The death—or diffusion—of the television water cooler has been much ballyhooed. But NPR’s Elizabeth Blair did a great segment on how word of mouth still helps build television, where the conversations about episodes have migrated, be it Twitter or the AMC’s post-episode chat show The Talking Dead, and was kind enough to have me on to talk about Scandal and how the labor law episode of The Good Wife got people who I hadn’t seen discussing the show dissecting it on social media for the first time:

She mentions something else that’s worth remembering, which is that some shows like NCIS, which get huge ratings, don’t really show up on social media at all. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a word of mouth discussion of the show, it’s just taking place in arenas where it isn’t necessarily visible and quantifiable. It’s fascinating how we assumed the existence of the water cooler for so long without being able to see it on a more than experiential level, and as soon as something more tangible came along, it became easy to reduce the physical water cooler conversation to the ephemeral thing it always was. But the simultaneous success of a show like Scandal, which made itself essential viewing in the time slot in part by making the ability to participate in the real-time social media conversation about it, and the longevity of something like NCIS provides a useful rule of thumb for talking about the television business right now. The old ways are far from dead, and the shiny new ones are far from triumphant, so it’s not a matter of choosing between them—instead, we have to keep an eye on both.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Live from Damascus” begins with a party at Lockhart/Gardner, as Will officially gets the word from Cary that the State’s Attorney will not go after him again. The celebration is short-lived, though, as Lionel Deerfield arrives with the news that the state bar association is pursuing Will’s disbarment – not because of judicial corruption, but because of the money he “borrowed” from a client in Baltimore fifteen years ago. Will ready admits that he’s guilty and seems ready to give up – “It never ends, does it? Once they have you in their grasp, they never let go.” – but Diane insists that he fight, and she’s the one who pleads for leniency. Because of Lockhart/Gardner’s pro bono work (which Will, of course, didn’t want to do in the first place), the board offers him six months’ suspension in place of proceeding with a disbarment hearing. Diane thinks he should keep fighting; she’s convinced that six months away from the law will kill him, which sounds a tad over-dramatic to me. Perhaps she actually means that she thinks it would kill her, or that she doesn’t know how she’ll function without him. Will decides to talk it out with Alicia instead, but Alicia barely has to say anything – Will decides to take the suspension as he’s telling Alicia what’s going on. When Alicia weirdly claims that she can’t imagine giving up the law for six months, Will points out that she gave it up for a decade, and this is a nice reminder that what’s seen as a cataclysmic event for a single man in this position is barely acknowledged as difficult sacrifice for a married mother.

Will’s final case before his suspension begins is against Neil Gross (last seen in “Great Firewall”), whose company made the software that the Syrian government used to decrypt emails and phone calls between protesters. They used that information to capture, torture, and kill people, and Lockhart/Gardner’s clients are the families of three dead American protesters. The judge keeps talking about his sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, and Gross’s lawyer Viola Walsh claims this must mean he won’t be objective, which is an interesting follow-up to the fake judicial corruption story. Much of the trial is spent going back and forth over whether Gross knew that the software, which was sold through a wholesaler, was headed to Syria, and Walsh distracts everyone with a picture that supposedly proves that one of the victims, Sara, is still alive. Will, who thinks he has nothing left to lose and, as Diane puts it, wants to “hit a home run with [his] last at bat,” is determined to get Sara back, and Kalinda uses her contacts and a little blackmail to find Sara’s location. Meanwhile, Will realizes that they key to the case is tech support: the Syrian government registered their software licenses but had to get help before actually using the software, so Gross’s company had to know what was going on and deliberately help them. By the time the dust settles, Lockhart/Gardner has won the case and Sara is safe at a US Air Force base in Germany – but Kalinda’s contact in Syria has vanished.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

Last night in “Another Ham Sandwich,” the legal proceedings against Will that The Good Wife has been teasing for weeks finally got started, and the grand jury hearing – which almost resembled a bottle episode – provided a showcase for excellent work by many of the show’s skilled actors. First, a note on the title: in case you, like me, didn’t recognize it, it’s a reference to a comment supposedly made by a New York State judge about how a grand jury could be made to “indict a ham sandwich” if that’s what a prosecutor asked; Tom Wolfe made the phrase famous in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

