The Good Wife Recap - Episode 1x02 "Stripped"
A handful of very enthusiastic people asked, and you shall receive: part 2 of the recap!
(No but seriously, thank you for the lovely feedback on the Pilot Recap. I just had a fantastic time ranting to myself in part one, but some of you really seemed to enjoy it and that just made it even more fun. Hope you enjoy this, love goes out to you all!)
At the very beginning of the second episode, something terrible happens: We open with shots of network appropriately naked Peter Florrick hooking up with a sex worker. There's moaning, there's chest hair, it's rightfully shot and edited just like a horror movie, and I haven't been this scared since I watched The Haunting Of Hill House for the first time.
Camera flashes, BANG, a kid yells "MOOOOM". Alicia wakes up. All perfect hair, mascara and eyeliner (okay Bella Swan post vampirification, I see you). It was all a dream. Well, actually it wasn't. Remember, and say it with me this time: She's 👏 a 👏 woman 👏 scorned 👏
But at least she's still slaying.
Quick cut to the business district of Chicago. We're at the firm. Cary Agos, that sleazy little ball of blond antagonism (in case you needed a refresher), is talking Alicia's ear off, saying how happy he is for her because of Peter's appeal. Well, that makes one of us, I guess. Alicia visibly feels the same as me.
The conversation is thankfully cut short by Alicia's client meeting. Through the glass walls, Will waves her into the meeting room - her knight in shining Armani if you will - and Cary goes on his way to do whatever it is he usually does, be blond and annoying elsewhere, I guess (I really have negative patience and sympathy points for Cary rn. Feel free to absolutely hold that against me in 80 years when we get to the season 6 recap of the show and I'll be talking and crying about him like he came from my loins).
In the meeting room, Diane and Will are already deep into the client interview. This week's case is the civil case that Will teased for us at the end of the pilot episode (right before the possibility of Peter's prison release entered the chat and RUINED EVERYTHING, including my peace). The client - funfact - is played by an actress who also had tiny mini guest roles on both Pretty Little Liars (as Ezra's age-appropriate ex-fiancée) and Gossip Girl (as one of Dan's Getting Over Serena Rebounds in the first episode of season 2 during the second out of approximately 347283639 times Dan attempted to get over Serena on the show) (I had to look up none of that, my brain is just actively rotting away in a dark, fuming swamp of useless trashy pop culture knowledge).
Every minor guest actor on this show has been in absolutely everything but particularly on Gossip Girl. It's glorious.
The client, Christy, comes in absolutely testing the limits of the tumblr community guidelines I'm very much not up to date with, but I don't care for all that cautious censoring shit everyone's doing over on other socials, so I guess let's fuck around and find out. Christy's going up against her rapist. Will warns her that this could be seen as opportunistic since the culprit is a public figure who comes from money (which I know could seem crusty af but he's absolutely right for warning her about that), but Christy's determined to go through with the process. She wants justice.
After the meeting, super friends slash god tier tv duo Will and Diane are discussing her decision. Alicia joins them. Diane, leaning against the wall behind her like the coolest bitch on the block that she is, begins to ask Alicia to let them talk privately, but Will interrupts her to tell Alicia to stay because, after all, he is but a himbo and those are his two favourite women in the whole wide world.
Diane worries that Christy doesn't know what she's in for, but she's leaning toward wanting to take the case, being the feminist that she is. Will, unsure, says that it's actually a criminal case, not a civil one, after which Diane so kindly informs us, the audience, that professional white-noise machine Glenn Childs, the state's attorney, rejected Christy's charges. Will namedrops a case from 2006 that I had to look up because I was entirely too occupied with first grade in that year to stay up to date on sexual assault trials in the US, in which three members of a university lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape. I groaned out loud twice consecutively when the google results came in, firstly for feminist reasons, then again for others, because of fucking course that man would bring up a sports related case. Will is such a dumb frat boy... But he's also MY dumb frat boy, you know?
