Robert King maintains that Season 2 for Alicia is all about self-sufficiency and questioning whether she needs Peter (Chris Noth) in her life. "At the end of the year, some of her moves were the Hillary moves of putting a man she believes in into office," said King. "Some [of that] was so she can make her own choices for herself and not be as tied to him. We love to think of this as major chapters. The first year closed the chapter of imbalance, the second chapter is about taking control and how Alicia, who has the ethical conscience about what she does, adapts that to the sometimes corrupt methods of the defense attorney and how she finds that equilibrium."
But don't think that we've gotten to the bottom of Alicia Florrick, said King. "There is still a lot to discover about her. We're really only a year-and-a-half into knowing this character and there is still so much to learn through Owen [Dallas Roberts]. We're bringing him back to show her family, how she reacts to her kids, the suburban life that is behind her but will come back in."
"[Alicia] has so destabilized in Season 1 by everything that was thrown at her," said Michelle King. "Now she does have her footing more in terms of her career and her life. It's about her making choices and taking control."
Peter and Alicia's marriage hasn't just hit the rocks due to his imprisonment and his political campaign, but also because of questions of trust. He sleeps in the maid's room while she sleeps down the hall. Lately, it's been Peter himself who has been the jealous one, wondering just what the relationship is between Alicia and Will (Josh Charles).
"There are disagreements between Peter and Alicia of how to parent that starts to drive a question mark of how much they are in fact married," said Robert King. "Peter's parents slept in separate rooms for a decade. He doesn't want that kind of marriage. He doesn't want his kids to see that kind of marriage."
But Peter might have some other skeletons in his closet.
"Alicia finds out some things about Peter that don't just have to do with hookers," teased Margulies with a sly laugh. "It throws her into a downward spiral. It's going to be interesting to see how she handles this."
Kalinda's recent walk on the wild side—breaking into the car of her rival Blake (Scott Porter) and smashing it up before leaving a lipstick kiss on the rear-view mirror, was a way to access Kalinda's backstory in an organic way.
"With Kalinda, it felt like the only way to access backstory was through violence, because she is such a private person," said Robert King. "You needed someone to almost hold a gun to her head before she'd tell you something about who she was. Also, there seems to be a prying quality to accessing her backstory. There is a guilty pleasure of having this violent force in Blake, doing the dirty work of the audience, finding out things about her. I think that was what attracted us to the idea of Blake."
And that's not all…
"Kalinda and Blake get a little darker and a little harsher, and yet there is sexual tension that is going to be partly sex, partly violence," he continued. "We're going to find out more about her past and is that the secret she's hiding?"
Kalinda's rival investigator at the firm has some secrets of his own, including ties to Will (Josh Charles) and Baltimore organized crime.
"We are always struggling with how many actors we can have under contract and accept that we are subject to their careers," said Robert King. "We love Scott Porter; we love what he's doing with Blake. We tend to write acknowledging that there is a pilot season that actors might be snapped up by other shows, so we have him in the medium-long haul. We have two plans, one if that's all we get of him and one if we get more… We love what he's doing to Kalinda and we love the way the two play together. You never know when you throw two actors into a bear pen and say, ‘OK, go fight.' The dailies are so much fun; you're only seeing one-tenth of it. What they do together is really musical."
Entangled between Will and Peter, Alicia's options were made more difficult by Eli (Alan Cumming) deleting that declarative voicemail from Will (and Will in turn landing his own love interest).
"It's changed a little bit in that the love triangle has become a bit of a rectangle because Elizabeth Reaser has gotten involved," said Michelle King. "That has destabilized things in a fun way. Suddenly, Alicia not only has choices to make, but Will suddenly has other ways to look as well."
"Alicia, wanting a plan, saying that poetry isn't enough, felt very much like what Alicia would do," added Robert King. "These are human beings that acknowledge that a roll in the hay does have repercussions that are sometimes astronomical and life-changing. We have characters being very deliberate in what they do, yet they are struggling with where their heart takes them. The tragedy, if there is one at the core of this, is, passion-wise, Will and Alicia are made for each other. How do they get over the hurdle of what Alicia's personality tells her to do and her sense of responsibility toward her children?"
Lockhart Gardner and Bond has already seen some major changes in the past few episodes, with the sparks flying between Kalinda and Blake for control of the investigator job, a dynamic that’s meant to recall Season 1’s rivalry between Alicia and Cary (Matt Czruchy) for the associate position. “This one’s turned up to 11 in a sense,” said Robert King.
But there’s also the underlying tension between Diane (Christine Baranski), Will, and new partner Derreck Bond (Michael Ealy), a set up that was meant to keep the power in Diane and Will’s hands and more than a few secret plots flying about.
“There’s a fight for the direction of the firm and even for possession of the firm that will pit Diane and Will against each other because Bond is manipulating them to be at loggerheads,” said Robert King.
Viewers were stunned when Wendy Scott-Carr unmasked herself as the mysterious third candidate in the race between Peter and nemesis Glen Childs (Titus Welliver), a major twist that will likely have a vast impact on the campaign to come.
"[Executive producer] David Zucker thought, the show seems to exist in triangles," said Robert King. "You think you're only dealing with a binary choice, A or B… The show is always, yeah, but there's C that you forgot about… We were thinking what would be fun would be an Oprah-esque character, someone who was very folksy, very human, very seemingly pure, yet might have as many Machiavellian instincts and techniques underneath."
"What was also fun was this idea that Peter Florrick and Glenn Childs know how to battle each other," added Michelle King. "Then you put this incredibly sweet breast cancer survivor there and it's suddenly they're both flummoxed. What the hell do you do with that if you're an old time Chicago politician? We just loved how it has destabilized both of them."
Cary isn't out of the picture, as he's now working for Glenn Childs at the State's Attorney's Office. He's still managed to cause some problems for Alicia and the firm, keeping Cary involved in the overarching plot.
"Cary is off in the Siberia of the State's Attorney's Office [and] we're not always going to have criminal cases, we're often going to have civil cases, he can't be on the other side of everything," said Robert King. "Yet, what really helped us is that Archie and Matt are adorable together. They had this patronizing flirtation where Kalinda was like, white boy, suburbanite, jerk. His growing up at the State's Attorney's Office, she's thrown by that and finds him, if not desirably sexually, at least desirable as an adult."
"If there is one regret we have with this show is that we can't give enough scenes to this amazing cast," added Michelle King. "We always feel like, oh if only there were yet another Will scene or yet another Diane scene or another Cary scene. We just like them so very much. It is an ensemble, but really Alicia is always the center around which everything spins."
While
The Good Wife is known for its fantastic leads, it's also provided an intense showcase for a revolving door of guest actors, including Lili Taylor, Mamie Gumer, Martha Plimpton, Michael J. Fox, and Dylan Baker, to name but a few.
Look for Dallas Robert's Owen—Alicia's brother—to turn up again in the tenth episode this season and continue to pop up thereafter as viewers learn more about Alicia's past.
As for Fox's recent turn as underhanded attorney Louis Canning, look for him to return later this year. "We are going to have Michael J. Fox back, for an episode," said Robert King. "He and Martha Plimpton's [Patti Nyholm] are kind of like the Colonel Kurtz of our episodes: the heart of cynical darkness in a sense. It will be unclear how much of that is an act and how much [Louis] is a genuine person, or when he's genuine how much of that is cynical."
