‘The Good Wife’ Season 5, episode 13: Florrick-Agos is on to the NSA

This week’s “Good Wife” wasn’t the high-octane episode that Season 5 has become known for, but it did set some very interesting wheels in motion for the second half of the season.

Case of the Week

Lemond Bishop is back, with the lawyer Lester in tow who deals with Bishop’s less-than-legal activities — played by the always-awesome Wallace Shawn. This time it’s the DEA coming after Bishop. They’ve got testimony from a “witness” about Bishop transporting and storing bricks of cocaine.

However, it turns out the witness is a false evidence trail, which the DEA must construct when they receive information from NSA wiretaps. That’s “Parallel Construction, B****es.”

The NSA surveillance, if you’ll recall, is the on-going storyline that dates back to the Lockhart/Gardner case of Danny Marwat from Season 3.

Anyway, the NSA can provide tips to other government agencies but the other agencies can’t let it be the NSA that they got the information from, hence the phony witness for the DEA.

In the process of all of this, Bishop and attorney Lester think it’s a leak at Florrick/Agos that got Bishop in trouble, so they lay a rather sneaky trap that alerts everyone to Alicia’s phone being tapped.

The Florrick/Agos crew start using burner phones, not that that stops the NSA, and they try to alert Lockhart/Gardner to the surveillance (though they all still think it’s the DEA at this point), but L/G thinks it’s a trick and chooses to ignore it.

In the end, after a U.S. attorney resigns his position mid-trial, Alicia and Cary get the Bishop case thrown out because of the wiretaps and also figure out that the NSA is either spying on Bishop or Florrick/Agos.

The Governor’s Mansion

The investigation is on for Peter’s voter fraud and the NSA neatly comes into play here as well. Marilyn won’t clear Peter in her report of what happened and she gives the Office of Public Integrity (which is a real division of the DOJ, it’s just called something slightly different) the video of Jim Moody delivering the tampered-with ballot box.

The Public Integrity office, Dubek, uses this to approach the NSA for any info their wiretaps can provide and the NSA forks over a phone conversation between Alicia and Eli that reveals Will is the key.

So Dubek comes a-knocking on Will’s door. At this point, Will will only say that anything having to do with Governor Florrick is protected under attorney-client privilege, but Dubek has a subpoena and throws the words “grand jury” around. It remains to be seen how steadfast Will stays in the face of prison — something Alicia is also possibly facing.

Thoughts & Tidbits

• Like we said, not the most slam-bang of “Good Wife” episodes, but it was all very neatly packaged, with parallels running between both the Bishop and Peter arcs, plus a nice parallel with the fake AMC drama called “Darkness at Noon” where everyone keeps crossing the line, apparently.
• The voter fraud storyline is certainly intriguing. Who’s going to flip on Peter? Or will he and Eli figure a way out of this? Peter going back to prison certainly doesn’t seem like a very interesting direction for the show.
• The NSA listeners, while completely unbelievable as characters, are always hilarious, particularly the one who is invested in Alicia’s life like it’s his own personal AMC drama.

Best line: “I think this will make sense if I get more wine.” — Alicia

Photo/Video credit: CBS