Diane almost takes her back off the wall she's so cuntily leaning against to fist fight him for the implication of a false accusation. They get into a back and forth until she finally asks him in a perfect blend of passive aggression and calmness in her voice, "Do you believe her?", and Will somberly says that he believes a lot of things he cannot prove. Diane and Alicia exchange eye contact, it's kind of a collective, imaginary sigh of the word "men...". It's also a bit fond though because we've luckily established Will's intentions. We know he's no scum.
Will, moving fast because he wants to get back in his girls' good graces, says he'll reach out to the rich family's lawyer to try and get them to settle with Christy. He jokes around a bit dumbly. Alicia smiles. Diane chuckles Christine Baranski's lovely, sexy signature chuckle, and my babies are all okay and they all like each other again and I can get a peaceful night of sleep tonight.
Will asks Alicia to join him for lunch with the family's lawyer. Alicia accepts, Will gives her a cheeky little look like he's about to yell out a string of proposals into her face like the precious little babygirl that he is. I need to take him to the park and make him a flower crown of daisies, I'm so serious.
Then a shoe drops. Or maybe something a bit smaller than a shoe. A scarf, perhaps. Will tells Alicia that Christy specifically requested that Alicia be on her case. He wonders how they know each other. They don't. Which leaves Alicia with only one logical conclusion:
Peter sucked Christy's toes.
Back in her tiny little office, Alicia gets an email from Cary, sending her that news piece on Peter's appeal that includes the audio of a sex tape of him and a sex worker (her name is Amber Madison. I fear she shall return). Alicia cannot catch a break and neither can I. I need this man dead a little.
Luckily, the show knows that well and quickly sends in my fairy angel baby Kalinda!! God, five minutes into the episode and she's only showing up now, they love to leave me suffering. She's dressed up in a very uncharacteristically light blue blazer, but she can honestly wear anything and I'll never critique fashion icon super king Dan Lawson, the show's costume designer. He knows better than all of us.
Kalinda says two sentences, then does this stupid, cute little jumping motion and waltzes right out again, and I'm sitting here, absolutely devastated, yelling NOOOO DON'T LEAVE YET, LET'S DO SHOTS OF TEQUILA AND NOT TALK ABOUT ANYTHING PERSONAL, AND THEN MAYBE SCISSOR A BIT -
Anyway... it's lawyer lunch time.
The family's lawyer, Will Ericcson, denies the allegations of course. Our Will, the patron saint of the Me Too Movement apparently, makes some snide remarks. Ericcson makes several inappropriate comments to Alicia throughout the lunch once he recognises whose wife she is, trying to compare his client's situation to Peter's. Alicia calls him out in it in a way that is so calmly and composedly blunt that she might as well have kicked him in the nuts. She has these moments a lot in earlier seasons. It eats every time and I'll savour it for as long as I can.
Ericcson proceeds to offer a fucking HALF MILLION AS A SETTLEMENT???? Will and Alicia are completely floored by the amount of zeros in Ericcson's scribble. It does mean that the client is totally guilty of course, not that we ever doubted that.
Back at the firm, Alicia's talking to Christy, still trying to figure out if she used to be one of Peter's girls. She deems the results inconclusive for now.
The fam (Will and Diane) joins them, all giddy like they just tangoed their way through the hallway together, to tell Christy about the settlement offer and its conditions: confidentiality. Not what Christy's looking for at all. She wants him to admit what he did to her. Will calls Ericcson and the offer's officially off the table. See you in court, William. So you shall, William.
Opening credits time ten minutes in, whoop dee doop ✨
Alicia and Kalinda finally team up again to go visit Christy at home to question her on the details of what happened. We get another installment of CSI: Illinois crime flashbacks, and Christy tells them about a friend (Maura) and the driver (don't care for his name) who took her to the hospital after the incident and who would make helpful witnesses if only someone could find them. Kalinda very bluntly and with off-putting amounts of judgement asks Christy about her work for the strip club (... agency?? the show kind of makes it seem like her old boss is running a nation-wide empire) at the time, and Christy confesses that she used to work as an escort for a while. Not looking good on the toe sucking front. Also possibly harmful in court. Still, Alicia's nothing if not compassionate to her core... at least for the time being.
