The Good Wife creators and writers, Robert and Michelle King, discussed the ending and that slap with CBS in a video posted to Twitter on Sunday evening.
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The Good Wife ends where it all began. The Kings even offered up some possibilities telling Deadline, “There has been talk about a spinoff, I’m not even sure where the process would be, but we love these characters, and if anyone made a deal with us today, we would be bringing any single one back”. It’s not so much the compromises in her profession that kept her path to victimizer going. Why can’t you keep the integrity of two strong women who have been through the trenches together?
Wasn’t she entitled to be happy and what did that mean? She straightened herself, and strode forth. When we first met Alicia seven seasons ago, standing by her disgraced husband, she was a naïve victim who needed to set out on the journey of selfhood that we’ve watched since 2009.
She does find Diane, who, without a word, raises her hand and belts Alicia across the face.
Peter ultimately decides to take a deal: one year probation and he resigns as governor. All jail time evaporated as the complicated courtroom drama took sharp turns throughout the episode. That it came from Diane just verified what an atypical heroine Alicia was – and one of TV’s best. She went to a place she’s been before, a place that Diane encouraged and traveled to often, by herself. I wish I had her answers all the time. “She is someone who takes charge, someone who controls the agenda”, they wrote. After the bullets that were lost were found, they didn’t help Peter’s case. And why did the show have to imply that Kurt had an affair? As Alicia dithered over her options in the finale, she had a vision of Will in his old office on a now-abandoned floor. Would she choose Peter? Alicia (Julianna Margulies) slapped the hell out of Peter (Chris Noth) in the series premiere for his humiliating, cheating ways. He was the bad guy, pure and simple and she was the good wife. She gets distracted. She gets fidgety. You’ve got to imagine that Jason’s skipped out on her, Peter’s going to leave to prison, and that her new partnership with Diane is kaput. New evidence surfaced even as the jury deliberated Peter’s guilt. And Grace, it just seemed like it had so many other odd, nearly incestuous elements if you brought in someone who was of blood relation doing that. Everyone else saw that, including Will Gardner. But, mainly, the Kings had trapped themselves with the development of Jason the Sex Wolf, a fantasy of a cowboy-like loner bad-boy detective whose plot played like compensatory erotic fiction for viewers who miss Will and enjoy seeing Alicia getting laid, for real, for once-and who can blame us? That first kiss was EVERYTHING. It was Alicia, who was slapped by her mentor and occasional law partner Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski.
When she straightens her suit – the same exact gesture we see her perform in the first episode – we don’t see her face, making us feel like we shouldn’t be able to relate to her as much anymore.
Robert: Just speaking of them as human beings, which is rare because they are just characters, but speaking of them as human beings, I don’t know how you get past this. Their easy, comfortable intimacy was refreshing. Yet through her reserve, there is vulnerability and fear.
She runs to find Jason – abruptly leaving Peter’s press conference. I loved, loved, loved that moment.
She also points the episode in which her character and Czuchry’s character made a decision to leave the Lockhart Gardner law firm. The road is clear now.
“I think it’s over anyway, isn’t it?” his spouse reasoned.
Michelle: It was hard because Christine and Julianna are friends and genuinely like each other and no one wants to slap a friend, but they’re also such professionals and committed to the show that they both recognized that, OK, if Julianna’s to get to that place in her acting, Alicia actually really needs to be slapped. It was triggered by the Eli confession about the Will Garner voicemail. It was marvelous to see those two characters together again, and Josh and Julianna are so good at their craft.
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[W] e were with Alicia at the party episode, two back. Thematically, it didn’t quite work to return to Peter in these final episodes.
