‘The Good Wife’ Recap: So Long, Farewell

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Julianna Margulies in "The Good Wife."Credit Jeff Neumann/CBS

Season 6, Episode 20: “The Deconstruction”

Will Gardner: shot in a courtroom by a crazed client, last seen lying on a gurney (one foot visible). Kalinda Sharma: saves her boyfriend from jail and from the retribution of an angry drug lord, last seen saying goodbye to the nicest character on the show and walking into the sunset.

When “The Good Wife” bid farewell to Josh Charles (who played Will) last season, his exit was melodramatic and more than a little silly. When it did the same for Archie Panjabi in Sunday night’s episode “The Deconstruction” — a surprise move, coming two weeks before the end of the season — it was the opposite. You could call it lowkey or anticlimactic; I’m going with the latter, thinking that it was an awfully undercooked way of saying goodbye to one of the most important players. (Of course, with Kalinda still alive, there’s the strong possibility that Ms. Panjabi could turn up from time to time as a guest star. Or that the seeming finality of her departure could have been a ruse.)

With Cary once again facing prosecution for his supposed involvement in Lemond’s drug dealing, both he and Kalinda approached the prosecutor Geneva Pine offering to help with her case. Cary, ever the martyr for Kalinda, offered to testify, while pragmatic Kalinda wouldn’t testify but would somehow get the goods on Lemond. Given 24 hours, Kalinda executed her plan.

Having brought Lemond’s son Dylan home from school (and why is she still on babysitting duty?), she downloaded files from Lemond’s laptop onto a flash drive. There was some medium tension regarding whether she’d be caught, until her plan became clear: It was a flash drive she’d stolen from Dex (J.D. Williams of “The Wire”), the flunky who runs Lemond’s legitimate businesses and who previously delivered the bag of cash that paid for Cary’s bail.

Her ploy was successful, with Lemond being arrested (in front of his son, which we’ll probably hear about again) and the blame being cast on Dex. But then it went south when the frantic Dex, trying to find her, talked to Cary and figured out from Cary’s responses what she’d done. Cary told Kalinda and she knew her time was done. She kissed him and silently left — ending one of television’s least sexy, most off-camera relationships — and next appeared at Alicia’s apartment. Alicia wasn’t home (she had her own problems, which we’ll get to in a minute) so Kalinda left a note and got a cheerful “Bye” from Grace. As Kalinda exited the apartment she turned at the door and looked back into the camera, a frozen moment that certainly appeared to be Ms. Panjabi’s adieu.

Alicia was absent because of a not entirely credible series of events that left her unemployed and sobbing — wracked with tears, convulsed with pain — by the end of the episode. It started inauspiciously with her humiliating public announcement that she was withdrawing from the state’s attorney job (because of the voting-machine scandal that we know was no fault of hers). Now she needed a job, but that led to a huge misunderstanding: Because of an errant phone call, Alicia thought her old buddies at what is now Lockhart, Agos & Lee did not want her to return and were trying to steal her clients. As we eventually learned, they did want her back, but they thought that she didn’t want to return and that she was trying to covertly lure her clients away. As David Lee kept saying, there she goes again. The confusion fed on itself, with each side reading the other’s delays as stalling tactics designed to win more time for client poaching. It didn’t help that Alicia kept getting bad advice from Peter and Finn, who accepted her version of events and pushed her toward scorched-earth tactics.

This was good for some comedy, with the two sides smiling at each other’s conference-room windows and Zach Grenier indulging in some high sanctimony as David. Eventually things were straightened out, with Kalinda’s help — perhaps the last time she would save the day for her bosses — and Diane, Cary and David were ready to take Alicia back. But at the proverbial last second, R.D. (Oliver Platt), who’d been hanging around the office because of the case of the week, announced that if Alicia returned, he, the firm’s new big fish, was gone. She was too tainted by her fake election scandal; he even invoked the name Blagojevich. Apparently Diane et al. capitulated (awfully easily, I’d say), because soon Alicia was morosely telling Peter that she was out and he was advising her to take some time off and write a book.

And that was that for a doubly gloomy night. To the sound of Lauren O’Connell singing “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” (when “The Good Wife” pulls the sad-pop-song card, you know it’s a special episode) Cary sat among the ruins of Kalinda’s apartment, where she had knocked a new hole in the wall to retrieve her guns and money, and Alicia found Kalinda’s note, which she read and tossed on the counter before doubling over.

Much more cheerful was the case of the week, in which Diane took on the cause of a grandmother facing 6 to 13 years in jail because of mandatory sentencing. It was an excuse for a guest appearance by Linda Lavin as Joy Grubick, and a funny scene in which the grandmother (played by the veteran character actress Phyllis Somerville) pretended, very unconvincingly, to be a drug addict as part of Diane’s ploy to win a lighter sentence. In one last example of Sharma omnipotence, Kalinda took the time — amid fleeing for her life — to notice a detail that enabled the grandmother to get away with probation.

How did you feel about the way the show handled Ms. Panjabi’s apparent swan song? Were you moved by the clip of Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”? Did you feel that Dan Bittner, as the smart public defender Alex Bollinger, was being prepped for a regular role? Are Alicia and Peter, who stood beside her at her news conference (in yet another echo of the series’s first episode) and who was the only person there for her at the end, going to be drawn closer? Let us know in the comments.