The Good Fight - Day 436 - Review

The Good Fight's take on current social issues continues in this week's episode. Adrian, Maia, and Lucca take the forefront of this episode with Diane, again, sitting in the backseat for the most part. Adrian's story covers sexual harassment issues and Maia's story takes on police brutality and corruption, while Lucca just helps out Colin's mother during a DUI bust.

Diane is drinking in bed and watching T.V., which no matter what channel she turns to, there's the Trump family. I don't know if she's on drugs and hallucinating again or what. Anyway, she gets a call from her one night stand from the last episode, Tim Matheson's Vice President Hoynes Tully, who is at a protest where it's gotten heated fast. Police are there. He's interested in coming over, she's not. She hangs up and takes a call from Adrian, who needs her to come in and help on a case.

She does, and we discover the opposing counsel on this case is none other than Burl Preston, played fantastically by F. Murray Abraham. He's a Hollywood lawyer representing an actor, Kip Dunning, whose life is about to be ruined by a story that a news network wants to air. Adrian and Diane are representing the news network along with some outside counsel, named Carter, hired by the network, who may or may not have his own agenda because he keeps going against Diane and Adrian.

The scandal is basically the show's take on the current Me Too movement. Kip, who is a beloved liberal actor, is going to be in hot water because the investigative reporter for the news network is telling the stories of two women who have anonymously come forward and are accusing him of sexual harassment. Marissa and Jay are tasked with not only finding these two women and discovering if their stories are true or not, but to look into the background of the outside counsel to see if he's going to work against them.

What the show does this episode is they discuss how meaningful and true this movement actually is and if it's being turned into a witchhunt with political motives. Were these women actually harassed or are they lying to ruin this guy's reputation? It's a fine line you don't want to cross, but the show juggles both sides well.

Another thing of note is that Diane finds out about another local lawyer's death; Wilk Hobson. The Good Wife fans will remember him as the guy who got into a fistfight with Will and was a general adversary to Lockhart and Gardner for a few episodes. Wow. He was found hanged, but they don't know if he committed suicide or if someone did that to him.

Diane, Adrian, and Burl question Naomi, the investigative reporter. They want to know if what these women are saying is true or not. She believes them, given her own experience with sexual harassment. I like what they did in this scene. She and Adrian eye each other during it, and you're meant to think it's a flirtation, but it goes in a whole different direction.

See, Naomi and Adrian actually know each other from the past, although he doesn't remember her. He was a guest lecturer in one of her classes when she was in law school. She says he completely ignored her in favor of her classmate, who was -get this- Liz Reddick. He denies any favoritism, but she holds steady and is later backed up by Liz herself who remembers Naomi and the favoritism Liz received. He twists this to say that Liz was the best in the class, but it's not entirely true. Later, he admits that he did favor Liz, but not because he wanted to get in her pants but because of her last name. It wasn't sexual harassment, it was ladder-stepping. Still terrible, but Naomi appreciates the honesty.

Over on the Marrisa and Jay side, Jay finds one accuser, Beth, who is an Ann Coulter loving, anti-semitic right-winger who seems just a tad off her rocker. That is not going to help their case. Marissa finds the other accuser, someone not so eccentric, but the woman wants to remain anonymous and not get involved in the suit. Marissa openly wonders if it's because she's trying to protect a liberal icon, but she claims she doesn't. In fact, she hands over her phone, claiming there is evidence that will help their case without her needing to be identified.

She gives the phone to Adrian and Diane, who play a clip on the phone of Kip pressuring the blonde into sleeping with him. Burl says they can't use the clip because of two-party consent. They could use it for exposure, but if she stays zipped up, so does the recording, because they can't use it to prosecute. Their next line of defense comes through whatever Jay and Marissa found out about Carter, which is that he wrote a script and wanted Kip to play the lead. That's going to be hard if his career is ruined by these scandals, so it becomes obvious that he was working against Diane, Adrian, and the network so he could sell his screenplay and get Kip to play the lead. This discovery makes Burl look bad, and the news network fires Carter and decides to go forward with the story. Burl intends to sue them for defamation, but they're not worried.

Now on to Maia and Lucca's storylines. As a result of some complaints about the actions of some police officers, Maia and Lucca are assigned to do some ride alongs with the police officers. Lucca goes with two cops (who work in the safe sector), and Maia goes with another two cops (who work in the dangerous sector). Lucca's time with her cops goes very boringly until they stop a suspected drunk driver which turns out to be Colin's mother, Francesca.

Lucca does Colin a favor and calls him (while he's in the midst of a hook up) to tell him the news. He shows up at the police station where Francesca is being processed and gets the cops to forgo a DUI charge. All of this leads to Lucca and Colin spending time together and her revealing that she is pregnant with his baby. She sounds like she wants to raise the baby on her own, but Colin wants to be involved. Like, so involved he wants to marry her. She turns him down because "It's a start," is not the most romantic way to convince someone getting married because of a pregnancy is a good thing.

Maia's ride along went much more excitingly than Lucca's. First, the cops end up in a high-speed car chase with some suspected criminals. It ends when that car crashes and the possible perps run away. The cops have to interview witnesses, but they are particularly rough with an African-American witness who happens to be on probation. Maia repeatedly intervenes when it gets heated, but one of the cops, Vince, is too stubborn and prideful to listen. Next, the three of them end up at a home with a suspected dead body, and yes, they absolutely find one. Well, Maia does, and she's traumatized by the sight of the corpse while the cops brush it off. The fishy behavior of these cops gets even fishier for Maia when she catches them stealing jewelry from the poor dead guy's apartment.

When she confronts Vince later about it, he tells her that they weren't stealing it, they were actually covering for the dead guy who was a fellow cop. He says they have a rule about if a fellow cop dies, the other cops rallying around him and make sure to cover up any bad behavior they were engaging in. This guy was cheating on his wife and the jewelry belonged to his mistress, so the cop says he's going to give the jewelry to the wife as though it was meant for her all along. Whether he's telling the truth or not, I don't know. Maia doesn't look sure either.

The last bit of this episode is just Diane paying Tully's bail. Yep. That's all for Diane this episode.

The episode felt a little slower than usual and much more of a filler, but I did appreciate the topics they were trying to cover. I still want to see more from Diane and a little more Liz, too. For a new character, it feels like she's not getting that much screen time either. Maybe it's because there are so many characters having their own storylines they're trying to spread each of them out, but I would like to see them share the screen more and not just in those brief working together on a case scenes they've been doing.