As the grand jury hearing gets underway, Diane must tell the rest of the firm – but first acknowledges Alicia’s hitherto-unspoken involvement by taking her aside and telling her first. Two things of note here: Alicia is honestly shocked to learn of what’s really been going on, and Diane is unswervingly attesting to Will’s innocence as a matter of course. Is she really that sure of him, or is her reputation and livelihood so entwined with Will’s that she can’t let herself admit any doubt? Or, for Diane, is there any difference between the two? She also tells Alicia not to feel responsible, which of course ensures that Alicia will feel responsible. (Although really, this is Alicia. She’d feel responsible anyway.) Alicia immediately makes an appointment with Peter – supposedly to discuss his mother – and then finds Will and Elsbeth outside the grand jury room. The reason Will offers for not telling Alicia sooner isn’t about privacy or embarrassment or putting her in the middle, but rather about his own psychology of self-preservation: “This is legal. It’s not personal. If I told you it would become personal.” And Alicia wastes no time in allying herself with Will against Peter, going so far as to tell Elsbeth that she wants to use “what [she] know[s] about the State’s Attorney” to help. Her public decisiveness surprised me a little until I realized that, personal feelings aside, Will is in the right and Peter’s office is in the wrong, and black-and-white moral judgments tend to be Alicia’s fallback when she has to justify her decisions to others – or to herself.

Alicia and Peter do finally talk about the grand jury trial, but Peter insists “It has nothing to do with us.” “Peter, how can it not?” Alicia asks. “Because I won’t let it.” And here we have the trifecta, along with Diane’s unshakable belief in Will’s innocence and Will’s insistence that the investigation isn’t personal if he doesn’t tell Alicia. This show is full of people who believe they can create the world in their image if they say things forcefully enough, and their shifting alliances control which world exists at any given time. Those three, Eli and Alicia, even Elsbeth and Wendy – that’s how they operate. The exceptions here are Kalinda and Cary: their strength comes from observing rather than dictating reality, which in part explains why they can be so effective, why they always seem slightly out of place, and why they have such a unique rapport with each other. Alicia finally gets Peter to admit that “of course” the issue is that he thinks she’s sleeping with Will – and then she looks him in the eye and says she isn’t. Which is true, as far as it goes, but Peter knows something’s up and almost smiles as he marvels, “My God, you have changed. I used to be able to tell when you lied.” Alicia offers up a substantial amount of personal and political capital when she asks Peter to just stop the hearing, hilariously implying that he’s been corrupt forever, so why stop now? But Peter – running for governor, don’t forget – refuses to go back to his old ways on behalf of his romantic rival: “Will Gardner is not my family.” Fair enough, but his children are his family, and they’re likely to be hurt in this. And if Peter is thinking about his campaign, I’m not sure the benefit he gets from keeping his office clean outweighs the risk of public reaction to his wife carrying on an affair with someone convicted of judicial bribery.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Bitcoin for Dummies” was one of those episodes of The Good Wife that revolves around everyone manipulating everyone else. Unfortunately, since Will is facing the very real prospect of jail time and Eli isn’t in the episode at all, the machinations are grim, without the undertone of playfulness this show often gives even cases involving serious issues. To make up for that, though, we get double Kalinda, as she plays a central role in both the case of the week and in Will’s legal woes.

A lawyer named Dylan Stack, who has Treasury agents literally following him around, comes to Lockhart/Gardner because of Alicia’s past dealings with Treasury. (This show is one of the best around at remembering to let previous cases affect new ones.) The Treasury department is after Stack’s client for supposedly creating a new online currency called bitcoin, and they’re after Stack because he won’t tell them his client’s identity. At first, Will is understandably reluctant to take on a possibly quixotic and high-profile case against the government in the middle of his own tussle with the State’s Attorney, but the representative of the brave new world of virtual money has arrived with piles of cash, and we know that Lockhart/Gardner needs cash. Judge Sobel quickly rules that Stack doesn’t have to give up his client’s identity, but since we’re still in the first half of the episode, that can’t possibly end things, and it doesn’t: Gordon Higgs, the same Treasury lawyer Alicia dealt with a few episodes ago, promptly arrests Stack for being the creator of bitcoin himself.

Perhaps characteristically, Will wants to go on the offense where Alicia and Diane are inclined to defense. They try to argue that bitcoin isn’t a currency at all, so it doesn’t matter whether Stack created it. But after some back and forth, including a fun cameo by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as an expert witness, Sobel rules that bitcoin is a currency, basically because it’s transferable and you can buy things with it on Amazon. I wasn’t entirely convinced – Cramer made some good points about bitcoin not having many of the characteristics of currency, including a central regulating bank, and another witness’s comparison of bitcoin to frequent flier miles seemed apt – but at least this outcome meant we got to spend the rest of the episode watching Kalinda run around a cryptography conference in pursuit of the real inventor of bitcoin.

