S04.E01: The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality

[Cranberry]

Quote

Diane Lockhart finds herself living in an alternate reality where Donald Trump was never elected and Hillary Clinton is the current president of the United States.

Airdate: April 9, 2020

[gingerella]

Do you have to pay for CBS All Access pass? And would this be available on Cox ON Demand or no?

[UNOSEZ]

I loved how incredibly insane our world sounds compared to Hillary-world... If you dropped somebody from 2015 into today and gave them a rundown of everything their head would spin and think we've gone mad.... I also loved how people are still people... Cancer may be cured but we still find ways to complain... I also liked the political reality squashing  #metoo.. It was jarring and sad.. But probably very honest, tho,  as was the corporate difficulties right after a tax hike... Don't get me wrong I do support these issues but I'm not blind to the fact that in the beginning there would be pain for some corps...  I wish alt-luca would said what happened with weinstein to someone... Can't wait for the rest of the season

[F8.]

Maybe its all the Covid craziness but I didn't really enjoy this episode. These days we get such short seasons before a show goes on hiatus I am hungry for every minute of real character and plot development.

Being the first episode I couldn't wait to to catch up with the gang and find out what was happening with them all but this episode left me feeling empty after such a long wait. If it had been a mid season episode I would have have just sat back and enjoyed it more.

Not much to say about it as it's contributed nothing to the season - bring on the REAL episodes!

[juno]

This has got to be one of the better casts on tv and I just can't understand how they come up with this story for this show.

This used to be a good show about lawyers and has turned itself into a political football that is kicked around every episode.

I don't enjoy daily reminders of the reality of the current state of affairs, but I need a distraction from them.

I will return when this shows decides to be a show about lawyers again.

[The Ringo Kidd]

This show is silly and amateurish. I thought dream episodes went out with Bobby Ewing.

If they really wanted to play to their audience they should have gone the Bob Newhart route and had Christine Baranski wake up in bed next to her wife Cybill Shepherd.

[BobH]

It's a pretty big swing for a season opener, but I think I mostly liked it, but maybe as an impressive failure. Maybe when we see if/how it fits in with the rest of the season.

It was surprisingly short compared to most of the episodes, about 10 minutes lower than average for the series. I think the only shorter one was a season two one where Lucca was completely absent so they probably cut out a subplot. The Weinstein stuff in this one seemed to be missing a resolution, can't help but wonder if something was cut there.

[Hanahope]

Oh here it is.  I thought the episode surreal with Hilary as president, complaints about cancer not getting cured fast enough, corporate taxes, no #metoo.  Glad no one died.   I too wanted to see Luca validate Diane.

[Aulty]

I watched half the episode even though I didn't really want to - I am not American and the over-politicised episodes do very little for me. It felt like Diane went from micro to macro dosing. A lot of things were really over the top, but I thought the notion that the Trump election has at least in some areas triggered a female uprising had a grain of truth in it. Nothing like a common enemy to get people riled up.

[Joimiaroxeu]

This show continues to have such intriguing opening credits. I'd put them right up there with Game of Thrones.

Heh, ya gotta take the bad with the good, Diane. A woman gets elected president and all the male predators get a pass. 😒

I think this episode made clear, some Faustian bargains are worse than others. The lesser of two evils can still make you want to projectile vomit.

I'm ready for this season, even if it is getting temporarily shortened due to the pandemic.

[TVbitch]

Can someone help me out. I did not watch Season 3 because of that awful Micheal Sheen character. So, at the end of this episode the whole thing was just that Diane hit her head during a home invasion? Or some SWATting incident? 

Edited April 12, 2020 by TVbitch

[thecdn]

I'll join the crew that hated this episode. Maybe the schtick would have been ok for 1/4 of the episode, at the very most 1/2. But the whole thing?

I hated this episode. I turned it off after 20 minutes the first time and picked it up the next day - just to finish it.

I can't believe they wasted 10% of the season on this.

[auntiemel]

3 hours ago, thecdn said:

Maybe the schtick would have been ok for 1/4 of the episode, at the very most 1/2. But the whole thing?

Yeah, that was my feeling. There wasn't even a case!

[OtterMommy]

1 hour ago, auntiemel said:

Yeah, that was my feeling. There wasn't even a case!

Well, there was the Weinstein business, and that was sort of a case.

I can't say this episode worked for me.  As some have said, the dream sequence probably would have worked if it were only part of the episode. But, with it being the whole thing, it was like the writers thought they had fooled us, but I'm pretty sure everyone who watched this knew it was a dream as soon as Diane was dancing around with the champagne.

Honestly, it felt like they discovered that they only had 9 episodes for a 10 episode season, so they brought their Evil writer's room to whip something up to bring them to 10.

