I think Pasquale came on board as the Band-Aid for the Finn Polmar problem -- namely, that Matthew Goode and Margulies had tons of chemistry but somebody shut it down (Margulies has said she doesn't think Alicia and Finn could ever have sex because he was too closely twined with Will Gardner's death) and THAT gave us visual blue balls, so they threw Alicia in bed with Steven off-camera and figured that climax would sate us. Not so, and then BOTH actors left. And now we have Jeffrey Dean Morgan brought on for the SPECIFIC purpose of awakening her libido again, only for her to get her rocks off perfunctorily with Peter and then, yes, for JDM to leave. I digress. My point is, I think some of the problems with The Good Wife right now stem less from a clear and all-consuming hatred of Julianna Margulies than from poor management. Every word and action from The Good Wife camp surrounding Archie and Julianna pointed heavily to it being Julianna's problem, but Tara from Previously.tv -- not someone who bullshits -- said she heard it was 100 percent Archie. That may be true, but it's at odds with how the entire situation was handled, which... either way, it's bad management, up to and including the maddeningly condescending interviews given about the infamous split-screen scene. Alicia's career being rebooted for the umpteenth time, in what is widely reported to be the last season, is just lazy. The show having no idea what to do with Cary is just sad. The Kings have two different pilots in stages of development, so I suspect they've turned over the helm of this ship to pay attention to any future cash cows. But you can't deny that Alicia does only interact anymore on-camera with newbies -- JDM, Cush Jumbo, guest judges, that one ADA. The chemistry that once fueled this show is gone, largely because Alicia is removed from it. That is a problem, and when you are a show that is now notorious for a major feud between actresses that was handled as badly as ANYTHING ever has been, it would seem like terrible optics to then craft a new season that further isolates the actress/character who was at the heart of the other conflict. Every choice they make underscores the theories they then try to debunk. It's odd. Basically, someone needs to write the book about what happened with this show.