Cut to the next scene, and brace yourselves, because it's a glorious one: we're back at the office and something absolutely iconic happens. Will, Kalinda and Alicia walk through the office, and while Kalinda and Alicia are bickering about the usual like a lesbian couple thirty years into their marriage ("YOU'RE TOO EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED, IT'S MAKING YOU USELESS" - "YOU'RE TOTALLY RUDE AND JUDGEMENTAL ALL THE FUCKING TIME" - "TEQUILA AND TACOS FOR DINNER TONIGHT?" - "FINE!"), Will YELLS through the office, over at Diane, "YOUR STRIPPER WAS HOOKING", and Diane, colleagues and employees everywhere around them, barely looking up from the file she's skipping through, dryly retorts, "Why is she my stripper when she does something bad?" in this super quick, super calm and wonderfully cheeky tone. Will laughs fondly. I'm in shambles because I love them so much.
They're very married, Will and Diane. I'm completely emotionally dependent on the state of their relationship at all times.
Kalinda and Alicia visit the state's attorneys office (a lot of scenery changes back and forth in this episode). Kalinda tries to flirt their way towards access to the witness interviews from the criminal investigation, but Glenn Childs quickly steps in to minimize her slay. Childs thinks that evil devil's spawn Peter Florrick set this all up so that the firm would take on Christy's civil case to embarrass his office by making him look like he doesn't care about rape victims. He's kinda right; both about the set up and his not caring. Alicia's the wrong person to take it out on though, let alone the actual rape victim.
Childs goes on to tell Alicia that he's got way more on Peter than what he's leaked to the press already, and Alicia, confident queen (for better or worse), tells him to just show it to her if he really does have anything. I let out a guttural groan rewatching that scene because it just turns into this whole thing and I hate everything about it (the usual drill with Peter and/or Zach centric storylines, if I'm being honest). But let's worry about that later.
The girls go on to Christy's old work place. Her old boss takes up a special interest in Kalinda because she's East Indian - you know, because marginalised women are terribly fetishized by men. Not to get too heartfelt in this silly recap of a show from 16 years ago, but shout out to my fellow poc women. Everything is awful sometimes and we all deserve better.
I'd love to say this whole episode is the worst kind of exposure therapy for Alicia due to what she's been through because of Peter, but they're all like that, really, so I won't. She does end up talking to an employee at the club about different escort fees and what special requests from clients higher payments can be related to. Let's say it all together this time in one, two, three: WOMAN 👏 SCORNED 👏
Kalicia go on to clock their overtime billable hours by heading to a club to try and find the driver who took Christy to the hospital (who turns out to be entirely unhelpful as he tells them that nothing happened and Christy's lying). On their way there, Alicia makes a quick call to her son, Zach - whom I don't think I've mentioned in the pilot recap at all and whom I hereby vow to only mention from here on out if it's absolutely necessary because he and his irritating storylines always annoyed me to no end - to tell the family that she's going to be home late. Zach, not reading the room at all, let's it slip that evil demon-in-law Jackie tried to guilt trip the kids into visiting Peter. Jackie is batshit crazy. I mean she's a mother who wants the best for her son, but she really is a lunatic first.
On Zach's side of the phone, the doorbell rings and the kids discover a blank envelope at the door, containing pictures of their father taking drugs with and sleeping with another woman. Enough to fill a lifetime's worth of therapy sessions if you ask me. The kids, my poor little pookies, decide not to tell Alicia about it because the pictures would hurt her and they don't want her to be hurt 😭 They're like 12 and 14 years old in this. It's extremely heart-breaking.
