The Good Wife returns from its short winter break this week with an episode that is erratic at best. “Goliath and David” has a mediocre case-of-the-week, an annoying plotline involving Marilyn’s baby, sub-par Lockhart Gardner drama, and hints that the Kalinda/Damian story is going to get as bad as we’d worried. Basically, it is an episode that shows that even at its best, The Good Wife makes the occasional misstep.
This week’s episode is a crucial one- after “Take the Ride, Pay the Toll” wrapped up the season-long mystery last week, we’re left with only two episodes this season. That’s too much time if the PtB are only going wrap up the hanging threads from the Tate arc and potentially not enough time for them to start something new. For the show to succeed over multiple seasons, though, a new border-spanning case is necessary and we get just that this week with the abduction and rape of Eva in Juarez by a mysterious Texas-plated car. This case feels like a bit more of a stretch for calling in our favorite international crime-fighting team than the half-bodies posed on the literal border, but given our previous relationships with the characters, it’ll work.
More than halfway through its debut season, The Bridge has finally revealed its long-teased baddie and his dark intentions. Except that, after a substantial buildup of intriguing socio-political motivations, it seems that was all a smokescreen to lure Marco Ruiz north of the border so our villain could set into motion his far more personal, and far less interesting, revenge-fueled plan. With the various criminal factions at work so far this season, one could easily be forgiven for being confused after this reveal. There’s the immigrant- and now gun-smuggling group, who seem to have some connection one generation back with Marco, there’s the Beast, the nameless man or men slaughtering young women in Jaurez, there’s Jack Childress, who kidnapped Maria and tied her up in the desert (potentially?
Much of the first three episodes of The Bridge have focused on fleshing out the characters on both sides of the border, giving the audience a better idea of what makes them tick, and doing a fantastic job of it. This week’s episode used the framework of a standalone case, in the form of the search for the missing woman in the desert, to give a look at how the characters relate to each other, in another solid episode that introduces a promising new character while offering a look at how the Mexican cartels operate.