Yahoo News In praise of a random, wonderful episode of The Good Fight
If the little boy doesn't get bone marrow he dies. That's the gist of "The End of a Saturday," Thursday's exuberant episode of The Good Fight. Weekend plans go out the window when Ri'Chard (André Braugher) calls an emergency Saturday-morning Zoom. His nephew Dustin (Walter Russell III) was minutes from a transplant operation when the donor backed out. "We're lawyers," says Ri'Chard. "There's always a Plan B." He needs legal solutions for sickle-cell disease, and in a 40-minute episode, the firm tries them all. That's 40 minutes rounding up, counting opening and closing credits. And actually, the proper plot doesn't even take that long. Multiple lawsuits and organ-donation schemes wrap by the 34-minute mark. There's still time for a pizza party, and then things get weird.
First, the team assembles. The breakneck pace — Dustin will die soon — requires all plans to change. Liz (Audra McDonald) cancels a camping trip with her son Malcolm (Che Tafari) and has to bring him everywhere...because you try to find a sitter at the last second. Marissa (Sarah Steele) leaves martial arts class and doesn't have time to change out of her army-fatigue gym wear. Carmen (Charmaine Bingwa) asks her girlfriend not to come to the office — because her co-workers don't know she has a girlfriend, or that she's gay, or that she's anything, really. Diane (Christine Baranski) has to cut psychedelic therapy short — and would you believe helpful Dr. Lyle (John Slattery) sits "on the board for clinical trials" for gene-editing bone-marrow experiments?
Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+. Charmaine Bingwa, André Braugher, and Che Tefari on 'The Good Fight'
On a lesser show, this would be a cheap shortcut: Good thing I know a doctor with this specific skill set! But co-creators Michelle and Robert King have a gift for using contrivances like that to accelerate small problems into bigger ones. Dustin's too young for the trial by a few months. Getting him treatment requires taking the FDA to court over its age-restriction rules. Which the firm does, in a scene that sums up Good Fight's peculiar brand of hallucinogenic normality. The judge (played by an immaculately crusty William Sadler) demands all attorneys meet at his house. Arguments are delivered on his front lawn, during a child's birthday party. Bubbles and clowns and "Five Little Ducks" background a tense showdown (complete with a stenographer!). Our attorneys win, but they also lose. They have to take a different case against the NIH, this time under the auspices of institutional racism.
At one point, Dustin himself has to appear before a judge. The very sick kid looks a little too good, so Diane kindly requests that he play up his illness. It's a macabre bit of comedy — play up your impending death, kid! — and Russell's stage cough is delightful. But the moral stakes are always clear, and illuminating. Braugher's a new addition this season, and he's mostly played Ri'Chard with maximum braggadocio. The actor gets more sensitive moments in this episode, rubbing his gray-fuzz buzz in quiet desperation. It's a chance to see how Ri'Chard's loudness is a direct reaction to a tough world. The episode crafts a very serious story about an adorable dying boy — and there are jokes about internet fetishists, a ridiculous escape from rehab, and Braugher himself crooning "Blessed Be the Name of the Lord." You gotta laugh, you gotta sing.
The script, credited to Good Fight writer Tegan Shohet, finds grace notes for all the main characters. Actually, despite the raucous momentum and the various settings, "Saturday" is half a bottle episode in the way it maneuvers all the leads together on one single mission. There's room for subplots, like the minor feud between Marissa and Carmen. And the episode also clarifies a core conflict underlying this final season. In a calm moment with Liz, Ri'Chard reveals his ambitions: He wants to throw off their corporate overlords, and build their firm into the biggest firm — all under his rapidly-expanding brand. Liz laughs, astounded at his arrogance:
LIZ: My lawyers don't want to work for a brand!
RI'CHARD: Sure they do, if it's that or unemployment.
LIZ: We want to make a difference, not sell T-shirts.
RI'CHARD: Oh my goodness, Noam Chomsky, how do you think we make difference? By all screaming and waving our arms? No. By falling in behind one name, one man, one parade: Ri'Chard.
The big news in television lately is bigness: A surprise volcano, a galactic money heist, dragon theft between cousins. Bad and good, it's all a bit much. TV used to be definitionally cheap, in every way a little sibling to movies. The product could look shoddier because 20-some episodes per year demanded some assembly-line work ethics. But that meant there was also, at times, a distinct small-screen mentality: Sly, self-aware, more obviously street-level as Hollywood cinema entered the era of blockbuster decadence.
Now the blockbuster mode has consumed television. So we should treasure The Good Fight before it goes. The characters are fabulously privileged — and one secret tragedy of this episode is the knowledge that Dustin's only getting one-percenter legal assistance because of who his uncle is. At one point, we hear how much the gene-editing trial will cost without health insurance: Nine figures! ("I am inspired and depressed by what it takes to stay alive," says Diane.)
But the show's cocktail-party-of-oblivion fanciness masks a marvelously scrappy edge. The Kings turned this spin-off into a recognizable old-fashioned procedural that is also recognizable as a piece of post-television TV, with odd tangents and playful narrative experiments unconstrained by commercial breaks or content restrictions (unless China is involved). It sure isn't selling T-shirts, but the show hasn't lost its capacity to thrill you, disturb you, or make you giggle. Sometimes all three at once: Don't miss the very end of "The End of a Saturday," when Saturday ends with a Baranski-mouth-agape shock. Oh my goodness, Noam Chomsky!
Episode Grade: A
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