The next day, Alicia visits Peter in prison and it turns out: Peter's appellant lawyer is the one who referred Christy to the firm. Alicia looks like she's about to punch Peter in the face. I sincerely wish she had. She naturally concludes that Peter cheated on her with Christy, to which Peter reacts like she's crazy and then has the AUDACITY to get mad at her because she hasn't forgiven him yet. BITCH???? EX-CUSE YOUUU? I once again want him to drop dead on the spot.
At Cook County, Alicia sees Christy again and almost throws up all over the metal detectors. Meanwhile, Will begins jumping up and down gleefully because their hearing has been assigned to (*drumroll*) LEGEND Judge Charles Abernathy, a very new, very liberal judge, which is just fantastic news for their case, right?
Right?
The plot of this specific episode and his role in it aside, I LOOOOVE Judge Abernathy. He's probably one of my top 5 favourite guest characters, and there are MANY, so it's saying a lot. He's super wholesome and just the right amount of quirky, the show's humour really shines through him even in the earlier (and more serious) days of the show. His interests include blood donation, same sex marriage and being against genocide. His biggest dream is to one day befriend Diane and be her regular plus one for EMILY's List meetings. He's just like me fr.
In court, Judge Abernathy grants all of Will's requests and denies all of Ericcson's motions. Will looks as pleased with himself as a three year old who just finished drawing all over a wall. A good day for him is a good day for us all.
But then things kinda go to shit. Will embarrasses himself a little during a cross exam, based on evidence that Alicia found for him. Judge Abernathy suddenly doesn’t seem all that biased in their favour anymore. And not 5 minutes later, the rape kit comes back, not matching the defendant's DNA. When I tell you, Alicia is so quick to turn on Christy here, and it's so obviously all due to the fact that she thinks she slept with her husband. Being a bitch is not a good look on her. She's lucky that this won't start to reflect on the state of her hair until way, way later in the show.
Right around the corner, Will is just BITCHING AND WHINING to Diane about how Abernathy sided with the defendant in court. Diane purses her lips, pads him on the head like the golden retriever puppy dog in disguise that he is and tells him well, he's a new liberal judge who doesn't want to seem biased, what did you expect, dear? She's rocking a snug, white button-up and long, tight black skirt combo in this scene. No person on earth has ever looked better, I fear.
Will hilariously retorts that he thought Diane had some pull with Abernathy because he so wants to get into her "glass ceiling committee". "EMILY's List..." Diane interrupts him with this warning, annoyed tone in her voice. She goes on to joke "Are you suggesting that I influence a sitting judge in some untoward fashion?" and chuckles a little at the end of the sentence. "No, just in a toward one", Will says, and then urges her to come to court and let Abernathy see her "sad little liberal face and contemplate a life without his friend". Diane laughs. And I swear to god, her laugh sounds so much more free and light than it usually does when she's laughing with Will. Like it's coming right and completely unfiltered from her heart.
I'm very unwell.
Alicia apologises to Will for messing up and causing him to flop in court, and he touches her arm and tells her not to apologise. They're a team, after all.
Will Gardner, here are the adoption papers, come move into my home.
At the Florrick apartment, Zach does some digital whatever to the photos of his dad on his computer that let's the kids conclude that they're photoshopped. In the kitchen, Alicia - wearing a very mom-coded cardigan - puts Jackie in her place while making everyone cornflakes for dinner. I'm not the biggest Alicia fan in the grand scheme of things, I'd even go as far as to say that at some point on the show, I start actively disliking her. But you really can't help but love her in the beginning. When she's good, she's iconically good. Queen behaviour fr.
Kalinda drops by (what a blessing). Grace goes to open the door, fearing it might be another load of Peter Florrick onlyfans prints, and a fantastic recurring joke begins right here: Kalinda is crazy uncomfortable around Alicia's kids. She gives them blank stares, like they're holding her hostage or something. This woman bashes in cars with her baseball bat, she flirts her way through firewalls and confidentiality clauses, but kids silence her so quickly. It's truly wonderful.
