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Vulture Guesses the Answers to 12 Good Wife Mysteries

Tonight, The Good Wife returns after what’s felt like an interminable hiatus. How dare CBS have kept us waiting for so long with so many story lines and mysteries left unresolved? Will Diane quit the firm, or will she be pushed? Will Will and Alicia ever have their “talk”? What’s Cary’s game? Damn it, addictive TV show, answer us! Well, until it does, we decided to collect all of the show’s unanswered questions and give both our rational and craziest theories on what will happen.

The addition of a third partner was meant to bail out ailing Lockhart/Gardner. But so far it’s only convinced Diane that new partner Derrick Bond and her old partner, Will Gardner are in cahoots to oust her. She’s preempting the inevitable by lining up other partners and associates to jump ship with her. But would Will really turn on her like that, or is she just paranoid? Most likely possible outcome: Will had no plans to oust Diane (though Derrick probably did). But when he gets word of Diane’s plotting, he kicks her out of the firm. Fellow betraying partners David Lee and Julius Cain join her since they have nowhere else to go, but not all the promised clients join them. Bitter rivalry ensues. Craziest possible outcome: Will ousts her before she gets commitments from David, Julius, and the potential clients, and they abandon her, leaving her alone and unemployed. She eventually retires into a life of shooting guns and arguing about Sarah Palin with her ballistic experts lover Kurt McVeigh.
So far, Alicia is still in the dark about Diane’s exodus. But as the most important junior associate lawyer in the history of junior associate lawyers, that won’t last. Will will want her for reasons of obvious affection and loyalty, and Diane will try to secure her for her political connections and Eli Gold’s loyalty to her. Most likely possible outcome: Alicia stays with Will. Of course. Craziest possible outcome: Before she can even make a decision, Will jumps to the conclusion that Alicia has decided to join Diane and pushes her out of the firm and out of his affections. Once David Lee and Julius abandon the effort, Alicia becomes the most important member of Diane’s team. Her bitterness toward Will fuels her as she goes up against him in a major case that will consume most of the third season.
Sensing Diane lining up her ducks for her exodus, Derrick had approached Will about a major D.C-Chicago alliance meant to turn Lockhart/Gardner into a “legal behemoth.” But then he disappeared for three episodes. Most likely possible outcome: Derrick has found another partner, perhaps a hot woman to rival Tammy and Alicia for Will’s affections. But the new partner comes with a client list filled with Peter’s political enemies. Craziest possible outcome: Derrick has recruited a shady new partner, and Will later finds out that his firm is unwittingly representing the biggest drug-smuggling operation on the Eastern seaboard.
Will knows Blake is a thug and frequently conscripts him to “knee-cap” a witness, steal files, or do some breaking and entering. But all we know about their relationship is that Kalinda found pictures of Will and Blake playing basketball back in Will’s Georgetown Law days. Most likely possible outcome: They met in a pickup game and stayed friendly. It’s just a coincidence that he ended up with Derrick and that Derrick ended up becoming a partner in their firm. Craziest possible outcome: Will met Blake when he was dabbling with meth in D.C. and, like Derrick, bailed him out of a tough spot. So Blake owes him, which is why he jumps whenever Will asks him to do something skirting the line of illegality. Will introduced Blake to Derrick, then later made Diane feel as though she’d discovered Derrick and brought him into the firm, thus making her the architect of her own departure.
Blake has dropped hints referring to Kalinda’s past life as “Leela,” and discovered her bitter lesbian ex-lover (Lily Taylor). Kalinda has hinted to Alicia that she changed her name because she didn’t like who she used to be; some have speculated that Zach Florrick’s ogling of Kalinda the first time he saw her hinted at an X-rated past. Most likely possible answer: It’s just the garden-variety shameful past of being a light criminal and lesbian in a strict Indian-American family. She changed her name and life to get away. Craziest possible answer: Kalinda slipped into prostitution years ago, and discovered a talent for sneakiness and investigation while helping the cops take down her pimp. A client recognized her talent and helped her change her name and start a new career. That client’s name is Peter Florrick.
Eli Gold (the great Alan Cumming) shouted the same question into his phone at a charity dinner as this woman (played by Anika Noni Rose) announced her bid as the third candidate in the Peter Florrick/Glenn Child Cook County state’s attorney race. We know she wants to “clean up” the state’s attorney’s office, that she has a daughter in public school, volunteers at soup kitchens, has perfect pitch, married a white guy, got breast implants after a mastectomy, and is wily enough to try (unsuccessfully) to steal both Eli and Pastor Isaiah from Peter. But what is her real motivation? And who is behind her campaign? Most likely possible outcome: She’s just an ambitious lawyer with a clean record who recognized a chance to get ahead when tapped by judge Victoria Adler, who’s too corrupt to run herself. Craziest possible outcome: She’s actually the mother of Nisa, Zach Florrick’s supposedly Somali-born girlfriend, and both she and her daughter are on a mission to infiltrate the Florricks’s lives and bring them down owing to Peter’s unjust prosecution of her brother, now in prison.