Kalinda eventually figures out that bitcoin is three people, not one: Stack and his two partners all accuse each other in hopes of leading both Kalinda and the Treasury agents in circles. The most interesting element of this is that one of the partners is a beautiful young blond woman, and Kalinda astutely points out that the woman could use her gender and looks to deflect suspicion: Everyone assumes that the inventor of a revolutionary tech product must be male, and it’s satisfying to see a woman turn this discrimination on its head and use it to her advantage. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter that Kalinda is being manipulated, because she doesn’t need to have the true answer as long as she can play Higgs the way she wants, and no one on this show – with the possible exception of Eli – can manipulate like Kalinda. She sets up (and “accidentally” records) a meeting with Higgs at which she promises to unmask the real inventor of bitcoin, and this proof that Higgs doesn’t really believe that Stack is the inventor leads the judge to dismiss the case. At their last meeting, Alicia tells Stack that she bought one bitcoin, but that it didn’t feel real. Stack responds with unexpected words of wisdom that could be the tagline for the whole show: “Real’s gonna change. Just watch.”
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

The Good Wife returned from its holiday hiatus last night with an episode that focused almost solely on the firm, rather than Alicia’s personal life, while losing none of its usual stakes or tension. The case of the week involves a couple called the Huntleys who are suing Lockhart/Gardner for alienation of affection when they represented the wife in their divorce two years earlier. David Lee, the head of family law, claims the case was straightforward, but it soon comes out that he, or maybe Kalinda, hired a stripper to get Huntley drunk and caught in a DUI sting so that his wife could get full custody of their daughter. He didn’t tell the client that he did this, and now she’s claiming that David hired a stripper to seduce her husband so that they wouldn’t reconcile. Alicia assisted with the case in her first year with the firm, so she’s put in the middle of things: in her deposition, she is first accused of using the events her own personal life to create false rapport with Mrs. Huntley and convince her not to reconcile, and then she comes dangerously close to perjury when she’s asked whether David hired the stripper. Alicia neatly skirts this: she can truthfully say that David did not hire the stripper to seduce Huntley, because he in fact hired the stripper to get the man drunk. The fact that Alicia is both willing and able to thread that needle illustrates the way she’s learning to play the game without completely abandoning her principles.

Alicia is more directly involved, though, when the Huntleys give up on the alienation of affection suit and instead accuse Lockhart/Gardner of fraud. David got one of Huntley’s companies for Mrs. Huntley in the divorce, and Julius’s department later helped her sell it in a way that resulted in the firm ultimately making more from the deal than the client did. This shouldn’t be an issue because there’s a standard rider that clients sign in divorce cases like this that waives this conflict of interest – but no one can find the rider, and Alicia is on record as the one who filed the final paperwork. Alicia tells Kalinda that she can’t actually remember filing it – and then David appears, claiming to have found it misfiled in Cary’s old paperwork. Alicia, to her credit, immediately goes to Diane with her suspicion that this is a new piece of paper that David had slipped in with some other paperwork so she’d sign it unnoticed. Diane tells her to stick with her “best memory,” which is of signing the paper, and insists that “testimony isn’t about right and wrong.” The Huntleys’ lawyer is suspicious too, and when he’s unable to break Alicia, he deposes Cary, assuming bad blood between Cary and his former employers. But Cary offers a full-throated defense of Alicia and the firm in general, as Alicia appears equal parts surprised and touched and Diane looks on like a proud mother. Afterward, Alicia expresses her surprise to Cary, who just says, “Wow. Things change.” When they worked together, Alicia was identified as the naive idealist and Cary as the amoral striver; neither was ever really that extreme, but now they’ve all but met in the middle. And when Cary, in seeming good faith, publicly pronounces that Alicia has a level of integrity that Alicia herself questions, it’s another reminder that on this show, it’s dangerous to assume that our guys are the good ones and the other side is all bad. Indeed, Diane ultimately wins not through proving the firm’s innocence but by producing more pictures of Huntley with a woman not his wife.
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Editor’s Note: Kate was traveling over the weekend, thus the one-day delay. Consider this an open thread for the first half of this season of The Good Wife. And enjoy!

