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Kalinda-Sharma.jpg

Have We Seen the Last of Kalinda on 'The Good Wife'?

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 27, 2015 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 27, 2015 |


Last night’s The Good Wife gave us an unexpected twist. In fact, it was one of those episodes that felt so inevitable that it was hard to resist the urge to fast-forward through it because I wasn’t that interested in watching how a “misunderstanding” plotline would resolve itself, because it eventually would, right?

Yes, it would.

And then it would quickly resolve itself. Because Alicia’s return to Florrick, Agos, and Lockhart wasn’t, in fact, inevitable. She’s damaged goods, and as much as Cary and Diane might want her back, it’s no good for the firm. So Alicia is adrift without a job in a law firm or in the state’s attorney’s office. With what is Alicia left? Unless she creates a firm with Finn Polmar next week, the future for Alicia remains uncertain. For those of us who have watched the firm split apart and come back together too many times already, there’s some real excitement in that uncertainty (just as there was in a similar plotline on Mad Men last night).

Meanwhile, Kalinda’s plotline fizzled to a potentially anti-climactic conclusion. It feels like the writers really don’t care for Archie Panjabi, because in limiting her to mostly scenes involving phone calls for most of the season, they finally seemed to write her out of the show. But even in her goodbye, she was relegated to a phone call with Diane and a letter left behind for Alicia. Julianna Margulies and Panjabi haven’t shared a scene together in over two years. Is the tension on the set between those two so thick that they couldn’t even give Kalinda a more satisfying farewell? Could they not put their differences aside for a few moments to share one final scene together?

Maybe. But word is from executive producer Michelle King that Kalinda will make one more appearance in the finale.

“Yes. We will see her.” Whether we’ll see her in a flashback, a flashforward, or the present day, however, remains unknown … “[The finale] answers a lot of questions regarding Kalinda, which I think there will be some mystery about. Has she truly left the show? Or are there still beats to be handled with, or story elements to be handled with her? So [the finale] answers the question of Kalinda for the year.”

I would not hazard to take a guess about what that means, but I’d like to believe that Kalinda is sly enough to avoid Lemond Bishop’s assassins and that when we see her again, it won’t be in a body bag. Hopefully, it won’t be on the other side of a telephone, either.