'The Good Wife' Recap: Alicia And Will Fight Dirty In Court, Peter Is Accused Of Election Fraud

by uInterviewJanuary 6, 2014, 12:00 amNews >

The Good Wife returned from its winter hiatus with Eli determined to discover the father of Marilyn’s baby and Alicia and Will going head-to-head in court in “Goliath and David.”

Picking up right where we left off, upon hearing that Marilyn (Melissa George) is planning to name her baby boy Peter, Eli (Alan Cumming) grabs her and forces her out into the hallway to have a private chat. Marilyn says that she isn’t naming her child after Peter Florick (Chris Noth), rather, she’s naming her baby after the child’s father. Needless to say, this does nothing to soothe Eli, who presses her to reveal the identity of her baby daddy. Marilyn refuses, and the two abruptly stop their conversation when Alicia (Julianna Margulies) joins them in the hallway. Despite Marilyn’s insistence that Peter is not the father, Eli decides to determine who is and hires Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) to investigate Marilyn.

Alicia And Will Battle In Court

The Holiday party results in a new case for Florick/Agos when the band they hired, Rowby (Matthew Lillard) and Marshall (Christopher Fitzgerald), come to them with a copyright case. They believe that the band’s guitar driven cover of the rap song “Thicky Trick” by Rebel Kane had been stolen and copied in an identical cover for the TV show Drama Camp (or, The Good Wife’s version of Glee). The Drama Camp version went on to be the best-selling song on iTunes, netting the television network millions.

At first, Alicia and Cary (Matt Czuchry) hope this will be an open and shut case, as Rowby assures them that their manager procured the proper contracts and licenses for the band to cover the song. After meeting with the manager, who doesn’t seem like a real manager at all, the case begins to fall apart. Rowby and Marshall’s manager got the band a compulsory license, allowing them to record the cover, but did not get a derivative copyright, which would give them the rights to their cover. Before the lawsuit can go forward, the band needs to try to get the derivative copyright from Rebel Kane. This step turns out to be quite painless, as Rebel Kane was in prison with Alicia’s husband and seems like a pretty upstanding guy.

Meanwhile, the lawyer for the TV network, Burl Preston (F. Murray Abraham), arrived at Lockhart/Gardner to meet with Alicia, believing that she still worked there. Will (Josh Charles) intercepts Preston and offers him a deal to go up against Alicia together. Preston has the case, and elusive Los Angeles connections Will is interested in exploiting, and Will knows what makes Alicia tick, both in and out of the court room. With the unholy alliance made, Preston and Will take their case to the Florick/Agos offices. Alicia and Cary are confident that the network will want to settle and are blindsided when Preston and Will announce that they are counter-suing for $800,000. Just like that, the case is headed to court.

Throughout the trial, Will did his best to throw Alicia off her game by objecting to everything she said. Angry, Alicia tried to get back at him by changing into the suit she wore the first time she and Will slept together. But, before game can escalate much further, the judge rules that Rowby and Marshall’s song is an unauthorized derivative work, and, therefore, is not protected under the copyright law.

Not willing to back down to Will, Alicia and Cary try to make the argument that the cover was a satire, and therefore automatically protected by copyright laws, but the rapper Rebel Kane gets on the stand and says that the original song was, itself, a satire, essentially nullifying the claim. In a last ditch effort to salvage the case, Alicia puts Robyn (Jess Weixler) to work, asking her to find everything and anything she can on the songs.

Robyn comes through when she stumbles upon a Swedish version of Drama Camp’s cover of the song that has an odd sound at the 1:23 mark. It’s the sound of a bowling ball hitting pins – a sound absent from the Drama Camp song being sold currently. Rowby and Marshall recorded their song in their manager’s bowling alley, and the Swedish version proves that Drama Camp had simply taken the Rowby and Marshall recording and disguised it, making it theft. Alicia and Cary take the evidence to Lockhart/Gardner and are pleased when Will must fold.

Kalinda Investigates Marilyn

Meanwhile, Kalinda tracks down Marilyn’s potential baby daddy, a married ex flame who she was with the night of conception. Unfortunately, this Peter denies any involvement and tells Kalinda that Marilyn left their reunion that night because she was called into work with Peter in Springfield. Not only was Peter (Florick) also in Springfield that night, but the security footage from the hotel security cameras is missing, and not even Kalinda can find it. Eli tries to get Marilyn to quell his curiosity once and for all, but she refuses again. Just as he’s about to go insane, Eli receives a call from a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who calls him into her office to comment on some footage she was sent by an anonymous source. It’s not the footage from the hotel, as Eli had been expecting, it’s footage of what looks like election fraud.

Eli emerges from this startling meeting in such a daze, he barely registers that Marilyn has convinced the father of her child to come forward. It’s Peter Bogdanovich, who appeared as himself in the very last seconds of the episode.

The Good Wife airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBS.