It’s been clear for several episodes know that The Good Wife was aiming to come full circle with its season finale. That point was made all the clearer by the surprise return of Josh Charles as the deceased Will Gardner in Sunday’s finale titled “End.” As the series wrapped up, Peter was back on trial, Alicia was in a bind, and, once again, there was a handsome man waiting for her in the wings. Would her decision be different this time? Well, yes and no. The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King weigh in on the ending that even star Julianna Margulies said would be very divisive.
The Good Wife is a holdover from an earlier age of network—or really any—TV drama. While Alicia took her final bow in an era when the ice zombies on Game of Thrones and the sweaty zombies on The Walking Dead rule pop-culture, Alicia Florrick belongs to the time of Walter White, Don Draper, and the other stars of the golden age of the TV antihero. So it makes sense that her ending, like theirs, would be about moral decay and self-realization. As the Kings put it in a video posted on CBS.com, “The victim becomes the victimizer.” As many predicted, Alicia ended the series by deciding to become a “bad“ wife, but that looked a little different than they might have expected.
Alicia still stood by Peter’s side and helped him evade conviction, but according to the Kings, she was motivated by selfish interest. She has to save Peter, they argue, in order to “save herself.” And in order to achieve those ends, Alicia ends up more callous than either Walter White (who at least went out apologizing to Skyler and saving Pinkman) or Don Draper (who, hey, bought the world a Coke!). Alicia throws Diane right under the bus in a way that the Kings describe as “collateral damage.” The most charitable interpretation we can come up with is that at least Alicia was partially thinking of Grace as she did it. Still the scene where Diane slaps Alicia is a perfect mirror for the premiere where Alicia slapped Peter. The role reversal couldn’t be clearer and the self-recognition on Alicia’s face closes the series.
As Breaking Bad famously tracked the evolution of Walter White “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” The Good Wife followed Alicia as she evolved into Peter. The Kings claim the show was “moving in the direction where there wasn't much difference between who Alicia was and who her husband was.” Is Alicia a villain or an anti-hero? It’s hard to quite see her that way after all the good she’s done for so many seasons. But the inclusion of Will Gardner in the finale momentarily humanizes Alicia while also highlighting the idea that Alicia’s transformation into Peter has been a longtime coming.
As Alicia’s vision of Will points out in the finale, their romance was the most appealing to her when it was the road less traveled. The narrative of Will and Alicia that we accepted for so long was that Alicia stuffed her needs and wants down for much of the series in order to be the “good” wife to Peter. But Will was always her fantasy, her “what if.” And while, yes, Eli can take some of the blame for their star-crossed relationship, it was Alicia who walked away from the reality of Will in Season 3. In that episode Diane, thinking that it was Will who broke up with Alicia, told him, “She’ll get over it.” Will replied, “She will,” but the delivery of that line implied that he never would.
Alicia dropped Will but then spent several seasons elevating their love to a thing of myth. Was she really the victim of a “the one who got away” scenario, or did she make a decision to close off her heart to the reality of a true and loving relationship? Was she already more like Peter than we suspected? With all due respect to Cush Jumbo, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and the Hail Mary inclusion of Lucca Quinn and Jason Crouse, the show was never really able to fill the vacuum left by Josh Charles’s exit and the rumored dissolution of the working relationship between Margulies and Archie Panjabi.
Without Will and Kalinda, Alicia lost the people who made her the most human, but in the end that worked perfectly in a story that wound up being about the “slow corruption” of a good woman. And Jason’s role in the finale might have carried more weight if the character had been on for more than 19 episodes.
The Kings argue that Alicia is still the hero of this story. Just, perhaps, a more brittle one. We see her square her jaw, wipe the tears away, and walk off into her future full, as the Kings say, of more “confidence” and more “strength” than she had seven seasons ago. Her actions had consequences and she’s irrevocably changed by what she did to Diane. We should have seen it coming when she mock-wept in front of Louis Canning last week, but Alicia has put her self-pitying days behind her. She’ll go on a little less human, but no less impressive.
