Alicia and Will defend a rich a-hole against a lawsuit brought by his stepdaughter. Everyone (including Alicia) thinks he killed his wife even though he was found not guilty in his criminal trial. After many cringe-inducing a-hole moments, Kalinda finds evidence that the stepdaughter did it. In the end it remains unclear who actually did it, but the rich a-hole is off the hook. Will and Diane face off over the future of the firm. Kalinda helps Diane arm herself against a death threat but Diane gives up the gun before she starts liking it too much. Peter's trial begins and the threat they were holding over Amber Madison has disappeared, so she appears in court to testify that she was a gift to Peter in exchange for him dropping cases. It turns out that Peter was paying her, too, which argues against the corruption charges. Childs offers Peter a deal that will let him go home right away but he can never practice law again. It appears Peter is considering it. Alicia and Peter talk about the possibility of him coming home. She makes it clear they won't be sharing a bed, but does not completely rule out a reconciliation. She still loves him.
Since this time around Jack has the adorable granddaughter, he's not so much for torturing, for the ends justifying the means and all. Luckily Renee Walker has lost her damn mind and is willing and eager to carry the torch. You know it's bad when Jack is the one telling someone to dial it down. But Renee is just getting started. And it's not about getting her badge back or any other personal gain. It's about saving America. Because there's no one else. Meanwhile, Jack's already been captured and beaten, the stubborn bureaucrat is already on the Jack train, Cole has badass moments of his own, there's a bad guy so bad he's letting his son die in the back room of a restaurant and Chloe's learning curve is about to get a lot steeper because DaJennyna is going to be spending a lot of time being threatened by her creepy ex. I'm not even going to get into the Starbuck/Leoben-ness that will confront us next week.
America, Jack Bauer never wants to be the guy to save us, it just always seems to end up that way. This time he reallyreally does not want to be that guy. He's happy just taking his adorable granddaughter to the zoo and napping on the couch after. Sure, his man purse is still ready to be donned and he remembers how to shoot a gun but he's like, totally not into it. It's not his problem. Unfortunately the bad guys do not stop being bad just because Jack Bauer is retired. Evil men still spin their evil plots and government bureaucracy is too stubborn, slow and stupid to catch them. It's up to Jack and Chloe (and later on probably Renee Walker and Freddie Prinze Jr) to find a way to save us all in spite of the lack of support from the newly shiny and stupid CTU. Chloe has not yet mastered the CTU system but she's still awesomely full of attitude and back talk and thanks to the recent repeat of last season's finale, we all remember that Renee will do whatever it takes to get the bad guys. And listen, Jack Bauer, we'd all rather nap on the couch than go running around shooting at people, at some point likely getting captured and doing it all while fighting bureaucracy for the right to succeed. So thanks in advance, Jack Bauer, for saving America. Again. All in a day's work.
This show is really good at tying Alicia's work into her personal life. This episode is largely about the trouble kids can get into behind their mothers' backs. Alicia's client is a doctor accused of over-prescribing painkillers to a high school patient dead from an overdose. At home, Zach is getting into a nasty role-playing game with Becca. Kalinda earns her keep this week as she becomes a double agent for Peter against Childs, gets hit on by Cary and still finds time to discover the real source of the killer painkillers. In a completely heartbreaking turn, it's discovered the dead kid stole the pills from his mom. Alicia goes home and tries to make sure her kids aren't doing anything correspondingly shady. They manage to tell her just enough to get the new nanny fired. In Will news, he looks good in a tux.
