TV Recap: ‘The Good Wife, “Conjugal”

A man enters a store with a gun. He waves it around, shouting at people to kiss the floor.

Image courtesy of TV Guide

An undercover police officer shows his badge to a terrified woman to identify himself, then approaches the armed robber. He shouts that he’s a police officer and tells robber to drop his weapon. Instead, the man shoots him several times, until he’s lying dead on the store floor.

Cop Killer.

Alicia, Cary and Will try to appeal the case based on the fact that a movie about the event came out a week before the trial. The judge refuses, and Will’s ready to be done. However, the convicted robber’s wife stops Alicia and uses a picture of the man with his daughter six years ago – the last time he saw her – to guilt her into pushing for a retrial. Kalenda doesn’t want to help, so Alicia goes to Will, and finds out that Cary’s already beaten her to it – it turns out, the wife was spreading those photos around as much as possible.

There isn’t a whole lot there – the man got pulled in with a bloodstain on a Cubs sweatshirt, similar to the one the robber was wearing. With the only witness to the crime convinced that Wilcox, the supposed robber, did the crime, there seems to be little to go on until Kalenda, shaken by her realization that cross-racial identification isn’t as easy as she thought, receives the previously missing line-up photos the woman was asked to chose from when she identified the robber. It turns out that he was wearing a Cubs sweatshirt in the photo. He is back; she is white.

The case is back in the hands of the judge who made the original ruling – who happens to be the same man from the pilot who gave Alicia a hard time. He’s not happy about the retrial, but he’s even less happy when the officer who arrested Wilcox claims, after being questioned by Alicia, that he does not own a Cubs sweatshirt. The judge does, though, and so do half the people in the courtroom. He ends up throwing out the sweatshirt with the bloodstains – it had been washed, and Wilcox claimed he just wiped a bloody nose – and the officer’s testimony. That still leaves the witness.

Some of the information Will, Cary, Kalenda and Alicia have gotten isn’t quite above-board. It turns out that when the case was originally prosecuted, Peter – Alicia’s imprisoned husband – was in charge of the case. But to avoid their conversation being monitored, Alicia has to make a conjugal visit. They get through the case discussion fairly well, but Alicia isn’t allowed to leave until the next morning. Peter ends up sleeping on the floor, but when he wants to hold her hand and talk, she pulls away and shuts off the light.

After the lawyers get evidence kicked out, they still have the problem of a witness. Fortunately, Cary comes through – he finds a man who, when being robbed, was told to “kiss the floor,” just as the witnesses in the store robbed six years ago were. However, this robbery occured one month later – after Wilcox was already in jail. The man who did that robbery died in jail.

Alicia brings the witness in and asks her to identify the robber. Even when being shown both faces, she still claims Wilcox did it – except the photo she pointed to wasn’t of Wilcox. Alicia’s team had switched the heads on the photos. The woan realized that she had made a mistake and had actually been unable to tell the difference – the Cubs sweatshirt had prompted recognition.

Wilcox is declared innocent and released. However, the prosecuter, on the advice of the judge, takes the blame and puts it on Peter’s shoulders so he and his new boss – the prosecuter of the case, and the man who exposed Peter – isn’t embarrassed.

This episode was pretty good. It had the usual heart-tugging case that you just know Alicia is going to win, but it doesn’t matter. The interesting part is actually the personal lives of the characters.

I’ve never been a Peter fan – the idiot keeps expecting him to forgive him and claims that he never misused his office. Idiot – I don’t think she cares. He cheated on her with a prostitute. And she can’t really forgive him – but she doen’t seem to have any plans to change the situation, just hanging in the limbo of trying to settle her life and her kids while he’s in jail.

Personally, I think she should dump Peter and hook up with Will. There’s been plenty of forshadowing – Will is an old college friend who likes and trusts her – more than he likes Cary, if his asking Alicia to handle questioning the police officer when Cary was the one who prepared for it is any indication. Peter is obviously jealousof Will and warns Alicia that he’s a player. But I don’t think he’s quite that bad – and I think he’d been good for Alicia (though really, she can’t get too much worse).

And on the probably-only-interesting-to-me Gilmore Girls character count, this episode makes three. Matt Czuchry as Cary is the obvious one (he played Rory’s boyfriend Logan in GG seasons 5-7). In the pilot, Katie Walder (Rory’s S4 roomate Janet) played a woman accused of killing her ex-husband. Emily Bergl (GG Francie at Chilton, S2 and 3) joins the list as a legal counsil.