We’ll miss this show when it’s gone.
If the little boy doesn’t get bone marrow he dies.
Weekend plans go out the window when Ri’Chard (Andre Braugher) calls an emergency Saturday-morning Zoom.
Charmaine Bingwa, André Braugher, and Che Tefari on ‘The Good Fight’.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+.
His nephew Dustin (Walter Russell III) was minutes from a transplant operation when the donor backed out.
“We’re lawyers,” says Ri’Chard.
“There’s always a Plan B.”
He needs legal solutions for sickle-cell disease, and in a 40-minute episode, the firm tries them all.
That’s 40 minutes rounding up, counting opening and closing credits.
And actually, the proper plot doesn’t even take that long.
Multiple lawsuits and organ-donation schemes wrap by the 34-minute mark.
There’s still time for a pizza party, and then things get weird.
First, the team assembles.
The breakneck pace Dustin willdiesoon requires all plans to change.
Dustin’s too young for the trial by a few months.
Getting him treatment requires taking the FDA to court over its age-restriction rules.
Which the firm does, in a scene that sums upGood Fight’s peculiar brand of hallucinogenic normality.
The judge (played by an immaculately crusty William Sadler) demands all attorneys meet at his house.
Arguments are delivered on his front lawn, during a child’s birthday party.
Our attorneys win, but they also lose.
They have to take a different case against the NIH, this time under the auspices of institutional racism.
At one point, Dustin himself has to appear before a judge.
It’s a macabre bit of comedy play up your impending death, kid!
and Russell’s stage cough is delightful.
But the moral stakes are always clear, and illuminating.
Braugher’s a new addition this season, and he’s mostly played Ri’Chard with maximum braggadocio.
The actor gets more sensitive moments in this episode, rubbing his gray-fuzz buzz in quiet desperation.
It’s a chance to see how Ri’Chard’s loudness is a direct reaction to a tough world.
You gotta laugh, you gotta sing.
The script, credited toGood Fightwriter Tegan Shohet, finds grace notes for all the main characters.
There’s room for subplots, like the minor feud between Marissa and Carmen.
And the episode also clarifies a core conflict underlying this final season.
RI’CHARD:Sure they do, if it’s that or unemployment.
LIZ:We want to make a difference, not sell T-shirts.
RI’CHARD:Oh my goodness, Noam Chomsky, how do you think we make difference?
By all screaming and waving our arms?
By falling in behind one name, one man, one parade: Ri’Chard.
Bad and good, it’s all a bit much.
TV used to be definitionally cheap, in every way a little sibling to movies.
The product could look shoddier because 20-some episodes per year demanded some assembly-line work ethics.
Now the blockbuster mode has consumed television.
So we should treasureThe Good Fightbefore it goes.
At one point, we hear how much the gene-editing trial will cost without health insurance: Nine figures!
(“I am inspired and depressed by what it takes to stay alive,” says Diane.)
But the show’s cocktail-party-of-oblivion fanciness masks a marvelously scrappy edge.
Oh my goodness, Noam Chomsky!
Episode Grade: A
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