At the end of the fifth season of The Good Wife, and what a weird year it has been, everything is different now, Eli Gold looks at Alicia like he's realizing that he has fallen in love, and then he says, "Do you wanna run for State's Attorney", because that's exactly what he is: in love with Alicia Florrick. And who could not be, after watching her grow into this magnificent person.
At the mid-point of the episode, when things have already started to escalate, Alicia tells Cary that they need some walls and doors. "Like at LG", he replies, like everything that LG stood for is wrong, because that's what drove Cary here: disgust with how things were run in the old system, a desire to build something new and untarnished. Alicia's reasons were always much more complicated, so their respective reactions to seeing their own firm in danger are completely different. Cary wants to fight at all costs, fight against being destroyed by Louis Canning and David Lee, fight against a merger with Diane, because it would mean going back to something he could no abide when he was part of it. Alicia was never as disgusted or revolted by the old ways, and she has a profound respect for Diane, so merging with her side of the firm, should she become managing partner, sounds like a good idea: something that would make their lives more stable, easier, put an end to all the infighting, all those things that have driven the season for the most part. It's two different ideologies, clashing, and they threaten to clash quite violently. Just like Diane, struggling for control over her own firm against Louis Canning, who seems to want power for the sake of it, because he can, because it's the only game he plays well, Alicia and Cary finally crash into each other with their competing concepts of reality. It's perfect that all of this happened while a live-feed from LG feeds all those secrets right into F/A (and bless the moral debate about whether to keep the feed running, about which responsibility weighs more) - in the end, it's not even about the secrets or their destructive power, it's about the rifts that they make obvious that have existed all this time. F/A still entirely depends on ChumHum, so the existential threat that losing them as clients poses reveals that Alicia and Cary had different reasons to make the firm, and different war plans to keep it theirs. And on a personal level, Cary gets the worst of it, realizing to what extent Kalinda has been playing him all this time: not only was she feeding information back into LG, which he probably assumed, but she was taking orders from Diane for specific tasks. He implodes, in a way (and it's perfect, and I don't think I've ever liked him more). It's enough to drive him to Louis Canning and feed him some information back, because if he can't trust anyone he loves, he can at least trust in the self-interest of his enemy (even if that was never a world he wanted to live in). A self-interest that would rather see LG destroyed entirely than leave it to Diane - which is the greatest of all the twists, in the end, after all these conversations that Alicia had to endure about an empty nest, now that Zach is graduating and leaving. Is it still an empty nest if Diane Lockhart joins your firm, if she chooses you over all her other options? Probably not. Who cares about LG when you can have F/A/L?
- Diane and Kalinda, jfc, is Kalinda going to go with Diane to F/A? Is she just going to be her very personal superhero? Their relationship is clearly not just based in professional interest, and if this is what the show has decided to do with Kalinda now that she can never be with Alicia (the rumours about why are pretty disheartening guys), then this is a pretty good solution, even if it's taken way too long to get there.
- Jackie and Veronica bake a cake and throw insults at each other and Veronica reveals Alicia and Peter's arrangement and it's glorious. Also the way that Peter says "MOTHER" like she's the most terrifying person in his life.
- Alicia's reaction and willingness to fight after "it's self-defence": SHE BUILT THIS, she isn't going to lose it to Louis Canning, a man she doesn't respect.
- Finn is forced to drop out of the race for SA and Peter and Eli come to the conclusion to go with Diane, because she's ALREADY VETTED. It's such an insult, the way it's done, and Diane clearly understands it as an insult, so she couldn't possibly actually do it.