[SoMuchTV]

I guess I didn’t hate this as much as a lot of other people. I could relate to how a dream feels. How did I get here? When did I change clothes?

I’m willing to give the season a chance, although I’m currently on the cbsaa free month, so it might be a while before I see how it all plays  out. Hoping my library can eventually open back up and get the DVD’s.

[txhorns79]

2 hours ago, OtterMommy said:

I can't say this episode worked for me.  As some have said, the dream sequence probably would have worked if it were only part of the episode. But, with it being the whole thing, it was like the writers thought they had fooled us, but I'm pretty sure everyone who watched this knew it was a dream as soon as Diane was dancing around with the champagne.

It did feel like it was a joke that went on too long.  Though I did enjoy seeing Carolyn McCormick and Kathryn Erbe together in a non-Law & Order related setting. 

 

On 4/12/2020 at 3:46 PM, TVbitch said:

So, at the end of this episode the whole thing was just that Diane hit her head during a home invasion? Or some SWATting incident? 

At the end of Season 3, Diane got into a conflict over strategy with her women's group and thought she had bested them.  If I remember right, one of the women got revenge on Diane by SWAT-ing her. 

[ThePurpleArcher]

On 4/14/2020 at 11:32 PM, txhorns79 said:

At the end of Season 3, Diane got into a conflict over strategy with her women's group and thought she had bested them.  If I remember right, one of the women got revenge on Diane by SWAT-ing her. 

Here is where I am totally confused ! S3 ended with Diane and Curt being 'SWAT-ed'. What was the result ? It flashed back to Diane ending up on the floor of her bedroom, with the paramedics waking her. What was the result of the SWAT invasion ? Did Curt get hurt (or killed) ? What happened to Diane with the SWAT ?  I lost the connection of what they were trying to tie together between S3 and S4.

Any help anyone can give would be appreciated! 

[SoMuchTV]

1 hour ago, ThePurpleArcher said:

Here is where I am totally confused ! S3 ended with Diane and Curt being 'SWAT-ed'. What was the result ? It flashed back to Diane ending up on the floor of her bedroom, with the paramedics waking her. What was the result of the SWAT invasion ? Did Curt get hurt (or killed) ? What happened to Diane with the SWAT ?  I lost the connection of what they were trying to tie together between S3 and S4.

Any help anyone can give would be appreciated! 

As I understand it, the SWAT-ing at the end of s3 left Dianne in a coma, and all of 4.1 (except the last couple minutes) were her dream/vision/whatever. So in her “reality” Kurt had died, but not in real life. 

[ThePurpleArcher]

3 hours ago, SoMuchTV said:

As I understand it, the SWAT-ing at the end of s3 left Dianne in a coma, and all of 4.1 (except the last couple minutes) were her dream/vision/whatever. So in her “reality” Kurt had died, but not in real life. 

Thanks - that makes sense. Very confusing to say the least. I wonder if they will ever re-visit this in the future, and shed more light on this. 

[SomeTameGazelle]

On 5/3/2020 at 7:59 PM, SoMuchTV said:

As I understand it, the SWAT-ing at the end of s3 left Dianne in a coma, and all of 4.1 (except the last couple minutes) were her dream/vision/whatever. So in her “reality” Kurt had died, but not in real life. 

When Diane asked how long she had been out and where they were, it was 10 minutes and Kurt confirmed they were at home. So not a coma.

I enjoyed the episode and liked how the nightmarish quality built gradually until she found Kurt. For the first little while I was willing to accept that the whole show was just an alternate reality and I was interested in seeing whether the whole season would actually be Diane figuring out how to take down Harvey Weinstein, but then the music cues became more obvious and I was on board with the dream.

I do wonder whether Eames and Olivet's characters are part of The Good Fight reality or just dream characters that Diane imagined using Law & Order to give them form.

[Milburn Stone]

On 4/14/2020 at 8:26 PM, SoMuchTV said:

I could relate to how a dream feels. How did I get here? When did I change clothes?

Me too. (No pun intended.) I found it incredibly anxiety-provoking, as if her nightmare were my nightmare, and since that's exactly what the show wanted to do, I thought they did an amazing job of it.

And I can believe Diane dreamt all of that, coma or no coma. OK, she was out for all of ten minutes--but ten minutes following one of the greatest traumas it could ever be possible to face. If that doesn't give you weird dreams, I don't know what will.

One of the truly nightmarish aspects was that it was so believable the world would suck with Hillary as president. Not as much as it did suck in real life--but if Diane's alternate reality had been the fantasy of how she wanted a Hillary presidency to go, instead of the way it probably would have gone, it wouldn't have been a nightmare.

[Anela]

After reading most of the thread for season three, I felt like this was a response to people who thought they were too against trump, pushing an agenda.