By Kate Linnea Walsh

We begin “What Went Wrong” with a slightly distracted Alicia and her colleagues defending a police officer, Lauryn, accused of killing her husband. The judge instructs the jury to only consider judgments of “guilty of first-degree murder” or “not guilty,” but the prosecution – led by Cary – is afraid they didn’t make a strong enough case for that, so they offer a deal: Lauryn pleads guilty to second-degree murder (and gets four years in prison). When the defendant asks for Alicia’s advice on whether to take the deal, Alicia says: “I think that you need to make that decision, Lauryn. You can’t defer to anyone else. You know what you did. You know what you didn’t do. You also know sometimes that doesn’t matter.” Alicia’s words aren’t really helpful to Lauryn, but the fact that Alicia came up with those words – especially the last sentence – encapsulates the way her character has evolved over the past two and a half seasons.

Lauryn doesn’t take the deal, and the jury decides on a guilty verdict. Alicia and her colleagues immediately start talking to jurors to figure out what went wrong, because everyone – prosecution, defense, and the judge himself – is surprised by the verdict. Something clearly happened, because in just one round of voting, over half the jurors changed their votes to guilty. It may have had something to do with outside evidence about one of the witnesses that the foreman introduced, but Lockhart/Gardner can’t use that because they found out about it by going through the trash from the jury deliberation room without permission. Instead, they must play a game of cat and mouse with the State’s Attorney’s office as Cary and Dana follow Alicia and her colleagues around and try to stop them from getting useful information from the jurors – a game that culminates in Cary throwing Kalinda in jail for a while. Lockhart/Gardner finally convinces the judge to declare a mistrial based on a technicality: The judge himself accepted a juror’s Facebook friend request during the trial, which counts as unauthorized outside contact with a juror. Everyone knows that something weird went on with the jury, but everyone also knows that this Facebook friending had nothing to do with it. It’s a perfect illustration of the point the show likes to make about using the system to get a desired (or even correct) outcome, even if the means end up having nothing to do with the motive.

While the Lockhart/Gardner lawyers are looking for evidence, Dana uses the threat of the judicial corruption investigation to try to scare the judge into deciding against Lockhart/Gardner, but he’s not playing. The investigation itself, however, is still going on, and Wendy Scott-Carr dramatically confronts Will at the basketball court where so much of the supposed corruption was alleged to have taken place. She tells him that he’s not her real target – Peter is. (She also tantalizingly mentions that Peter used to be part of Will’s basketball game. I’d love to know more about the history between Peter, Alicia, and Will.) In an echo of the case, Wendy, too, is using the system she’s been given to accomplish her own objective. Now, does she mean that Peter is literally the target of the investigation, or that she plans to use the publicity of the investigation to gain support for another run against Peter when his term is up? It could be either, but I think she meant the former, because she said “Peter’s clean this term. But he wasn’t his first term, was he? And you know where his weaknesses lie.” Will: “Well, I know a lot of things.” I’m sure he does. When he refuses to talk without a lawyer, though, she says the next time they talk will be in front of a Grand Jury. Will calls her bluff: “Okay. So be it.” That should be interesting.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Parenting Made Easy” starts with an arbitration in which Lockhart/Gardner is representing Pamela Baker, a professor who was fired and believes it was because she complained about her boss rubbing her shoulders. The boss, provost Daniel Clove, starts by claiming that he fired Baker because of negative student evaluations, but it turns out that the real reason is because she was outspoken about her conservative views. Clove says that the issue is that she was disruptive, regardless of what she was saying, but Lockhart/Garder argues that Baker’s civil rights were violated and that what she said about homosexuality (while defending Santorum!) was religiously-motivated speech rather than hate speech. It almost looks like they’ll win with this – until the defense proves that Baker hid her faith, so Clove couldn’t have known that what she said was religiously motivated. It was nice seeing Lockhart/Gardner representing a conservative, and the show did a good job of portraying her as a real person with firmly held beliefs rather than just as a stereotype or cliché. I also appreciated the way they had the character complaining about sexual harassment turn out to be a religious, conservative Republican, since all too often – especially in recent Herman Cain coverage – our national conversation sees sexual harassment as a pretend issue invented by liberal feminists.