Alicia is in the middle of working on a case against a Glenn Beck-type tool when she’s yanked off and forced to work on the divorce case of Carla Browning and Glenn Childs. Childs managed to find himself a woman of equal or greater evil to marry and divorce. Mrs. Browning needs her pre-nup to be ignored and her strategy is to threaten to tell Alicia the information she knows Childs has on Peter. She tells Alicia about a file on Childs’ computer called Triton Fields. Childs thinks Alicia and Peter are masterminding the whole thing and so tells Alicia about the packages he’s left (that she knows nothing about because her kids have been intercepting them) and ominously claims to have more damning information. He also transfers Peter out of protective custody and threatens his family. Peter takes it like a man. Mrs. Browning, after she gets what she wants and right before she signs the agreement, tells Alicia that Childs tapped the Florricks’ phones. In Cary news, he is tasked with hand holding the client when Alicia is pulled from the TV tool case, and he’s terrible at it. In Will news, the TV tool digs into the firm and comes up with a photo of Will and Alicia from when they went to the hotel lobby for a case. He twists it into them having an affair, which many people seem to believe. Will has some history with the defense lawyer in the case and they flirt sexily but it appears as though Will decides to not do anything substantial about it. The TV tool also accuses Diane of being a lesbian, which she finds hilarious.
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.
Lame. Ending. The rest of the episode was ruined by it. There's going to be an explanation where Peter is not a bad guy, but still...lame. It makes the show's return less exciting instead of ramping up the anticipation.
When a FBI agent goes missing, Peter and Neal go after the money launderer the agent had been investigating. Neal plays pai gow with the launderer undercover of one of his old aliases, Nick Halden. Mozzie is adorably excited about helping Neal by forcing him to watch a cheesy pai gow movie, then teaching him about the game. The FBI team sets up in the apartment of a man who is a confidential informant against the launderer. He has a cute little daughter who gives Neal a chance to show Peter how to act with kids. After the pai gow game, Neal runs up against an undercover Interpol agent who lies to him to get the FBI away from the launderer. She tells Neal if he helps her she can lead him to Kate. Neal keeps the Interpol influence from Peter, who figures it out anyway. Elizabeth reminds him that the only reason Neal would keep something from him is Kate. The missing FBI agent is dead, of course. Peter and Neal find his body in a warehouse. Peter calls Neal out on the Interpol agent and explains she was lying. He forces Neal to choose to help the FBI or end their partnership. There’s a lot of back and forth about whether or not they are partners. In the end, Neal manages to get a bug onto the launderer, who quickly incriminates himself to the FBI’s satisfaction. The Interpol agent tells Neal that the guy who has Kate is FBI. What FBI agent has time enough in their day to keep a prisoner?
Alicia is rewarded and punished for her competence when she is chosen by Stern to be his beard as he represents himself against drunk driving/assaulting a police officer charges. Stern was something of a hero of hers when she was a student, but he is not forthcoming about his arrest and is altogether difficult and scatterbrained. Alicia, of course, puts him in his place and saves his ass while figuring out (with Kalinda's help) that he has dementia. She calls him out on it but she can't tell anyone else due to client confidentiality. He decides to leave Lockhart and Gardner to start his own firm and wants Alicia to come with. She says no because she's loyal to Will.
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Castle and Beckett play a game of three-card monte as they look for the killer responsible for pushing an assistant district attorney off the roof of a parking garage. Castle carries around what he affectionately calls a Cape Fear file of the A.D.A.'s potential enemies, amongst whom is a criminal named Jessup. Jessup is played by J.B. Smoove and he's fantastic and hilarious and should really be made a permanent part of the team. A hooker (who is actually a bad guy) makes Castle feel sorry for her, which gives him an opportunity to demonstrate the earnest goodness we all love to see on Nathan Fillion's face. On the home front, Alexis and Beckett have a mysterious meeting that turns out to be nothing, but only after Castle has spent the whole episode fretting about it. In the end, Castle and Alexis are still adorable and heart-warming and Ryan and Esposito are yet again underused.