Kalinda does come bearing good news once she's gotten over the initial shock of one on one child exposure. Christy's rape kit results match the DNA of a convicted felon who was in prison at the time of the rape. The missing match was caused by a mistake at the lab.
During the lab tech's cross, Diane shows up in court to support her bestest friend Will by pouting her little liberal pout or whatever, and she strides in looking like a million dollars. I'm not kidding, she actually catwalks through the court room. Judge Abernathy fully looks like he's about to jump to his feet and soundly applaud her mere presence. RIP Judge Abernathy, you would have loved my Twitter account.
Alicia's cross exam goes extremely well. We, the audience as well as the court room, find out that the mishap happened because of unsterilized scissors and resulting cross-contamination of the DNA samples. Will requests that Christy's rape kit gets analysed by a different lab. Ericcson argues that it would be of no use, since, as they argued, the sample is already contaminated.
Abernathy denies Will's motion. They really have to find Maura now.
Another iconic scene alert: Will and Alicia head to the hotel where Christy was raped to try and gather information to help them find Maura. Alicia drops a sports metaphor. Will's eyes almost fill with joyful tears in answer.
With the shared power of Will's slick charm and Alicia's empathetic compassion (mostly the latter to be honest), they get the receptionist to slip them some info that actually results in them finding Maura, but not before Will and Alicia get approached by a random blonde woman who's heavily implied to be one of Will's ex-flings. She fully slut shames them with her eyes. Will looks like he can't even recall the first letter of her name. He does remember and say it, but I personally think it's way funnier to pretend that he has no clue whatsoever how he even knows this woman.
"She thinks we're getting a room.", Alicia says, worried. Will shrugs. "We could do worse" he says casually, but avoids her eyes at all costs while he says it. I'm weak for one trope and one trope only (a lie) and it's idiots in love. Damn this show for only having the most idiotic simps as their main characters.
Anyway, back to the case. They find Maura and she backs up Christy's story in court. Outside in the hallway, while they wait for Judge Abernathy's verdict, Alicia and Christy have a nice little moment together. Christy thanks her, for everything. Alicia pulls herself together and asks Christy very calmly how she knows Peter. She doesn't. She's never even met him. All was well.
(Except for all those other times Peter actually did cheat on Alicia, but I wouldn't want to be nitpicky)
Judge Abernathy returns to give his verdict. He judges in favour of the defence. Christy sinks into her seat, looking like she's about to faint as he explains that the lack of a usable sample leaves him no other choice, no matter where his personal sympathies lie. Diane jumps from her seat, storming out like she's about to show him just where he can stick his personal sympathies. Someone's about to be kicked off the EMILY's List email chain quicker than he can ask for a moment of silence.
In the hallway, the press is already waiting to take the defendant's statement. But before he can finish giving it, he's getting arrested on camera, because Childs has reopened the criminal investigation. There's an untainted DNA sample and the evidence is basically all laid out before him now on a silver platter. It'll be fairly easy to prosecute. He gloats about this to Alicia, who in response laughs at him and walks away. A good thing happened for the wrong reasons. But she's content knowing that it's happening at all.
That night, when she returns home, Alicia finds Jackie watching the arrest on the news. "Is this yours?" she asks, and Alicia confirms that it is. "Is he going to jail?". Alicia thinks so. "That's good," Jackie concludes, before they say goodnight to each other.
Alicia goes through the apartment and kisses their sleeping children goodnight, unaware of what they're keeping from her to try and shield her from harm. In her bedroom, she puts headphones in and finally listens to the recording of Peter's sex tape for the first time.
And that's a wrap on episode two. This turned out super long and very case heavy, due to the subject matter. Some episodes are lighter and more character related than others, as per usual with procedural shows. But I do hope it was a little entertaining, too.
best characters: Diane and Will, easily. They were all banter and bestie-ism in this episode, the way god intended them to be.
best outfit from the episode: Diane's white button up and black skirt. It's nothing special on paper but Christine Baranski just looks so insanely hot in it that my eyes cross and my mouth starts foaming whenever I see it.