The show also uses this case to remind us that all the characters on the show – including the ones we’ve assumed we won’t see again – live in the same world and intersect in a variety of ways. Alicia initially expects the arbitration to be routine, so she chooses it for Caitlin’s court debut – but it turns out that they’re up against Martha, who was Alicia’s first choice for Caitlin’s job. Martha is holding a grudge against Lockhart/Gardner, which in turn puts more pressure on Caitlin. Martha also ends up calling her boss to come help, and he is none other than Michael J. Fox’s Louis Canning. It seems that Canning and Alicia have developed, if not a friendship, at least a grudging respect for each other’s abilities, and Canning tries to convince Alicia to work for him. (Finally! It had been a whole few episodes since someone was trying to coax Will or Alicia or Kalinda away from Lockhart/Gardner!)
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Editor’s Note: Apologies for the delay on this, due to travel and illness. And hopefully this open thread will tide you over until next weekend’s episode.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner is facing the military justice system again in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” as Will and Alicia defend Sgt. Regina Elkins, a young, female drone operator who is charged with 12 counts of murder when drones kill civilians in Afghanistan. Elkins’s parents are paying for civilian representation, and Capt. Hicks, who we first met in “Double Jeopardy,” comes to Lockhart/Gardner because he thinks they “would do the least damage.” Interestingly, though, it’s Kalinda who convinces Will to take the case: he’s reluctant, unsure of his own competence in the military court system, but when Kalinda tells him that the State’s Attorney’s investigation into him is winding down and that he should “do something nice for someone,” Will takes her at her word, and he and Alicia are back in military court. The judge is the same one Will clashed with during his last experience, so he does what he did when the British judge didn’t like him: He has Alicia talk in his place. Even though Will loves Alicia partially because she can hold her own in a courtroom, he persists in believing that she will come across to others as meek and kind to a fault. This play never really works, and despite Alicia’s compelling argument that Elkins’s accuser was sexist and that she was prosecuted as a scapegoat, Elkins is found guilty. I liked that, because the courtroom scenes have no tension if Will and Alicia always win, but I wish the show had taken this opportunity to delve into the questions it raised about civilian collateral in drone strikes and about the illegal use of drugs like Adrafinil by soldiers who must stay alert for long shifts.

It turns out that Kalinda had Will doing something nice under false pretenses, anyway, because her information was wrong. The investigation into Will isn’t winding down — it’s heating up. Peter assigns his old rival Wendy Scott-Carr as special prosecutor, and Scott-Carr decides to forget about Lemond Bishop and drugs, and instead go straight for Will and judicial corruption. (While we have no reason to think that Will is actually bribing judges, it is interesting that judges from outside his own system, like the British judge and the military judge, tend to hate him practically on sight.) Scott-Carr says it’s her own decision to make Will the focus of the investigation, but everyone, including Diane, assumes Peter is coming after Will because of Alicia. Diane knows the allegations against Will are unfounded, but her patience has run out, and she talks to him like a school principal scolding a wayward 10-year-old: “Stop it. Alicia. Peter Florrick is coming after you because you are sleeping with his wife. Don’t lie to me. It’s wrong. You are her boss. He is the State’s Attorney. Even if it weren’t wrong, it’s not smart. Stop sleeping with his wife. Do you understand me?” By the end of their confrontation, I’m ready to let Diane take over running the whole world, and Will looks appropriately chastened — though he never actually agrees to stop sleeping with Alicia.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

In “Death Row Tip,” everyone’s digging up the past as Lockhart/Gardner become tangentially involved in a death row case because Ricky Parker, the convict in question, gives information to the police (and a documentarian) about a gang murder. When the police dig up the body, they find the body of a missing young woman as well, and Lockhart/Gardner represents her boyfriend, who is arrested for her murder. They’re convinced that, instead, her murder is related to the gang killing, even though a 14-year-old gang member confesses to the latter. Parker suggested to the documentarian that he knew who really committed the crime, but he’s scheduled to be executed within hours. Lockhart/Gardner therefore agrees to help the defense attorney with Parker’s appeal in return for access to him. They do eventually solve the murders and exonerate their client, but that’s almost incidental; what the show cares about is the death penalty issues the case raises. No one really thinks Parker is innocent, so their appeal rests on testimony from his mother that she neglected him and testimony from his priest that he is actually a good person – and all of it is blatantly untrue. This prompts Alicia to examine her feelings about the death penalty, and, somewhat surprisingly, the show decided to make her one of the characters most in favor of it. The defense attorney and the priest both argue that it’s morally acceptable to say whatever needs to be said in the appeal because the death penalty is always morally wrong, but Alicia isn’t buying it, partially because the girls that Parker raped and murdered were Grace’s age.

