Mike starts the robot roll-call, and Judge Winter bitchily says they should just cut straight to Alicia.

Alicia: "Thanks! In good faith! Anyway, Mr. Burke, did you know the gun they found on the dead dude was used in another crime?"
Burke: "Yes. That's part of the evidence but the audience didn't know that, because it would give up the whole game too early."
Alicia: "So I checked into that, a jewelry robbery from a couple years ago, and turns out that it was Officer Zimmerman [shudder] who was on that scene..."
Dunaway: "Are you honestly suggesting this was a drop gun -- a phrase we're going to be using in this episode to mean a gun that was retrieved from a crime and used later as planted evidence -- that Zimmerman held onto for a couple years just in case?"
Alicia: "I'm getting there, yeah."

Mike: "Fuckin'... No, you're done. Five minutes are up."
Alicia: "I spent most of it arguing with Winter and Dunaway for the right to..."
Mike: "And yet. That was your choice. Let's move on."
Roc: "Uh, I'm going to give her my five minutes. This is interesting."
Men, Simply Aghast!: "See, this is why we hate tokenism! Give 'em an inch and they gang up on white men. It's anarchy!"
Alicia: "So anyway, is this the first time in history that such a 'drop gun' might have been used to muddy the waters?"

THE WOMAN THAT HATES MEN WHO HATE WOMEN THAT HATE HORNETS

Cut to Mike privately telling Alicia another thing that makes total sense, which is that -- in addition to the idea of Zimmerman keeping this gun a full two years, which is not really that remarkable if you think about it in terms of the probability you'll make at least one mistake at work, over the course of your lifetime -- what Alicia is actually working toward, here, is a race riot.

...Which, yeah. I see your point. What I don't understand is how that's a bad thing.

But then an even worse, truer, scarier bit, and one that would send me running for Lockhart & Question Mark the second he said it:

"You wanna kick the hornet's nest? Ask Diane what happens when you piss off judges like this. When you take people like this, and piss them off."

It was only on rewatch that I noticed how carefully Mike is treating her. He's saying the same things, in the same particular way, that Diane might use to warn her off. The way it's being performed, he comes off scary as shit, but because he's being so subtle about it I wonder if he won't turn out to be a good deal more okay than he's coming off here. It's the norm for this show -- Canning's not so bad, the more we get to know him; Eli is even more of a trainwreck now than when we hated him -- but the way the episode ends had me thinking he was a more iconic person, like Wendy Scott-Carr or Colin Sweeney (or Jackie Florrick): Somebody whose existence depends on their meaning to Alicia's shifting personal philosophy.