selenak

A transitionary episode, which imo tries to pack in too many things at once and yet feels oddly slow.

Take the inclusion of the Amina incident (slightly fictionalized) into the case of the week. That to me felt random, like a sidenote/namecheck. Except that I remember how betrayed so many people felt when it turned out that the lesbian Syrian blogger they'd championed was really a Scottish 30 something guy (in the episode, he's from Kansas), and I don't know, but if you use the story I think it would have been worth to make more of it than a gag scene with Kalinda.

Then there's the fallout at the attorney's office with Cary and Dana. That, too, felt like an afterthought packed into the episode rather than an important part of an ongoing plot thread. Moving over to the main plots at L & G: I do hope Eli signing on to his ex wife's compaign after all means we've seen the last of the Eli as comic relief plots for a while, because these are starting to get old, and the show presumably wants us to keep taking Eli seriously as an operator. Not that I don't appreciate both the ex and Stacy having the upper hand in in this episode.

Back a few months and last year (already this long? zomg!) the episode with the Chinese dissidents being exposed packed a real punch when Alicia at the end realised that L&G hadn't done it for the victims but to help Patrick Edelstein (the show's Zuckerman avatar) against his competition. Whereas Edelstein's appearance here to reassure the audience that THIS TIME, IT'S TOTALLY ABOUT THE VICTIMS feels clumsily Doylist and anticlimactic by comparison. (I'm not sure I understand why "on this occasion, my interests and Neil Gross' align" other than, again, to point out to the audience no capitalist interests are involved for Will & Co anymore, we swear!) Kalinda's Syrian contact being caught at the end was predictable and would have felt far more painful if we'd seen Kalinda in conversation with him before this episode. Suddenly hearing L & G handles tricky stuff for Kalinda that now Alicia will have to do makes me look forward to the rest of the season, to be sure, but here it was, again, too obvious a set-up. And so forth.

Now to be fair: the meat of the story was the Will plot. And this was well done. Will accepting the six months of suspension was both unexpected and character progress, plus it genuinenly shakes things up on the show. It allows Alicia to temporarily move into his position at the firm, and something I'm wildly curious to see is whether or not once the six months are over her affection for Will and sense of fairness really will make her happy to move back into a lower position or whether she'll want to keep the new one. I'm also intrigued that Diane actually says there'll be a name change. I mean, if Will is only gone for six months, why?

Basically: not an episode I'll watch again. But it sets up several things I'm really looking forward to see playing out.