It would have been interesting to have Will more involved in this case, because I’m not sure how his constant internal conflict between pragmatism and idealism would have shaken out in this situation. But he was distracted by being investigated by Cary and Dana, who now seem to suspect him of buying off a corrupt judge. He knows that Diane is watching him and Alicia closely, and suspects that Peter is going after him because of Alicia, but when Alicia shoots down his idea of “pausing” their relationship, he certainly doesn’t fight very hard. He still doesn’t seem to have told Alicia much about the investigation, and I can’t decide whether he’s trying to protect her or trying to keep her from discovering something about his past. In Alicia’s absence, Will’s main ally is Kalinda, which in turn calls into question Kalinda’s actual motivations in her escalating love triangle with Cary and Dana. Kalinda spends much of the episode flirting with Dana, and Cary is blatantly jealous, possibly of both of them. But after they have a close call when a suspect starts shooting, Cary and Kalinda finally kiss – and then he gives her a weird look and walks away. I suspect that Kalinda is actually letting herself feel things for once, but Cary has no reason to think she’s not playing him, so this turn of events should play interestingly into the investigation into Will.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

Lockhart/Gardner goes up against the U.S. government this week in “Executive Order 13224″ as they represent Danny Marwat, an American of Afghan descent who was arrested while working as a translator for a defense contractor in Afghanistan and is now suing the government for torturing him. The various government witnesses keep claiming that they can’t answer questions because of the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Diane repeatedly uses this to her advantage by getting the judge to agree that if the government says information about something is classified, they can’t also claim that it never happened in the first place. Diane is enthusiastic about the case because it’s “the right thing to do,” even if it means, as she says, “poking the bear,” but Will isn’t convinced that it’s right at all. His pragmatic worry that going after the government could make life hard for the firm is combined with his belief that Diane is “fighting an old war.” “Rumsfeld and Cheney are gone. They’re writing books,” he tells her, but she’s firm in her conviction that the government should be held liable for torture anyway. When they discover that Marwat has been lying to them about his connection to a suspected terrorist, though, Will and Diane agree to drop the case. But the Justice Department uses evidence uncovered in that trial to bring criminal conspiracy charges against Marwat, and Lockhart/Gardner is back in, this time to defend Marwat. Diane uses a similar tactic: A military officer refuses to answer questions about an interrogation because the information is classified, so the judge agrees that evidence from that interrogation is inadmissible, and throws out the case. Much of Lockhart/Gardner’s work on this case involves reading through redacted transcripts from secret military trials, and the show made very effective use of bleeping techniques during imagined reenactments of these trials to illustrate the extent of the redaction.

When the case begins, Glenn Childs invokes the titular executive order. Diane says it is designed to help investigate charities who are funding terrorists, but Childs says it also applies to terrorists who hire lawyers. The judge agrees with Diane that it’s a violation of attorney/client privilege, but concedes that it’s the law, so a representative from Lockhart/Gardner must meet periodically with Gordon Higgs, a monitor from the Treasury Department. Diane assigns this task to Alicia, and though Higgs assures her that there’s a Chinese wall between Treasury and Justice, Alicia immediately feels as though Higgs is trying to make her investigate on his behalf, especially when he asks her to report back if Marwat ever mentions the Badula Qulp region of Afghanistan. Marwat later mentions Badula Qulp, so in her second meeting with Higgs, Alicia tries not to answer the question, and Higgs threatens her with a large fine and jail time. He also advises her against getting a lawyer – not something a government representative is supposed to do. Alicia decides to fight back, “poking the bear” – the government – from yet another side. Will offers her a high-powered lawyer who is experienced in cases like this, but Alicia wants some distance from the firm and instead goes to Elsbeth Tascioni, one of the lawyers who worked on Peter’s case. Tascioni first comes across as scattered, a little ditzy, and almost amateurish, but she then uses these behaviors that are generally coded as “feminine” and ineffective to run circles around Higgs. Even Alicia doesn’t realize what Tascioni is up to as she gets Alicia to agree to help her with a case involving an insurance company – and then reveals that this insurance company covered Marwat’s company, so Alicia can’t answer questions about Marwat without it breaking the insurance company’s attorney/client privilege. She even throws in a hilarious bit about how the Supreme Court is very into corporate personhood recently and wouldn’t “take kindly” to Higgs infringing on the insurance company’s rights.
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