The TV-production cycle should preclude The Good Fight from being as politically up to the moment as it often is, but the ink is still wet on “The End of Playing Games,” which kicks off by talking about the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home and turns up the heat from there. The raid happened on August 8 of this year, and the broadcast that opens the episode mentions it as a flash point for far-right protesters who want to take the fight to liberal cities like Chicago, which has been roiling with tension from the start of this season. The show had been relatively vague about the nature of the protests, but it finally identifies them as an example of “accelerationism,” an effort to ignite racial tensions to trigger a race war and accelerate the breaking up of the government.
Perhaps the most subtly disturbing scene in “The End of Playing Games” is the one in which Jay and Marissa summon a cop to investigate evidence of a bullet that’s been fired into Diane’s office. The cop is thoroughly disinterested in even the most basic facts of the case, like evidence that the trajectory of the bullet suggests a shot from a nearby building rather than from ground level. He also scoffs at Marissa’s conclusion that the Proud Boys might be responsible, because “we’ve been arresting more Antifa on the streets.” With that, the official investigation is over. At a minimum, there’s no interest from the police in following up on the bullet’s origins. Not only do the rank-and-file not see the Proud Boys as a threat, they may be aligned with them.
“You have a minute?” Jay asks Marissa. “I need a white girl to get past security.”
“The End of Playing Games” is a big episode for Jay, who was already doing the job of two investigators when Marissa joined the legal ranks but now seems to be a one-man corps. His discovery of the bullet holes sends him on an odyssey that requires him to take a more active role that he’s used to. Investigators are supposed to poke around in the shadows, digging up the dirt on various bad actors or legal adversaries. For Jay to have to step up and take illicit action himself is an extreme measure, and Nyambi Nyambi, who generally plays the role with a steady confidence and unflappability, conveys an uncharacteristic discomfort as he steels himself for the fight. The Good Fight is obsessed with the idea of citizens having to step up when legal institutions fail them, and that’s exactly where Jay finds himself when having to confront this instance of racially motivated violence. Diane may be alarmed by what has happened in her office — she’s first shown sitting at a table away from her desk, perhaps as a response to the “slip and fall” death that occurred outside her window — but for Jay, it’s a bigger existential threat. A bullet fired directly into a majority Black firm is meant for him.
After Marissa and Jay spot an open window at a plausible angle from the office, they start snooping around. The pair fake their way into the possible shooting site, where they find gun residue on the window. But the rest of the journey is Jay’s to take on his own. Once again, he slips into an unmarked van and travels to the facility where Renetta Clark leads a Black underground movement to find the racial justice that cannot be achieved through official channels. She identifies the culprits as members of the Michigan Army, a militia outfit that’s been targeting Black universities and businesses. But Jay cannot just leave it to Renetta to take care of the problem. She wants him to be part of an operation to infiltrate a member’s van and access his encrypted laptop, which may reveal the militia’s source of funding.
It goes much deeper than that. The more trust Jay earns from Renetta, the more she shares the full scope of her organization, which includes a full-on extrajudicial detention center that makes Judge Wackner’s court seem positively quaint by comparison. When the men in Jay’s operation actually seize the militia member who owns the van — and intends, from the evidence, to detonate a fertilizer bomb on an HBCU campus — Jay discovers that Renetta has a prison carved into her warehouse like a movie set and that they’re currently detaining the neo-Nazi who shot Frank Landau. It all links back to one of the side courts that sprung up in the Wackner season: Renetta’s sister is Judge Vinetta Clark, who had started up a courtroom in her living room and is serving time for it. Renetta is simply moving off the grid altogether.
The Good Fight remains a courtroom drama, but “The End of Playing Games” plays with the unique tension on the show between legal maneuvers and the breakdown of the entire institution. In the other major subplot, Liz and Ri’Chard are handling the fallout of the FBI’s investigation into STR Laurie, which is both crisis and opportunity — or, as Homer Simpson would say, “crisitunity.” The panic over the firm’s loss of its corporate backbone has associates filing their résumés, but Ri’Chard presents the lawyers with a challenge: For every STR Laurie client they bring under the firm’s umbrella, they each get a $5,000 bonus. When Liz reminds Ri’Chard that they don’t actually have the money to pay for this initiative, he fires back, “At the end of the day, we’re either broke or we can afford it.”
The frenzied effort to seize STR Laurie clients before the news about the investigation spreads wider leads to a hitch in the form of David Lee, whose delicious malevolence has found the right home at STR. David files an emergency restraining order against the firm for stealing STR’s clients, setting off a courtroom free-for-all that includes several twists and turns, starting with the revelation that STR has recordings of sensitive conversations that give them the evidence that Liz and Ri’Chard are deliberately thieving here. That intrusiveness, combined with the known tensions between the partners, allows Liz and Ri’Chard the space to pull off a ruse that puts Ri’Chard heading up STR’s legal team, firing David and killing the court action. (Remember the complaining I did a week ago about the show having Liz and Ri’Chard play too passive a role in killing STR? Turns out I was wrong about that. Mea culpa.)
The good news is that Liz and Ri’Chard seem like a true partnership, united in a mission to become the biggest Black firm in existence. The bad news is that they’re presiding over an uncertain and chaotic world that’s falling apart literally below their feet. With two episodes left, The Good Fight feels like it’s teetering at the abyss.
Hearsay
• That’s Thomas Middleditch from Silicon Valley (and Middleditch and Schwartz) as the building supervisor investigating the death of the protestor who slipped and fell on the statue outside Diane’s office before plummeting to the streets below. The role allows Middleditch to work from his comic bag as a clumsy, fumbling nerd of sneaky resourcefulness, but the subplot doesn’t amount to much, other than the revelation that Carmen’s lover (the one who looks like Marissa) stole the keycard used to escort the victim to the roof.
• Diane’s will-they-won’t-they flirtation with Dr. Bettencourt takes a turn for the will-they when she calls him up for documentation that his treatments haven’t affected her judgment and job performance, but they wind up just meeting for drinks. When the doctor grumbles about the NRA not caring how many kids get killed, it puts her marriage to Kurt in a grim light.
• It really has been fascinating to see how much Diane has been on the margins this season. At the onset, The Good Fight was built largely around that character and Christine Baranski’s performance, but perhaps it’s sensible that she not be placed at the center of a show about a majority Black law firm. Her current office space is a solid metaphor for the show’s agenda on that front.
• Ri’Chard’s faith has seemed at times like the branding that goes along with his name, so it was nice to see him and Diane have an earnest conversation about his beliefs. Ri’Chard’s response to Diane’s question about what he wants to get out of religion is particularly interesting: “It doesn’t do anything for me because it’s not transactional. I pray because there is a God and He desires that I acknowledge Him.”
