The dazzling second season of the legal spin-off drama has boasted many pleasures but nothing lingers quite as much as Christine Baranskis multi-layered lead
The Good Fight has been so relentlessly delightful to watch lately that it can be hard to reconcile the seriousness of its subject matter – the turmoil of the Trump era and the rise of violent populism – with the uproarious filter through which it’s being examined. The most unlikely thread running through it has been my hero Diane Lockhart’s increasingly untethered reaction to a political world turned upside down, which began with a bartender offering her a microdose of psilocybin mushrooms at a funeral, and continued through an occasional glimpse of hallucinatory news stories, that may or may not be real, which certainly speaks to the unnerving unpredictability of unstable times.
Time and again, Diane has been one of the most satisfying characters on television. She is capable, wry, and rarely loses her grip on anything, though this political climate has been testing. The Lockhart laugh, clipped and steady, often employed to devastating effect in The Good Wife, has appeared with more frequency in The Good Fight, which has seen her slowly evolving evaluation of and response to the Trump presidency. The absurdity seemed to paralyse Diane for a while; the unreality brought her to a point of near-apathy that has surely tempted many over the last 18 months. But at last, as the second season moves into its home stretch, she has flushed away the psychedelics, and is focusing on the attack with renewed vigour. Last week, when challenged by a young woman in charge of a #MeToo-ish website called Assholes to Avoid, who accuses Diane of betraying young women’s feminism for assisting in the site’s takedown, she finally snaps back. “Women aren’t just one thing,” she insists, “and you don’t get to determine what they are.”
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