Last we saw of Peter’s spiritual advisor, he was turning down Wendy Scott-Carr’s solicitation of his endorsement and throwing his hat in with Peter. Then, just as swiftly, his father Jeremiah stepped up, along with the other elders of his congregation, to take away his church for what they saw as a betrayal to the African-American community. Most likely possible outcome: Pastor Isaiah begins campaigning directly for Peter, sparking a war with his father. As a direct result of his support, Peter beats Scott-Carr. Craziest possible outcome: Same as above, but Pastor Isaiah ends up assassinated. A bereft Peter gives an incredibly moving speech atop a car hood, rallying the city behind him and winning back Alicia for good.
She’s convinced her mom to let her go to a jamboree with Shannon the proselytizer. Much to their horror, both her mom and grandma Jackie have walked in on her praying. Grace seems convinced that her prayer helped an innocent man be spared of execution, and that it may help mend her parents’ marriage. Most likely possible outcome: The prayer was just a cool experiment, but she doesn’t believe it enough to fully commit to religion. Craziest possible outcome: Grace’s increasing devotion to Christianity starts becoming a campaign issue as trackers follow her to the jamboree and prayer sessions. Peter brings in Pastor Isaiah to talk to Grace about a more moderate path to spirituality, which she resents so much she begins openly campaigning for Wendy Scott-Carr against her dad.
In listening to wiretaps on a corrupt Chicago politician, Alicia discovered that Eli, too, was being tapped for unknown reasons. It’s clear he needs to lawyer up, and that Peter, as his boss, may run into issues, too. Most likely possible outcome: Peter wins the election, but then revelations come to light about the questionably legal means by which he got there, along with the contents of Eli’s wiretap. He becomes torn between standing up for his friend and abandoning him to save face. Craziest possible outcome: The wiretaps reveal that Eli was the one who told authorities about Peter’s involvement with prostitutes, and that he’d engineered Peter’s downfall to secure himself the job of resurrecting him.
They’re still sleeping in separate beds, but there was that oh-so-hot, unexpected oral-sex scene in the bathroom after Alicia was amazing in court. Most likely possible outcome: Alicia slowly starts to see signs of the man she fell for in the first place, and in the final frenzied days leading up to the election, something will come out that will make Peter have to sacrifice his political ambitions to defend Alicia and his family, and she won’t be able to help herself any longer. Craziest possible outcome: Said moment of clarity never comes and Peter becomes more and more wrapped up in his foundering campaign. Alicia turns to Will and gets caught. Peter does what Alicia never could and files for divorce.
When he lost out on the junior associate’s position at Lockhart/Gardner, Cary joined forces with Glenn Childs’s state’s attorney office to bring down his former bosses. Sometimes he seems bitter and vengeful, but at other times he’s giving Kalinda warnings about Blake or showing up to help Lockhart/Gardner get an innocent man off death row. Is he a bitter prick, a single-minded defender of justice, or is something more nefarious and complex afoot? Most likely possible answer: He still wants to bring down Lockhart/Gardner; this man of justice thing is just a front. But he’s foiled when the firm falls apart on its own. Craziest possible outcome: When Diane’s exodus doesn’t go as planned, he leaves the state’s attorney’s office to join her and Alicia in bringing down Will (his enemy No. 1), who is now partnered in the shadiest law firm ever with Derrick.
The last we heard of the Voice Mail of Love saga, Alicia had learned of its existence from overhearing Will talk about it on a wiretap. She ran to his office to hash it out, but found him with new love Tammy. She mentioned that they ought to “talk” in the future when they’re not so crazed: Will that talk ever happen? And will it matter, now that he’s moved on with Tammy, and she seems dedicated to making her marriage with Peter work? Most likely possible outcome: Over drinks after a harrowing court case, Alicia finally works up the nerve to confront Will about what she learned in the wiretap. But too much time has passed (and the show would be dead without will-they-won’t-they). He lies, and proposes to Tammy. Craziest possible outcome: They have their talk and strip right then and there in Will’s office for a night of furious sex, twenty years in the making … that is captured on tape by Peter’s trackers and leaked online at the height of his campaign.
Vulture Guesses the Answers to 12 Good Wife Mysteries