The Good Wife 3x04: Feeding the Rat

Original Air Date: 16 October 2011

Storyline: Alicia takes on a pro bono case where the witness becomes the prime suspect. Lockhart/Gardner may be in jeopardy, as Will and Diane consider their futures and the firm's direction, while Eli tries to go behind enemy lines and learn about the firm's politics.Review: It's the second appearance of Lisa Edelstein in The Good Wife, and Celeste Serrano is still stirring trouble. While pretending to be the one wowed by Lockhart/Gardner, who are pursuing her old firm's bankruptcy department, she is actually the one trying to get Will to join her new firm, under a promise hard to reject by her former colleague: baseball commissioner. It's weird to see Edelstein play such a different role from her 7-year run on House, where she was the mature one: here, she is the one always chasing the dream, the next shiny thing, and tries to pull Will in this vortex as well by playing with his emotions. I find myself loving Celeste more than I have ever loved Cuddy (before last season's romantic fiasco). She may be despicable sometimes (like when she tried to stir trouble between Will and Peter), but she's a lot more fun than she ever was in FOX' medical drama. 

As for Will's decision not to leave his firm, it was both a sign of him being a grown up as it was of his love for Alicia. I doubt he actually meant it when he said that not everyone can pursue their dreams, some people have to work; if he did, it would be kind of lame and lame he is not. He doesn't want to leave the firm he built from ground up and he doesn't want to leave his new found love - though things might be easier for him and Alicia should they not work together. Even though neither he nor Peter took the bait when Celeste tried to make them jump at each other's throats (and how much fun that scene was, right?), I'm starting to wonder how their encounters will go when Will and Alicia go public.
Their relationship - as I said before - is a mature and comfortable one and they don't really need expressing their feelings at this point. But that doesn't mean that his unwanted confession was not sweet. Weirdly, he's the one who is not afraid of saying what he feels, while she's still resisting. Does she keep the emotional distance because she really doesn't love him or because she is afraid? I'm going to go with the second one, only because I remember the phone conversation that they had just before Peter's press announcement. And since it's quite clear that this show is going to go on for a few more years, it would be a mistake giving them the forever after so soon after they got together.
As always, I want more Eli. He tries to figure out who are the players at Lockhart/Gardner and what is the best way to persuade Will and Diane, while trying to convince Kalinda to work for him exclusively. As fun as the scenes between him and Kalinda were, I find myself missing the ones between Eli and Alicia and a few phone conversations are not doing it for me. But I'm glad he's still working for the cheese guild.
The case Alicia is working on in this episode is a pro bono one: she is defending an innocent man who witnesses a murder but finds himself arrested for being the killer. The case is not very exciting, but it brings out a dilemma for Diane: economy versus doing the right thing. I'm a bit tired of the whole survival drama when it comes to the firm. I get it, the economy is bad, but does every legal drama need to bring this into discussion? It has been done to exhaustion in The Practice and I'm getting sick of it. Nevertheless, Diane's struggle between doing the right thing and making more money was an interesting character study; she's often been portrayed as the cold woman who thinks more about the firm than about anything else, but she can be quite compassionate at times.
But that was not all that the case brought on; it also marked the appearance of a new female character, AUSA Imani Stonehouse, the granddaughter of a reverend whom everyone seems to revere for his actions, though it hasn't been made clear what those were. I don't think the show needs any more characters - definitely not any more love interests for Cary (who managed to match his coffee cup to his short and tie perfectly), and I'm not crazy for her using her family to get judges to rule in her favor. But Judge Francis Flamm (Harvey Fierstein) was pretty fun and having judges with unique personalities has always been one of my favorite things about legal procedurals.The Good Wife 3x03: Get a Room Back to Season 3