Alica gets another case that reflects on her own situation when Will assigns her to help Stern's (of Stern, Lockhart and Gardner) daughter out of her latest legal problem. The daughter and her husband are orthodox jews sued by a woman who slipped and fell on an eruv wire that the couple could not repair because it fell on the sabbath. Alicia is forced to work with a rough-and-tumble street lawyer type who is coincidentally adorable and smart enough to fall at least half in love with our heroine. It turns out he's been lying about being a lawyer, he never passed the bar, and may or may not have lied to her about Will playing mean lawyer tricks. It also turns out Daughter Stern has been lying to her husband and using her cell phone on the sabbath. When Alicia tells the husband to forgive his wife, he asks Alicia if she's forgiven Peter. This carries through to when the adorable street non-lawyer hits on Alicia and she stops him because of her marriage. Even though, as the non-lawyer points out, Peter cheated on her. On the home front, Zach goes on a heartbreaking journey to find the woman in the crack-smoking photo and gets caught talking to a hooker by his nosy grandma. When Alicia confronts him about it he lies to her but she suspects something. On the other-exciting-things front, Will sees Alicia and the non-lawyer close-talking and gets visibly, boyishly bummed out. Also Kalinda continues to kick ass and looks good in satin.
Super guest stars galore this week, with John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco) and his marvelous hand gestures playing a mob boss who has taken control of a church with a centuries-old bible that is rumored to have healing powers. When the bible is stolen, the boss turns to the FBI for help. Peter and Neal clash with Kirk Acevedo over jurisdiction before retrieving the bible from Callie Thorne. In the process, Neal gets flirty and grabby, Mozzie impersonates a FBI agent (and gets all the funny lines again), Kate's bottle is found to have a NY subway map and an Iraqi Veteran gets free doggy health care from the mob boss.
The stakes are high this episode, as Alicia works on an appeal for a death row inmate. It starts with an effort to prove he did not receive a fair trial and moves on to attempting to prove his innocence. Alicia and Cary unintentionally end up working together after each is suckered in by the determination of the convict's clever wife and the cuteness of their daughter. It takes help from Kalinda and Peter, but they are successful and an innocent man is saved. It's an interesting case based on a Bull's sweatshirt and the inability of people to recognize suspects outside of their own race. To get Peter's help, Alicia has to pay him a conjugal visit in order to keep their conversation private and unrecorded. They are both uncomfortable. She's disturbed and more than a little disgusted by the room where the visit takes place and she doesn't share the bed with Peter. Before she turns the lights out for the night she briefly holds his hand. It's sad. We are reminded once again that Cary and Alicia are competing for one job as Will and Diane start to face off over who is staying. Will argues that Alicia makes the prosecution nervous, but shockingly doesn't mention that she's brilliant and kicks major ass every time she is given a chance. No kids or mother-in-law this week. Next week some guy with a lot of hair flirts with Alicia.
A pop singer is killed and found hanging upside down in an alley in a position similar to one she strikes in a music video. The psycho stalking fan didn't kill her, her ex-manager didn't kill her, her ex-bandmates didn't kill her, her junkie sister didn't kill her. Thanks to Alexis's high level of fandom and smarts, Castle figures out what happened from listening to the last song the pop princess ever wrote. We learn that Beckett likes watching Castle and Alexis together. We notice that Ryan and Esposito are sorely underused.
Last night's episode had fake vampires, fake werewolves, underage drinking and the requisite sexually-charged moments between Castle and Beckett. But all that was just frosting on one of the greatest geek moments in recent history: Nathan Fillion dressed as a space cowboy who looked remarkably like Malcom Reynolds while strains of Firefly music twanged faintly in the background. It was infuriating. It was satisfying. It was perfect. Castle continued its geek courtship by using comic book panels to help solve the crime.
USA Network's White Collar has been heavily hyped for months now. Based on USA's consistent ability to produce entertaining, somewhat quirky television and Matt Bomer's ability to make female hearts a-flutter, it seems like it can't fail. And it didn't really fail, but it didn't really blow us away either.
For those unfamiliar with the premise of the show, Neal Caffrey is a con man serving the last few months of a four-year prison sentence when he walks out of the prison. This is the first scene and it's a good one. We watch him shave, dress in a guard uniform and walk calmly and briskly through the prison and out the door. Other inmates watch him go by and seem to know he's escaping, but no one in authority even glances at him suspiciously. Bomer does a great job with this scene. We can see on Neal's face his impulse to run. When another guard grabs a gate as it opens, we watch as he is about to freak out but keeps calm and the guard smiles and swings the gate open for him.
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