The Good Wife - Lifeguard

Judges good, bad and political are the focus of the story this week.  The Democratic Ward and Committee Chairs wants Diane to be a judge.  They make their pitch to her with a boatload of praise and she is suitably flattered and thrilled.  Likewise thrilled is Will, who apparently relishes the idea of losing both Stern and Lockhart.  Alicia's client this week is an adorable kid geek in trouble for lashing back at a bully by throwing a book at him.  The prosecuting attorney is played by Michael Gladis aka Paul Kinsey (life after Mad Men, yay!).  He and Alicia agree on a plea deal that will allow the kid to stay out of detention.  When they go before Judge Baxter he overturns the agreement and sends the kid to a private detention facility.  It's harsh.  Baxter happens to be Will's friend, so Alicia goes to Diane and gets some great advice on filing a motion to reconsider on account of apparent racial bias.  While she's there Diane does a bit of the mentoring we've heard so much about.  Baxter shoots down the motion with the age-old "Some of my best friends are black" defense.  During a basketball playdate, he bullies Will by asking if he wants to sleep with Alicia (which Will doesn't deny, by the way) and tells him to make her drop the motion.  After some digging and deductive reasoning, Kalinda and Will figure out that Baxter is getting kickbacks from the private detention facility when he sentences kids to serve time there.  Evil.  Throughout the digging into Baxter's biases, both Will and Diane are pressured to lay off and neither one will.  It costs Diane her shot at being a judge, but makes us love her more.  And while the Will-good-or-bad question may never be definitively answered, in this case he comes down on the side of good.  Cary gets put in his place this episode, by a partner in the firm and more than once by Kalinda.  On the home front, Grace makes a new friend who's Dad is in prison because Peter put him there.  Jackie snobs that Peter is in a better prison and Alicia laughs at her for it because it's funny.